Ruth Mostern (University of California, Berkeley)

Career:

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department of the University of California, Berkeley, where I am completing a dissertation on political geography and state power in China during the Song dynasty (960-1276 CE). I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan during the 1996-7 academic year, and at the Tôyô Bunko in Tokyo during the 1997-8 academic year.

I am also an associate of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a spatial digital library to map global cultural and historical data using a GIS interface. I am the liaison from the China team to the technical teams and the ECAI Berkeley administration, and I am also involved with ECAI administration and recruitment at Berkeley.

Selected Talks:

Mapping as Practice: Representations of Cartography in the Song Textual Record, Association of Asian Studies, San Diego, CA, March 2000

Political Territory in Imperial China: How to Map State Power, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative/Pacific Neighborhood Consortium, Berkeley, CA, January 2000 and UC Berkeley Department of Geography, March 2000

Discussant and roundtable participant, Spatial Identities in Asian History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, June 1999

Mapping Authority: Politics, Territory and Frontier Administration in Early Song Guangxi, Association of Asian Studies, Boston, MA, March 1999

‘Using the Prefectures to Govern the People’: The Politics of Territory in Song China, Association of Asian Studies, Washington, DC, March 1998

Songdai diyu yu xingzheng dili zhidu [Territory and the Administrative Geographical System of Song China], Taiwan University History Graduate Colloquium, Taibei, Taiwan, July 1997

Current Research

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is a collaborative project founded in 1997 which will combine global mapping, imagery, and texts into a spatial digital library. There are currently about 300 affiliated scholars globally. ECAI affiliates are organized into three kinds of working teams: technical teams (e.g. metadata, cartography, databases), regional teams (e.g. Japan, Caucuses, North America), and thematic teams (boundaries, rubbings, biographies). Members join ECAI through their participation in small groups working on particular projects (Catholic mission settlements in North America, China historical GIS). What ties these diverse projects and scholars together is a shared commitment to the documentation of data using Dublin Core metadata with standardized extensions, and the use of GIS. This will ensure that all of the projects that are registered with ECAI can be located and searched using TimeMap, a GIS-based temporo-spatial interface that is being developed for this project. ECAI’s mission is to continuously expand the scope of affiliated databases to encompass the many regions and cultures of the world, varied disciplines, and multiple historical periods while maintaining a high standard of academic research excellence. For more information, please visit the website: www.ias.berkeley.edu/ecai.

Personal Research:

I am currently completing my dissertation, "Apprehending the Realm: Territoriality and Political Power in Song China (960-1276 CE)." This project examines the creation, maintenance and abolition of counties, prefectures and provincial circuits during the Song era, arguing that the domestic territorial landscape was not simply a stage on which politics occurred, but was intimately connected to the nature of Song rulership and legitimization itself. I demonstrate that state power was established, maintained and extended, in part, by calibrating, surveying, mapping and adjusting the area and number of administrative units. There were over a thousand territorial changes during the Song. The court ordered territorial change, involving significant expenditures of both funds and political capital, in order to quell uprisings, enact rituals of kingship, pacify frontiers, fight wars, collect taxes, maintain the support of landlords, magnates and chieftains, and manage personnel. Such changes were not distributed randomly in space. Territorial change correlated strongly with colonization and defense, so that the peripheries of the empire, north, south and west, were extremely fluid, while core areas, particularly the wealthy and populous southeast, were much more stable. Furthermore, over the course of the northern Song, a great number of territories were abolished in the north, but many were established in the south, and the map of China in the mid-thirteenth century thus reflected (and perhaps helped to engender) a demographic revolution that had begun in the eighth century. In addition to writing up this project in the standard form of a historical monograph, I am also working on an animated map of Song political territory that can display all of the events of territorial change that I am writing about and that will be linked to translations of documents ordering or explaining particular events of territorial change.

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