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Item Open Access The Swiss contributions to the international development of cartography: The Eduard Imhof Era(2009-07-12) Forêt, PhilippeMy paper is about a project that will examine Switzerland's participation, during five decades, in the institutional and intellectual emancipation of the map-based sciences. I intend to provide a thematic and dispassionate account of the achievements of Swiss cartography and cartographers, and document the crucial initiatives a Swiss academic took to develop cartography worldwide. In the course of my analysis of Professor Eduard Imhof's interactions with his foreign colleagues, I will add cultural as well as technical perspectives to the interpretation of contemporary progress in the mapping sciences. For the Swiss school of cartography, the Imhof era (1920-1970) was more formative than the bet-ter-studied Dufour and Siegfried Maps period (1845-1926). Despite the contentious political environment of his time, E. Imhof (1895-1986) used his personal charisma to systematically encourage cooperation worldwide. Through the seminars he led and the International Cartographic Association he created and chaired, E. Imhof federated the cartographers from across the world. I will explain how by 1970, on the eve of the digital revolution, he had forged a common professional identity and improved modes and venues to communicate across the discipline. Eduard Imhof will thus allow us to touch on two important themes in science and society: the geography of knowledge and the adoption of new theories, standards and methods by the international scientific community.Item Open Access The Disentangled Pictorial History of Mémoire sur la Chine (1776)(2013-05-11) Forêt, PhilippeThis paper would add a contribution to the "entangled histories" of the circulation of Sino-European representations of landscape during the long 18th century. I will discuss a prime example of interaction, interpretation and hybridization that occurred in French essays, atlases, encyclopedias, reports, and private letters on the Qing land-scape. I am especially interested in the grey literature and colorful maps that have sur-rounded two publications by d'Anville and Father Du Halde, SJ: Mémoire sur la Chine (1776); and Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735). I will disentangle only two in the many layers of the French interpretation of the Qing landscape: Layer 1: Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782)'s quarrel with Father Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669-1748) SJ, about de Mailla's disentanglement of d'Anville's disentanglement made when he reviewed… Layer 2: … several disentanglements made by the Manchu, Russian, Dutch, and French cartographers who mapped and depicted independently several parts of the Qing Em-pire I will examine why and how d'Anville defined concepts, methods, and best practices in the disentanglement of landscape representation. I plan to revisit the Sino-European history of transfers of theories and techniques on visual information, from technical surveys of the physical landscape in Beijing to the emergence of a new intellectual landscape in Paris. Case study: The carto-controversy of the Mémoire de M. d'Anville, etc. sur la Chine (1776), and of the Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735) Since Julius von Klaproth (1826), Henri Cordier (1904-1908), and Marcel Destombes (1976), we believe that we know everything that deserves to be known on the infor-mation on China that became available to 18th-century Paris. We have been maybe too self-confident. Since 2010, Lucile Haguet has unearthed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France new materials that are telling us an un-redacted story on the Sino-European exchanges of landscape depiction.Item Open Access Staking a Claim in Paradise : The Appropriation of Central Asia by the Capitals of China (1625-1945)(2010-11-01) Forêt, PhilippeLecture given at the China in Asia colloquia series, 2010-2011 OBJECTIVE Understand the non-Chinese notions at work in landscape-making and in thegarden architecture of the imperial capitals of China. METHODOLOGY Examine imperial villas, gardens and temples. Hypothesis: These sites represent physically and explicitly theories andtechniques on landscape appropriation. Case study: The residences of the Qing dynasty (1625-1912) in Shenyang, Beijing (Yuanming yuan and Yihe yuan) and in Chengde (Bishu shanzhuang),and those of Manchoukouo (1932-1945). EXPECTED RESULTS Conceptualize the Qing landscape through changes in scale rather thanthrough ruptures in time.Item Open Access Is China ––––––––––––––– flat? A minor contribution to counterfactual geography(2008-12-11) Forêt, PhilippeThe French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) and Félix Guattari (1930-92) gathered two seminal texts in On The Line. In "Rhizome," Deleuze and Guattari introduced a new kind of thinking, which is both nondialectical and non-hierarchical, substituted pragmatic and free-floating logic to our usual binary, oppositional, and exclusive logic model, and offered an early template to understand the internet. In "Politics," Deleuze and Guattari envisaged society as a series of lines, reinvented politics as a process of flux whose outcome is always unpredictable, and suggested that the creativity and multiplicity of its flows can redirect and question capitalism. According to On The Line, China always rebounds after most of the country is destroyed. China starts up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, when it is shattered at a given spot. A rupture occurs in China whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight. After each rupture, there is a danger that China will stratify again everything, from Taoist resurgences to communist concretions. China experts can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and bad. China has valued the making of flat spaces, traditionally for food production and today for profit-making in the well-connected global economy. China's vision of state-building has always been at odds with the physical reality of a country rich in hills and mountains. We have had so far thirty centuries of unsustainable development.Item Open Access De la vertu au vice: l'espace des loisirs à Macao (1910-1930)(2003-05-16) Forêt, PhilippeLe nom Macao (Aomen en chinois, Ou-mun en cantonais) proviendrait d’une corruption du nom du temple A-ma (Make miao en chinois, Ma-kok miu en cantonais) qui se situe à l’entrée (men, mun) du Port Intérieur. Le temple est fondé au moins deux siècles avant l’arrivée des Portugais. Il est dédié à l’impératrice divine A-ma ou Mazu tianhou, qui est la patronne des pêcheurs et des marins...Item Open Access The role of Central Asia in the discovery of global warming(2009-11-11) Forêt, PhilippeThe review of precise field maps and photographs should help me reconstruct not only the environmental and cultural history of Central Asia, but also the scholarly debate on climate that occurred during the first three decades of last century. I will very specifically investigate expedition reports because these publications exemplify the methodological guidelines enforced by the scholarly community. I will indeed argue that Stein's Explorations in Turkestan or Hedin's Sino-Swedish "Scientific Expedition to the North-western Provinces of China" provide a useful framework to analyze the first debate on global warming.Item Open Access Au delà de la frontière scientifique, la frontière du réel en Asie centrale chinoise(2010-02-04) Forêt, PhilippeTo comprehend the role of frontier and frontier-making in the scientific controversy on the "geographical pivot history," I will propose a short account of the remarkable topographical expeditions that explored the Gobi, Taklamakan, Qinghai and Kevir deserts.Item Open Access "An Interesting Geographical Change" : Hedin, Stein and Huntington's surveys of climate change(2012-11-09) Forêt, PhilippeStudying the contribution of the lakes of Central Asia to the discovery of global warming must touch on science policy in the early 20th century, the uneasy relationship that learned Europe used to have with the environmental history of colonial Asia, and the production and mobility of new and potentially troubling knowledge. I intend to provide an account of how three independent scholars engaged the Royal Geographical Society of London and the international geography community. I will intertwine their maps, private letters, travelogues and scientific reports from the field with the history of theorizing on climate change. My analysis of Sven Hedin, Ellsworth Huntington and Aurel Stein's interactions with their colleagues promises to challenge the current narrative on the discovery of global warming.Item Open Access Teaching the Islamic History of the Qazaqs in Kazakhstan(2014) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis paper was the basis for a talk I gave in Russian at a conference for the jubilee of Ashirbek Muminov at the Eurasian National University on the 20th November 2014. It was published in the conference proceedings: Yu. V. Shapoval, A. S. Kabylova & N. Robinson (ed.) Islamovedenie v Kazakhstane: sostoyanie, problemy, perspektivy (Astana: ENU, 2014), pp.24-30.Item Open Access Early Sources on the Qazaqs and their Khans(2015-09-11) Alexander Stephen, MorrisonThis paper was the basis of the 5-minute lecture I gave at the plenary session of the recent 'Mengilik El' conference to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the founding of the Qazaq khanate, held at Nazarbayev University on the 11th September 2015. The 'conference' itself was much more of a political than a scholarly event, and largely a matter of theatre than discussion or intellectual exchange. The paper was designed with a very general audience in mind, and reflects the way in which I teach this period and these sources in 'History of Kazakhstan', rather than any real research of my own. I have also added a link to a short interview I gave to the e-history.kz website the year before, repeating many of the same things in broken Russian.Item Open Access Challenges in teaching and curriculum development for 'History of Kazakhstan' at Nazarbayev University(2014) Alexander Stephen, MorrisonThis is the text on which I based a talk in Russian given at the plenary session of a conference held at the Eurasian National University on the 22nd November 2014. It was published in the conference proceedings: E.B. Sydykov (ed.) 'Actual Problems of Research and Teaching of National History Nowadays' (Astana: ENU, 2014) pp.6-8.