03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T133020181103T1545America/VancouverAsia and the Global Origins of the Social Sciences, 1700-1900
This panel aims to consider the contributions of Asian traditions of scholarship to the formation of modern disciplines commonly seen as Western in origin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, academic disciplines now grouped as the humanities and social sciences took shape in new university departments, academic journals, and other institutions that continue to structure scholarship today. It has often seemed that these epistemic formations spread through European imperialism to be adapted and transformed in Asia, displacing existing knowledge traditions. Yet as new histories have begun to suggest, our modern disciplines were not the singular invention of Europe, but co-produced globally.
How, then, were Asian knowledge traditions deployed in the global construction of fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and comparative law? In the eighteenth century, Jesuit engagement with Indian pandits created foundational axioms of anthropology. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Qing linguistic scholarship was deployed in phonetic descriptions of Chinese for Western students, as disagreements over Daoism cemented the separation of philosophy from orientalism. By the era of high imperialism, Japanese legal experts mobilized their traditional philology to contribute to the idea of diffusionism itself. Through the circulation of books, artefacts, and practices as well as encounters and exchanges with Asian scholars, new modes of knowledge production emerged in the West from diverse beginnings. Modern disciplines in the humanities and social sciences should be seen as truly global, not just in their geographical reach, but also in their intellectual origins.
Organized ...
Boren, Fourth FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
This panel aims to consider the contributions of Asian traditions of scholarship to the formation of modern disciplines commonly seen as Western in origin. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, academic disciplines now grouped as the humanities and social sciences took shape in new university departments, academic journals, and other institutions that continue to structure scholarship today. It has often seemed that these epistemic formations spread through European imperialism to be adapted and transformed in Asia, displacing existing knowledge traditions. Yet as new histories have begun to suggest, our modern disciplines were not the singular invention of Europe, but co-produced globally.
How, then, were Asian knowledge traditions deployed in the global construction of fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and comparative law? In the eighteenth century, Jesuit engagement with Indian pandits created foundational axioms of anthropology. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Qing linguistic scholarship was deployed in phonetic descriptions of Chinese for Western students, as disagreements over Daoism cemented the separation of philosophy from orientalism. By the era of high imperialism, Japanese legal experts mobilized their traditional philology to contribute to the idea of diffusionism itself. Through the circulation of books, artefacts, and practices as well as encounters and exchanges with Asian scholars, new modes of knowledge production emerged in the West from diverse beginnings. Modern disciplines in the humanities and social sciences should be seen as truly global, not just in their geographical reach, but also in their intellectual origins.
Organized by Mårten Söderblom Saarela (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
The First Treatise of Indology and the Origins of AnthropologyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science01:30 PM - 02:03 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC
It is rare to find scholarly classics whose authors were not eager to be acknowledged, but such is the case of Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens (1777), a founding treatise of Indology and a classic of early anthropology whose real author remained obscured for two centuries. That the mystery endured so long is in part due to the fact that Moeurs et coutumes was published twice in the half-century following its composition, under two different names. But the reason its true author, the Jesuit Father Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691-1779) wanted to remain anonymous was the state of shame and ignominy in which the former members of the Society of Jesus found themselves after Clement XIV dissolved the Society in 1773.
This paper presents Indology’s first treatise for the first time to an English-speaking audience with a dual purpose: to describe its content and descriptive method in the context of contemporary travel and proto-ethnographic productions, particularly those of non-Jesuit missionary orders; and to assess its influence upon, and similarities to and differences from, the disciplines of ethnology, anthropology and Indology as they came to maturity in the nineteenth century. The main aim is to gain consciousness of how the ethnological sciences were molded – or not – by missionary methods and circumstances of the Age of Enlightenment, and how awareness of these facts can help us to develop more faithful ways of perceiving anthropological realities.
Philosophy, Orientalism, and the Invention of "Eastern Wisdom"View Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science02:03 PM - 02:36 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC
In Paris on September 21, 1827, Europe’s most famous philosopher and France’s first professional sinologist met to discuss the intellectual traditions of China. The sinologist, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, lauded the “ancient oriental doctrine” of Daoism, which he claimed had been known to all the peoples of the pre-Christian world. The philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, accepted that Daoism was the fully realized expression of Chinese thought – but for him, it was not philosophy at all, only a “developed religion of magic.” This marked the end of a transformation in European engagement with the China. Just a generation earlier, the philosophes of the French Enlightenment had looked there for familiar models of Confucian reason. How, then, had China become a location of exotic alternatives of Daoist wisdom? In this paper, I argue that professional sinologists and philosophers together built their idea of sagesse orientale, or “eastern wisdom,” on the foundations of the Jesuit missionaries’ search for divinely-inspired prisca sapientia, or “ancient wisdom,” reworked through the interpretive lens of the late Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment ended with the disenchantment of the West, it also led to the enchantment of the East. In this way, China posed new questions that independent academic disciplines including both philosophy and orientalism were set up to answer. Both exponents of progress and admirers of the past converged on the idea of a monolithic East as an enchanted and ancient land, incommensurate with the modern West.
Joshua Marshman Reads the Kangxi Zidian Rhyme TablesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science02:36 PM - 03:09 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC
Research on the Chinese language, as opposed to practically-oriented language study, constituted an essential aspect of academic sinology as it developed in Europe in the nineteenth century. In 1814, Joshua Marshman published a book on the Chinese language with the intention to systematically describe the prestige pronunciation of the Chinese language of his time. The book appeared at a time of increased interest in the Chinese language, with Robert Morrison's Chinese-English dictionary following soon after. Another aspect of Marshman's book, however, was contrary to current trends. At this time of increased trade and contact with China, Morrison claimed to record current pronunciation; Marshman, rather, chose to appropriate the gains of a Chinese scholarly discipline. His source was the phonological tables included in the imperial dictionary Kangxi zidian, published in Beijing in 1716, which had sought to circumvent the inconvenience of Chinese characters through a system that was difficult even for Chinese scholars to master. Marshman's choice was met with incomprehension by Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat, the rising star of French academic sinology: If the European researcher was already armed with the Roman alphabet, a fine tool for phonetic description, why would he choose to rely on the arcane tools that a non-alphabetic civilization had developed merely to mimic what was literally at the fingertips of every educated European? This paper will use the case of Marshman to consider the role of Chinese scholarly knowledge in European research on linguistics in the nineteenth century.
Civilization and Diffusion: From Comparative Law to International CopyrightView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science03:09 PM - 03:42 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:42:00 UTC
In recent years, “diffusionism” has emerged as the most prominent bogeyman, if not straw man, for non-Eurocentric histories of science: witness proliferating critiques of Basalla, of Cold War development, of modernization theory. Such targets, however, should strike us as too easy. If we would now champion modernity as the “history of exchanges and entanglements…of the co-production of knowledge,” then we must also recognize that Eurocentric models of diffusion were not merely the construct of Euro-American labors, but actively promoted and elaborated upon by non-Western actors, for their own sensible reasons, based on their own beliefs about how knowledge moved.
This presentation outlines one portion of a more robust transnational genealogy of diffusionism. It does so by examining the rise of comparative law in Japan, and the role played by comparative legal scholars in shaping international copyright conventions premised on Eurocentric diffusionism. Arising out of philological efforts to understand Chinese rites (li), then growing though interchange with the nascent field of ethnology, Japanese comparative law developed a model of civilizational transfer that fused anthropological theory with prior concepts of Sinocentric acculturation. This model served as a key conceptual resource in Berlin, 1908, when Japanese comparative legal scholars were called upon to renegotiate the Berne Convention. Although first articulated in relation to China, Japanese scholars’ view that civilization consisted of a movement of knowledge from centers to peripheries encouraged them to support a vision of international copyright whose goal was to diffuse ideas from Europe to “less-civilized” regions of the world.
