Natural Resources and Human Societies in East and West: Early Modern and Modern Environmental Histories from Japan and Germany
Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, 30. September 2024, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Natural resources are essential for human subsistence and form the basis of societies. As a result, societies developed complex relationships with nature and with what nature provided to humans. This not only concerned forms of societal organization but also permeated knowledge and belief systems. Societies formed institutions and practices to govern, cultivate, extract, process or preserve natural resources. They also ascribed cultural meanings and economic value to natural resources and produced knowledge and norms for how to deal with them. Therefore, resources are a useful tool to examine the entanglement of past societies with their environments.
How have ontological shifts changed attitudes towards the extraction of resources? How was human intervention into nature for the sake of producing or preserving natural resources mandated or justified? What cultivation practices and technologies were developed to facilitate the creation and extraction of resources? How aware were members of different societies of the consequences of human intervention into nature?
Conventional wisdom identifies the advent of Western capitalism as the beginning of reducing nature to a provider of resources and subsequent reckless resource extractivism. But this does not mean that premodern or non-Western societies lacked concepts of human interference in resource extraction or avoided ill effects from environmental degradation.
By bringing scholars together from Japan and Germany in both early modern and modern environmental history, this workshop facilitates the discussion and exchange of ideas about new approaches in environmental history on the research of natural resources. It brings into conversation both research focused on time periods representing different stages of capitalist development and on two regions with differing thought and belief systems that became increasingly entangled in the modern period.
Registration
To register, please send an email until September 22, 2024 to reform[at]ressourcencampus-bochum.de.
Virtual participation via Zoom is possible.
Preliminary Program
09:00-09:15
Welcome
Julia Mariko Jacoby (University of Duisburg-Essen)
Katja Schmidtpott (Ruhr University Bochum)
09:15-10:15
Early Modern Environmental Histories of Resource Ecologies
Kōichi Watanabe (National Institute of Japanese Literature, Tokyo):
The Connected Environmental History of the Ayu Sweetfish, the Aqueduct, and the Valley
Tina Asmussen (German Mining Museum/Ruhr University Bochum):
Minescapes: Ecologies, Labor, and Investment in the Early Modern Europe
10:15-10:30
Coffee Break
10:30-11:30
Modern Environmental Histories of Resources, Technology, and Expertise
Tatsushi Fujihara (University of Kyoto):
Rice breeding in the Japanese Empire
Frank Uekötter (Ruhr University Bochum):
Monoculture: Decoding a Global Mystery
11:30-12:00
Coffee Break
12:00-13:00
Round Table with Participants: Environmental Histories in Japan and Germany
Convenors: Julia Mariko Jacoby (University of Duisburg-Essen), Katja Schmidtpott (University of Bochum)
13:00-15:00
Lunch
Organisation:
Julia Mariko Jacoby in Kooperation mit dem Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus “Resources in Transformation”, Area Ruhr, Universität Duisburg-Essen