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Published by Greg February 10th, 2014 in Commentary, Blogging, Popular Science, Health
According to Chinese historians, the consumption of bird’s nests began as a “thing to do” among the wealthy. But after a century or so (beginning during the Ming Dynasty) the medicinal and nutritional value was recognized and the bird nest was incorporated into a less frivolous life model.
While the value of the bird nest in Chinese diet and health is not disputed today (by the Chinese) when this became important and how that occurred is a complicated story.
For example, there is a document from 1596 stating that bird nest was merely a food of the rich, and there is a document from 1694 (Ben Cao Feng Yuan” or “The Medicinal Herbs in the Wild” by Zhang) stating that the bird nest has clear medicinal properties. The question scholars have is when during this period did the transition occur.
The next century or two involved a discussion of how, when, and under what conditions the bird nest become recognized as a medicinally and nutritionally important thing. It seems that this discussion settled down during the last quarter of the 19th century, but more recent work (100 years later during the last quarter of tEfe people
Ituri Foresthe 20th century) saw Chinese scientists/medical experts running the bird nest through laboratory experiments to ascertain details of their medicinal properties. (Or to test the properties’ validity?)
What are the properties? Don’t ask me. Perhaps there are none, perhaps there a many. As to what is said about the properties, I could give you a list (I have one) and Wikipedia probably could to, but since I don’t understand bird nests it would just be passing on information that I cant’ verify.
I bring this up only because of what it says about tradition.
If you are a more or less “typical” North American or European, or whatever, you may actually have fewer traditions than your grandparents or parents did, but you have some, and you probably have more than you think. Over the last few decades in America, we have managed to show our deep disrespect for tradition, for women, and for the elderly by linking the three together into the phrase “Old Wives’s Tale” and then declaring all the “Old Wive’s Tales” to be wrong. You can tell they are wrong because call them “Old Wive’s Tale” and define this as a thing that is said that is wrong. (Oh, don’t misinterpret me. I’m NOT saying ANYTHING here about what stories and beliefs are wrong and not wrong, at this time.) The center of the Reactionary Liberal Universe is the metro sexual medium BrownBlack and OffWhiteOff urban boundary EdgeLand of places like … oh never mind, you know where they are. But it is always urban, so we of the central fringe have swapped “Old Wives Tale” out and replaced it with “Urban Myth.”
It is funny for me to hear the phrase “Urban Myth” when applied to beliefs that emerge from, say, the Ozarks or the Central African rain forest . Do these people know that there is a place outside of the urban area? Do these people (the studded, the black-clad, the bobbed, and the Birkenstocked) KNOW that if you keep going in a straight line from the coffee shop you WILL eventually run into a farm, eventually a forest or something, and sooner or later you will be in the middle of nowhere surrounded by people who you wish thought like you but guess what, they don’t, and you think they want to hurt you but all they want is to make you go away, or if not at least buy something, or at least stop looking at their women and children like you were going to kill and eat them….? (Oh, sorry, have not taken my Gonzo Go-Away pill this morning … I’ll get on track right now..)
My point is that in our efforts to reject one thing, we have made ourselves stupid, as usual. In Chinese culture, historiography is critically important. It is not sufficient to say that the bird nest confers certain properties. It is also important to know when those properties were discovered and how. Beyond this it is important to know how perceptions of these medicinal values have changed, and what various different historians have said … historians that themselves were writing many hundreds of years ago … historians in history … about the process of assimilation of the bird nest into traditional Chinese Medicine. And so on.
Historiography is like a blog that you been writing for a thousand years, so every single thing you say has already been said, more or less, many times, and there is a “Hist.Oriog.Raphi.fi.Me” button you press and all the old posts that could link to your current post do link to it and become phrases of different point size and degree of transparency in the background of your text. So you have to rewrite the new text because some of it becomes illegible because the background is too dense and shows through strongly, obscuring what you are writing. Historiography is like a spouse or a sib or parent or offspring who remembers EVERYTHING you’ve ever said or done and cannot stop reminding you of it when ever anything you say or do reminds THEM of it, causing you to restate, re-justify, re-describe, re-explain and re-plan everything in the context of your past and of previous reactions you and others have had to your past. What a pain it must be to live in a culture that is based on history as opposed to one that is based on now.
This is also why the only non-boring way to learn history is to read novels.
You can never get AWAY from your past. All you can do is create MORE of it.
Your job for this weekend, for during your spare time: Take that thought (”You can never get AWAY from … etc. etc.”) and find out all the ways you can that this thought has been expressed before by other people. Extra points for the number of different cultures you can find it in.
By the way, this is not an endorsement of bird nests as thing to eat. Or not eat. I have no opinion on it, other than that I’m not doing it.
