AAS Call for Proposals

We are looking for a discussant interested in commenting a panel on nomenclature. This panel examines the granularity of naming: the movement from generic natural categories, such as tea or plum toward named particulars-a specific cultivar, varietal, mountain, grove, watershed, harvest, or place-based product. Such particulars are not merely linguistic; they index ecological and political relationships. In Asian, Sinophone, and transregional contexts, acts of naming are shaped by literary writing, folk taxonomy, agronomic and botanical science, bureaucratic classification, and marketing and heritage claims to terroir. They raise questions about who has the power to name natural particulars, what forms of ecological knowledge become recognizable through names, and which relationships between organisms, environments, and communities are made visible or obscured in the process. Four papers come from ethnographic and semiotic, historical, and literary perspectives. One pays attention to Pu'er Tea in Yunnan. One is about Beijing Zoo's labeling in the 1960s. A third looks into the transpacific trade of Gingsen. A fourth paper examines late Ming's nomenclature of botanical varieties in poetry. 

Thank you for your consideration! Please reach out to Siyu Xie at sxie18@jhu.edu