Childhood discoveries in Imperial China: cosmology, medicine and Neo-Confucianism

Seminar summary

Drawing on the tools of the socio-anthropology of the life course, this research seminar analyses the ways in which life stages have been structured in China, and how contemporary Chinese society currently regulates and shapes the experience of age, life courses and intergenerational relationships. The first year of the seminar will focus more specifically on the social construction of life stages and the thresholds that define them. More specifically, the aim will be to historicise the categories, representations and shifting meanings attributed to childhood, youth, adulthood and old age in the history of contemporary China, paying attention both to the evolution of the terms used to describe these life stages, to the factors (political, economic, institutional, cultural) that shape these experiences, and to the resulting social phenomena. Combining an introduction to key social science texts on the stages of life with the growing body of literature on these subjects in 20th-century China, this research seminar is aimed at researchers, PhD students and Master’s students alike.

Organisers: Justine Rochot (View e-mail); Marie Bellot (View e-mail)

Suggested reading

● GARNIER, Pascale. 2021. “Ariès: between history, social philosophy and the everyday knowledge of children”. Les Sciences de l’éducation – Pour l’Ère nouvelle 54(1): 35–52.
● HSIUNG, Ping-chen. 2005. “Introduction”. In HSIUNG Ping-chen, *A Tender Voyage. Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China*. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1–28.