Professor Emerita, UC Santa Barbara Department of Anthropology
Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
Adam Ferguson Building, George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LL, U.K.
Tel: 44 131 651 3863 / 650 3923
francesca.bray@ed.ac.uk; bray@anth.ucsb.edu
The role of everyday technology in the formation of ideology and culture
| Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997) | |
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In this feminist history
of eight centuries of private life in China, Bray inserts women into
the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women.
Taking issue with Orientalist images of Chinese women as simple victims
of monolithic patriarchal oppression, Bray analyses technologies of
space, work and reproduction in the construction of late |
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This book was awarded the Dexter Prize in 1999 by the Society for the History of Technology. |
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| Technology and Society in Ming China (1368-1644) | |
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A short book designed for use in high-school and undergraduate courses. From about 1500 to 1750 China was at the center of the world economy, with the highest exports of commodities and imports of silver of any country of the time. This book shows how the development of farming and textile technologies, added to advances in technologies of communication like hydraulic engineering, ship-building and printing, combined to propel Ming China to the level of a thoroughly commercialized consumer economy. |
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| My current research project, on everyday technologies and the Californian way of life, looks at the social and political relations and the cultural meanings embodied in such everyday artifacts as the flush toilet, the genetically-engineered tomato, and e-mail. |  |
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I am interested particularly in innovative ways of exploring gender systems. For example bringing technology and gender together allows us to get beyond the artificialities of theories that privilege language alone.
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My own research focuses on the interplay between material and discursive expressions of gender (Technology and Gender was an exploration of this interplay in the case of pre-modern China). The course I teach (An 126) on gender and modernity in East Asian societies concentrates on how the nexus of politics, law and economics stimulate inventions of tradition and modernity around gender. |
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The history and anthropology of medicine and the body
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Some recent projects of mine include "The Chinese experience,"
in John V. Pickstone and Roger Cooter (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth
Century, (Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000: 717-36). "Chinese health beliefs," in John Hinnels and Roy Porter (eds), Health, Religion and Suffering, (London, Routledge, 1999: 187-211).
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"Chinese health beliefs", in Roy Porter (ed), Religion, Health and Suffering (Routledge, 1998) "Medical history and gender history;" "Reproductive medicine and the dual nature of fertility;" "Reproductive hierarchies" chapters 7-9 in Technology and Gender (University of California Press, 1997). |
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The production of knowledge: comparative studies of science,
technology and medicine
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I teach a seminar (An 215) on cultures of science that examines modern Western scientific knowledge, practices and institutions from the perspective of cultural anthropology. Other recent projects include: "Technics and civilization in Late Imperial China: an essay in the cultural history of technology", Osiris Winter 1998; co-editing the volume on Science in China in the Enciclopedia Italiana's International Encyclopaedia of the History of Science; advisory editor of Isis. |
Agricultural systems and agricultural development
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Since then I have published The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (California 1994) and various papers on agriculture, including "A stable landscape? social and cultural sustainability" in The Sustainability of Wet-Rice Agriculture, IRRI, Manila 1998. Other recent and forthcoming publications include "How wholesome is that soup? The political contents of the refrigerator," in Roger T. Ames (ed), Technology and Human Values: On the Edge of the New Millennium (forthcoming, University of Hawaii Press, 2003). "Genetically modified foods: bodies, shared risk and political action," in Lois Ann Lorentzen (ed), A Biotechnology Reader (forthcoming). |
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Upper Division Courses
Graduate Courses
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Graduates whose committees I chair or co-chair:
Other UCSB Anthropology graduates I am working with:
Graduates I am working with outside the department include:
Some recent news of former students: Haripriya Rangan's Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History was published by Verso in December 2000; Priya, who teaches at the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, is currently researching rural livelihoods and economic networks in South Africa Suzanne Zhang Gottschang
was appointed Assistant Lecturer in the Department of anthropology at
Smith College in Fall 2000; her co-edited volume, with Nancy Chen, on
urban China has just been published by Duke University Press. Patrick Dowdey curated (and edited the catalogue for) the spectacular exhibition "Threads of Light", on Suzhou embroidery, at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, before taking the position of Curator at the Mansfield Freeman Center for Asian Studies, Wesleyan University |
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