An Uneven Knowledge Import:
Chinese Translations of Material Culture, Book History and Collecting Studies
中文世界對物質文化、書籍史與收藏研究的譯介：一項不均衡的知識輸入
A bibliographic study, framed by translation studies and the sociology of knowledge, of how Chinese-language academia has imported Western scholarship on material culture, book history and collecting: macro-theory (Polanyi, Bourdieu) translated in force, reading history (Darnton) accumulated, yet rare-book studies, provenance research and auction history remain untranslated — an inverted structure with methodological consequences.
A bibliographic study, framed by translation studies and the sociology of knowledge, of how Chinese-language academia has imported Western scholarship on material culture, book history and collecting: macro-theory (Polanyi, Bourdieu) translated in force, reading history (Darnton) accumulated, yet rare-book studies, provenance research and auction history remain untranslated — an inverted structure with methodological consequences.
Editorial Abstract
Framed by translation studies (譯介學) and the sociology of knowledge, this Chinese-language study surveys, on the basis of verifiable bibliographic records, how Chinese academia has absorbed Western scholarship relevant to rare books, manuscripts and the auction trade. It documents six Chinese editions of Polanyi's The Great Transformation, the twin full translations of Bourdieu's La Distinction (Commercial Press 2015, simplified; Rye Field 2023, traditional), the citation-mediated reception of Appadurai and Kopytoff, the three-edition genealogy of Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, and the near-total absence of translated technical literature — Pearson's provenance research, Pomian's, Belk's and Muensterberger's collecting studies, and the auction-history volume Under the Hammer (Myers, Harris & Mandelbrote, eds., 2001). The essay characterises this pattern as an inverted structure of knowledge import and traces its methodological consequences for Chinese scholarship on literary markets. The full Chinese article, with keyword list and annotated bibliography, is published in the Chinese Overseas Study Review.