收集与分类:明代汇编与类书

Collecting and Classifying:Compendia and Encyclopedias(Leishu)in Ming Dynasty

汇编与类书的生产,在明代尤其是晚明时期达到了高峰,官方与私人都竞相参与这个知识的生产与再生产过程。这时出版的各类大型丛书中,不仅包含了传统的经典知识,也以日用类书的形式涵括了各种各样的实用性、技巧性知识。晚明日用类书——以及包含它们的丛书,都是来源于经典的知识汇聚之地,在这里,仅仅那些有特权与学识的个人有权力对世界进行收集与分类。"收集"(collecting)的社会学及其文化逻辑让我们看到,明清时期相关事物的知识收集与分类,是在类书的编纂过程中逐渐发生的,其主要特点是经由名称对事物进行区隔。可明代的类书编撰者很少表现出对在实验室里获得的纯粹经验知识的兴趣,他们主要是通过探究文本来进行知识收集与分类的工作。

The actual production of compendia and encyclopedias peaked in Ming China, specifically in the late Ming. The administration and the individuals engage in the processes of producing and repro- ducing of knowledge continuously. The daily-use encyclopedias of the late Ming and the collectanea that contained them, were sites of classically derived knowledge where only individuals of privilege and learning earned the right to collect and classify the world. The sociology of collecting and its cul- tural logic allows us to see that in Ming and Qing China collecting and classifying knowledge about things occurred within the pages of ＂Leishu＂, whose characteristics were to order things through names. But Ming encyclopedists rarely expressed a penchant for purely experiential knowledge ob- tained in the laboratory, and they collected and classified the world mainly through perusing texts.