AAS Call for Proposals

To name is to pick an entity out from the world, bind it to a chain of recognition, and make it available to judgment, appreciation, and exchange. Empires, states, markets, and connoisseurs have long understood that naming extends beyond its referential function. It is an aesthetic, epistemological, and political act: a way of distinguishing natural things, authorizing knowledge about them, and attaching aesthetic, ethical, territorial, and economic value to their differences.

This panel examines the granularity of naming: the movement from generic natural categories, such as plum or tea, toward named particulars, such as a specific cultivar, varietal, mountain, grove, harvest, or place-based product. In Chinese and Sinophone contexts, such acts of naming are shaped by literary connoisseurship, folk taxonomy, agronomic science, bureaucratic classification, marketing and heritage claims to terroir. They raise questions about who has the power to name natural particulars, how such power is legitimized, and what forms of knowledge become recognizable through names.

Our two initial papers approach these questions from literary and ethnographic angles. One examines how Ming poetry recognizes specific plum varieties rather than "plum" as a general category, tracing how literary connoisseurship turns botanical distinction into aesthetic knowledge. The other turns to contemporary ethnography in Yunnan, where Pu'er tea is named through increasingly granular distinctions of mountain, origin, cultivar, and process, and where such distinctions carry administrative, territorial, and commercial weight. Together, these papers ask how names make natural things legible as valuable particulars, and how such legibility is produced across poetic, bureaucratic, and market regimes.

We invite two additional papers that extend, complicate, or reframe this conversation. Possible questions include: How do names transform natural things into objects of connoisseurship, governance, heritage, or exchange? How are claims to terroir, origin, authenticity, and refinement made through naming practices? What kinds of epistemic authority are mobilized through literary, philological, scientific, bureaucratic, or vernacular forms of classification? When does naming preserve local distinctions, and when does it standardize, appropriate, or erase them? How do Chinese and Sinophone naming practices invite us to rethink broader theories of taxonomy, value, place, and symbolic power?

We welcome papers from literary studies, anthropology, history, art history, geography, STS, environmental humanities, semiotics, philology, and related fields. Contributions may address any period, genre, region, or natural kind, including plants, animals, landscapes, foods, medicines, minerals, or other named forms of nature. 

Please reach out to Siyu Xie (sxie18@jhu.edu) and Shulan Sun (shulsun@iu.edu).