From the publisher:
In this innovative and engaging history of
homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the
transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth
century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious
circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead,
subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a
newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail.
Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of
forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under
these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected
outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's
transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and
expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed
amid China's modern transformation.
Table of Contents after the jump.
Introduction
1. Suspicious
deaths and city life in Republican Beijing
2. On the
case with the Beijing procuracy
3. Disputed
forensics and skeletal remains
4.
Publicity, professionals, and the cause of forensic reform
5.
Professional politics of a crime scene
6.
Dissection and its discontents
7. Legal
medicine during the Nanjing decade
Conclusion:
a history of forensic modernity
More information is available here.
