Dead bodies and forensic science: Cultures of expertise in China, 1800-1949

This dissertation examines the modern reinvention of a field of traditional Chinese technical expertise?the forensic examination of dead bodies?as a case study of the role of science and professionalization in the construction of a modern social and political order in early twentieth-century China. At stake in the examination of dead bodies was the role that modern disciplines would play in defining expertise, the role of professionals in implementing modern governance, and the role of the imperial past in shaping modern China. This study contributes to our understanding of the hybridities of modernity, the cultural and social politics of 'expert' knowledge, and the local inflections of science during its emergence as a global universal.