Perspectives on Chinese Studies.docx

1、Perspectives on Chinese StudiesPerspectives on Chinese StudiesIntroduction I include with these comments an earlier statement prepared for a similar workshop held last year in October at NYU. The organizers, including Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, requested a statement on each participants research,

2、followed by a discussion of the implications of that research for Asian Studies as a whole. So I apologize for the personal nature of the enclosed statement. Nonetheless, it does provide some context for my comments today, and you may want to look at it before reading these remarks. I should note th

3、at all the participants at the NYU workshop, coming so closely after the terrible events of Sept 11, were in a state of shock. The discussion focused on ways to prevent Sept. 11 turning into a call to arms under the banner of a clash of civilizations. One of the most productive responses people thou

4、ght up was the holding of a conference on everyday life in post-socialist societies - where the daily struggles, hopes, and disillusionments of farmers, miners, workers, and intellectuals could be explored in ways that would bring out the common humanity of peoples of several different civilizations

5、. I still think that that is a valuable idea. Anything that can be done under current circumstances to challenge the premises of American exceptionalism and unilateralism is worthwhile. A turning point Chinese Studies is at a turning point. The tremendous outpouring of academic production coming out

6、 of China and Taiwan has definitively ended the era of the generalist in Chinese studies. But this onslaught of materials -both primary and secondary - presents a challenge. Rather than sink into narrow specializations and/or drown under the weight of raw data, Chinese studies needs to transform its

7、elf. No longer can the generalist pretend to master all (or enough) of the details of Chinese civilization to produce a unified representation of complex totality. But neither can Chinese studies any longer hide behind such representations, speaking only within closed ranks to fellow specialists, an

8、d refusing to engage with developments in other areas of the humanities. Chinese studies needs to participate on an equal ground with other fields, even if that means abandoning the protection of regional studies for the more daunting task of engaging with debates in anthropology, gender studies, en

9、vironmental studies, medical history, global history, film theory, post-colonial and even post-modernist studies. Over the past twenty years, scholars in China and Taiwan have made an impressive effort to translate, study and absorb major works of Western sinology. But the trend now is to go beyond

10、sinological studies to more fundamental sources of theoretical models, to the challenging works of Giddens, Foucault, and even Derrida. Sinologists may find themselves left behind, as Chinese scholars enter global debates on the nature of modernity, the impacts of globalization, the commodification

11、of culture, the relationship between empire and writing, and the reconceptualization of Chinese history. Of course there will be a great deal of second-rate imitation and mis-applications of the seminal ideas of these contemporary thinkers. That has already happened in the Western academy, and so it

12、 will come as no surprise in Asia. But more fundamentally, we are witnessing the rise of Asian intellectuals who are engaging these theorists on an equal ground, proposing new understandings of vital issues of cultural understanding and interaction in a rapidly changing environment. Chinese studies

13、may strike a defensive posture, and wallow in newly discovered materials, sulking over its lack of invitations to broader thematic conferences in the humanities. Or we will have to take up the challenge, and incorporate training in current theoretical approaches into our already overburdened sinolog

14、ical training programs. But it is not enough to relegate this theoretical retooling to graduate training. The important thing is to bring out new concepts from our own research that have a contribution to make to humanistic studies in general. Not just to document a different civilization, but to ge

15、nerate new concepts and discover new problematics which have wider implications and open up new perspectives on other areas of study. Comparative approaches to regional history Since my own research has focused mostly on regional history, I would like to make a few methodological comments on this to

16、pic. The greatest challenge is to think difference differently. To think difference all the way through, as a positive force. Rather than studying each regional culture of China as a variation on a given model, or as a process leading to and culminating in integration within a given standard form, w

17、e might seek to grasp the underlying problematics of each unique, regional culture, as it is expressed in a constantly expanding multiplicity of elements. Chinese studies has to break out of the constraints of imperial logic, or, if it seeks to explore these constraints, it should do so critically.

18、Imperial logic dictates that local culture is merely a variation of the same, a struggle to impose the identical, or near enough, onto the divergent. It is far more challenging to think difference all the way through the transformations of local cultures, even if this results in a thousand Chinas sw

19、arming over the neatly drawn borders of our increasingly state of the art maps. Looking back over fifty years of Chinese historical studies in the West, we can see the research being driven by the sources. Early post-war studies of the 60s focused on national level archives, including lists of degre

20、e holders, and the structure of court politics (following the documentary trail). As provincial level materials (memorials from field administrators, provincial archives) began to be studied, emphasis in the 70s shifted to identifying players at the provincial and regional levels (Strangers at the G

21、ate, Rebellion and its Enemies). With the opening up of district level archives, the emphasis shifted downwards again in the 80s and 90s to the concrete workings of the sub-administration of the local magistrates, through intensive study of legal records. Urban archives and collections of epigraphy

22、were also exploited in an explosion of Shanghai studies and in the exhaustive account of the temples of Beijing by Prof. Naquin. The use of epigraphy in Prof. Naquins work, however, is indicative of another downward shift to the local neighborhood organizations that sponsored certain aspects of reli

23、gious ritual in the Beijing temples. Similarly, the ability to conduct fieldwork in villages of China beginning in the late 80s and 90s has led to a new focus on local cultural history of geographically differentiated regions of China. Ultimately, this kind of research makes it possible to conceive

24、of writing Chinese social history from the ground up - from the perspective of Chinese villagers, rather than from the perspective of the state. This initial research has already led to several important sets of publications (summarized in Daniel Overmyer, ed., Ethnography in China Today: A Critical

25、 Assessment of Methods and Results, Taipei, Yuan-Liou Publishing Co., 2002). We are now in a position to begin studying different regional histories comparatively, in order to bring out their differences and similarities. We must also continue discussions of the methodologies employed in this resear

26、ch, in order to ensure that it has the impact on the field that it deserves. The invaluable descriptions of specific rituals in the Studies in Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore should be followed up with more extensive research into the regional cultures that these ritual-events embody. For each

27、 region studied, we need to have an explanation of why certain sites were chosen, and others excluded. We need to have an overall account of the historical development of lineage formations, temple networks, ritual traditions, government institutions, and economic forces at each stage in the history

28、 of these regions - how did these institutions, networks, and forces function in the Song, in the Ming, and in the Qing? To get at these questions, we need to explain and evaluate our sources very carefully - how reliable are accounts in genealogies of early origins of particular lineages? Who is re

29、porting which legends? To what degree have their accounts been edited? One notes a growing awareness of these issues in the Traditional Hakka Studies Series edited by John Lagerwey. A particularly fine volume in that series which carefully evaluates historical sources alongside descriptions of speci

30、fic village rituals is Liu Jinfengs volume on the Gannan region. Innovative local histories of the Pearl River delta of Guangdong, are under preparation by David Faure and his associates. Similar efforts are underway in Sichuan, Guangxi, Northeast China, Huizhou, Suzhou, Chaozhou and Putian. New res

31、earch projects are getting underway in North China and in Zhejiang. Conditions will soon be in place for productive conferences on comparative regional history. In order for this work to be done, we will have to modify or transform G. W. Skinners central-place theory of economically determined sub-r

32、egions of China. A new, comparative cultural ecology will have to be developed for the regions under study, combining environmental studies with an historical understanding of local cultural institutions and forces. Differences of scale, culturally specific senses of place, local networks and ritual

33、 alliances, will have to be incorporated into this new paradigm. This research will be complemented by research in electronic databases providing comprehensive coverage of massive collections such as the Siku quanshu (I found over 3120 hits in 1789 different juan for Putian, and 5763 hits in 3596 juan for Xinghua). GIS technologies will also play a majo