History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 19-47 © Wesleyan University 2020 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.12180 THE CRITICAL PROMISES OF THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE: PERSPECTIVES FROM EAST ASIAN STUDIES FEDERICO MARCON ABSTRACT This essay, written from the vantage point of a historian specialized in early modern Japan, asks if and in what capacity the history of knowledge offers an advantage for our understanding of the past compared to established historiographical forms. It accounts for the intellectual relevance of this genre of history and concludes with a strong endorse- ment of its self-reflexive methodology. It also contends that historical research on East Asia is of inestimable value for this historiographical approach because of its resistance to uncritically universalizing Eurocentric terminology and because of its direct engagement with transcultural translation of both archival sources and heuristic apparatus. Historians working on knowledge production in East Asia or in other parts of the “non-Western” world must constantly question the effects of their interpretive categories on the topics and archives they study; they are thus accustomed to the epistemological self-reflection that this new approach seems to require. The essay concludes by advocating meta- phorical comparison as a formal model that best expresses historians’ heuristic practices. Keywords: knowledge, science, early modern Japan, honzōgaku, metaphor, comparative history, critical history “Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.”—Max Ernst 1 The notion that the history of knowledge is a new methodology of historical inquiry would surely sound preposterous, if not absurd, to many. Investigations of what past societies justifiably believed to know about nature, the mind, soci- ety, power, or life after death have been the subjects of research in the history of science, the history of philosophy, social and political history, historical anthropology, and the history of religions for most of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, knowledge production indeed became a central concern for his- torians inspired by approaches as distant as Michel Foucault’s genealogy, the social constructivism of David Bloor’s Strong Program, and the social history 1. From the preface to a 1920 exhibition of Max Ernst’s work, quoted in Don Fabun, You and Creativity (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1969), 6.