Academia Sinica

Faculty Member, Institute of Modern History

associate research fellow

About

巫仁恕(Wu, Renshu)

1990年代是個關鍵的年代，大規模群眾運動興起，作為小市民的我身歷其境，躬逢 其盛，對於我撰寫博士論文有很大的刺激，於是構想撰寫有關明清城市民變的研究。我嘗試擺脫過去馬克思史觀，而用社會心理學的角度來分析。我也因此被歸為 「右派」!那就改研究別的方向吧！我選擇與日常生活最接近的課題，那就是消費與物質文化。雖然又常被視為不正經的研究，但是在研究過程中，卻可以疏解不少 壓力。最近總覺得自己不像晚明的文人士大夫那樣重視品味，反而比較像清代的士大夫喜歡吊書袋。
1990s was a crucial year, with the stirring of large-scale mass movements, and as I was a citizen I was right in the thick of it. Those events were a huge stimulus for my doctoral dissertation and I came up with the idea of writing about the collective protests the urban people went through in the Ming and Qing dynasties. I attempted to throw off the recent Marxist views of history, and analyze the events from the aspect of social psychology. For this reason I was branded as a “rightist”! So I changed the direction of my research! I chose a topic closest to everyday life, namely consumption and material culture. Although my research continued to be regarded as not serious, nevertheless, in the process of research this actually took a lot of the pressure off me. Recently I have felt that I resemble not so much the serious a late Ming literati who attaches importance to taste, but rather a Qing scholar-official who likes to flaunt his knowledge of the classics.