| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Francesca Bray. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. (A Philip E. Lilienthal book.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 419. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.

Francesca Bray's new book is not only fascinating and elegantly written, it should also change the way we do history. Bray analyzes the framework of everyday life to fashion a new understanding of Ming and Qing China. Using an interdisciplinary approach and a variety of primary sources, the author recovers a history of technology for people who have often been assumed to have none: non-Westerners and women. In addition, her work demonstrates the importance of material culture as an expression of power relations basic to the social structure of China. Material culture both embodies power relations and serves as a means of transmitting values. One of the strongest forms of the expression and experience of ideology is its concrete material manifestation in sets of technologies that constitute systems. Here Bray links gender, technology, and cultural history through a close analysis of the systems of domestic space, textile production, and human reproduction. 1

Technological systems, Bray argues, represent and diffuse dominant cultural values. She explores the role of technology in shaping and transmitting ideological traditions, focusing on the contributions of technology to the construction of gender. She examines how technologies contribute to producing people and relations between people, a project that requires her to look at technology as a form of communication. She defines a language of physical practices and things, translating between material actions and subjective processes to make arguments about gender and technology in China. Her work connects traditional Chinese values to real lives of people, complicating and enriching our understanding of "Confucianism." 2

The author's approach and methods are interdisciplinary in the way most fruitful for understanding her subject. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of science, she adds to those disciplines techniques derived from the annalistes school of history as well as from gender studies, archaeology, and text criticism. Her sources abundantly support her argument. . . .

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