Localizing Learning

Throughout a period of thirty years, Bol has published three major studies of Neo-Confucianism, more precisely focused on Daoxue, or the “Learning of the Way.” Although he does not explicitly frame these three works as sequential, the intellectual trajectory appears obvious. The book under review is the third in this trilogy. As the title indicates, it is a study of the “localization” of learning in one prefecture from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The first book, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford, 1992), traced the re-definition of both culture and learning as literati social and political identity was transformed between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2008) sought to historicize Neo-Confucianism by embedding ideas and thinkers in their changing social and political contexts between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.Localizing Learning builds on the themes of the earlier volumes to focus on the southeastern prefecture of Wuzhou, where Bol has spent much time learning from local scholars and residents and mining a broad range of texts. His ethnographically detailed depiction of the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Wuzhou intellectuals at times reads like old-fashioned, if essential, biographical narrative, as well as intellectual history. This content is complemented with a wealth of quantitative and geospatial data drawn from database projects that have occupied Bol for more than two decades. At times jarring, the juxtaposition of these two kinds of scholarship ultimately produces a model marriage of qualitative and quantitative history, successfully combining “thick description” with sophisticated analytical tools that enable the quantification of vast amounts of data. Bol’s elaborate appendices explain the book’s statistical methods, acknowledging the challenges that all historians face with imperfect data sources. Bol has a remarkable, if not unique, command of both the traditional textual sources that he cites and the quantification methods that he employs.Along with an exemplary integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this book offers a compelling argument for the interdependence of intellectual and social history. One of the book’s key conclusions illustrates the value of these combined methodological perspectives. Chapter 6 uses quantifiable biographical and geospatial data to track affinal and kinship ties as well as social and intellectual networks, showing that “the literati community at the prefectural or even county level was increasingly held together through culture rather than marriage” (189)—a significant conclusion that aligns with the emergence of a distinct Wuzhou literati identity as profiled in the book.A brief review cannot begin to do justice to the rich learning that underpins this work, evident in every chapter, nor can it fully convey the enormous amount of data gathered into powerful visual formats to support the book’s arguments. Bol’s interests range from intellectual biographies of important scholars and teachers from Wuzhou to the value of literary versus classical and historical knowledge, examination learning, printing and publishing, and marriage and kinship. He uses all of them to trace the construction of a local intellectual identity, placing the claims of a distinct Wuzhou cultural and intellectual identity in historical context.Bol also innovatively addresses the vexed question of regional or geographical “schools of thought” that have long shaped the Chinese intellectual history of ideas (190–191). Although Bol’s own goals are “intellectual historical,” he grounds this pursuit “in the context of quantifiable social change” (188). He is committed to the practice of intellectual and social history as a joint enterprise, while recognizing tension between them in explanations of the choices that historical actors make as between “the interests they pursue or the justifications they give for pursuing them” (227). As one reviewer of the first book in Bol’s trilogy pointed out, the explanation of how and why Daoxue succeeded in replacing earlier cultural values (literary, historical, and classical) requires not only knowing what people thought (or wrote) but also how they lived—the context of social experience, including kinship ties, social networks, and intellectual connections.1 Bol has aimed to do exactly that.One final point has to do with the “case study” paradigm, in which Wuzhou could be viewed as a microcosm of larger trends. Bol rejects this characterization, however, arguing that “case studies” are just local histories that may share some features with others, and may suggest ways of thinking about other places, but are not “representative.” He thus positions this work as a study of how the scholarly elite in one place developed its own distinctive cultural and geographical identity as they adapted to larger patterns of dynastic political change and intellectual transformation across four centuries. In doing so, he also makes an important contribution to current scholarship about evolving relations between literati elites, the state, and local societies in middle and later imperial China. Ways of being “local” were never simple; they were always embedded in a wider “national” context of intellectual and political life

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