Knowing Hands: Chinese Hand-Memory Techniques & Handy Knowledge in Situ, Comparison, and Contact

• Applicant: Professorin Marta Hanson, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548632216

While looking at the Stock Exchange online, a Chinese truck-driver runs his thumb on his fingers before buying stocks. In China and Taiwan, hands are similarly used in varied contexts: with hands traditional doctors establish diagnoses, diviners compute horoscopes, and Daoist priests perform rituals. Historically, hand-memory techniques have been attested in China since the 7th c., first in Buddhist ritual practices and then in many fields: medicine, mathematics, music, poetry, law, and divination. However, they have never been connected as a common practice. How did cognitively using hands spread or declined over time in these fields? How widespread are these practices within contemporary East Asia? The Knowing Hands project thus examines in comparative and cross-cultural perspectives unexplored historical and ethnographic material on Chinese hand-based practices. It seeks to understand both 1) how people use their hands to think with by linking hand mnemonics- what we term "epistemic hands" as a form of extended cognition, i.e., how humans use hands to aid cognitive processing; and 2) handy knowledge - "mindful hands" as a form of embodied cognition, i.e., what knowledge is grasped corporeally with hands to do things. For the first time, the project aims to link these two distinct uses of the hand: how do forms of extended cognition observed in epistemic hands inform embodied know-how in mindful hands and vice versa? We examine these practices in three ways: 1. epistemic hands in situ, historically and ethnographically in China (and spread to Japan and Korea); 2. epistemic hands in comparison between East Asian and European traditions and in contrast to mindful hands; and 3. cross-cultural Sino-European contacts about epistemic and mindful hands. Our hypothesis is that Chinese hand mnemonics are an overlooked traditional data-management tool conducive to knowledge acquisition, retention, and dissemination. We aim to build a digital corpus of these techniques in East Asia to facilitate comparisons with scattered scholarship on European examples and contrasts with mindful hands. Based on this corpus, we first plan to trace how epistemic hands historically spread from one field to another and explain why a similar way to model knowledge was used in so many different fields? Second, just as Jesuits introduced a European hand mnemonic to the Chinese court in the 1680s and reported a Chinese one to Europe by the 1780s, we will further explore how mindful hands - as equally complex forms of embodied knowledge, gestures, and sensitivities - also played significant roles in Sino-European exchange. Third, the project’s ethnographic lens returns to epistemic hands to examine how people from a broad socioeconomic spectrum used them to nurture their computational and reasoning abilities and develop a form of sociability that favored acquiring pragmatic knowledge. In short, the Knowing Hands project reintegrates hands into the history of knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partner: Privatdozentin Stéphanie Homola, Ph.D.