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College aantekeningen (Lectures) Culture and Language: East Asia (5181KC82)
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College aantekeningen Culture and Language: East Asia (5181KC82)
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Culture and Language East AsiaCompilation Document
Contents
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 1 27-1.....................................................................................2
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 2 3-2.......................................................................................7
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 3 10-2...................................................................................11
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 4 17-2...................................................................................16
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 5 24-2...................................................................................22
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 6 2-3.....................................................................................27
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 7 9-3.....................................................................................29
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 8 24-3...................................................................................36
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 9 6-4.....................................................................................45
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 10 13-4.................................................................................55
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 11 20-4.................................................................................58
Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 12 27-4.................................................................................63
1
,Culture and Language East Asia Lecture 1 27-1
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four lecture ‘clusters’
- The Big Ideas & The Big Clichés
- Language and Culture
- Identities
- The Languages and How to Write Them
Maps and Monkeys: “Culture” - people and the things they do and make
the one issue: ‘East Asian culture(s)’ the history tour
- What is ‘Asia’?
o The classical view/classical cosmography/the Roman view
Blocs: Europe // Africa // Asia
Everything you could see when you were standing in Rome and looked East
Asia minor (northern Middle East) vs Asia maior (southern Middle East)
“Asia” shifts continuously
“Asia” is more an idea than a location
o 1492: Columbus lands in “India” the early modern view: the Indies
Columbus actually lands in the Americas
India, and thus America, initially was deemed part of Asia
Asia is not a stable entity
Asia is Asia + the Americas
o The Victorian view:
Europe is the centre of the world
The Near East is the Middle East
The Far East is Asia
o Is the Middle East part of Asia?
- What is ‘East Asia’?
o Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledges East Asia and South Asia
o Association for Asian Studies (AAS) acknowledges North East Asia and South East
Asia
So ...
- conceptions of geographical units are fluid
o (c.q. “Asia” and “East Asia”)
- geographical units often have something to do with natural barriers
o mountains
o oceans
- but functional (and ostensibly geographical) units usually have to do with cultural barriers
(“us” and “them”)
EXAM! Defining “East Asia”
- Cultural traditions: “The Great Tradition” vs. “the little traditions”
o Anthropologist Robert Redfield (1897-1958)
2
, - Within certain cultural regions a variety of little traditions stand in relation to only one great
tradition
- John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer & Albert M. Craig: East Asia: Tradition &
Transformation(1978)
o Builds on:
East Asia: The Great Tradition. A History of East Asian Civilization, vol. 1.
(1960)
East Asia: The Modern Transformation. A History of East Asian Civilization,
vol. 2. (1965)
o Asia in geographical terms:
“the area east of the great mountain and desert barrier that bisects Asia”
[i.e. the mountain ranges of Central Asia and the Taklamakan and Gobi
deserts]
o Asia in racial terms:
“the habitat of Mongoloid man (except for the Eskimo [Inuit] and American Indian
[native American] branches of that race)”
o Asia in cultural terms:
“the domain of a civilization rooted in that of ancient China”
o in anthropologists’ terms of “traditions”:
East Asia is “the Great Tradition” rooted in ancient China, as opposed to the “little
traditions” of China, Taiwan, Japan, North & South Korea, Vietnam, etc.
“little traditions”, in this case, overlap with nation states
- “In the modern age, many of the features that made the region -now defined as including
China, Japan, and Korea-distinct have been submerged by the effects of revolution, politics
or globalization. Yet, as an ancient civilization, the region had both an historical and cultural
coherence. It shared a Confucian heritage, some common approaches to Buddhism, a
writing system that is deeply imbued with ideas and meaning, and many political and
institutional traditions.” – Charles Holcombe: A History of East Asia (2011)
- Defining “East Asia” in recent years: the “Sinosphere” (a.o. Fogel) as, more or less, an
alternative term for Fairbank’s, Reischauer’s and Craig’s third definition
East Asia as/vs. ‘Imagined Community’: “imagined communities”
- title of a classic book (1983, 1991, 2006) by Benedict Anderson (understand: nationalism is
seen as a defining aspect of modernity)
- proposition: nationalism should be seen in relation to the large cultural systems (= ±great
tradition)
o “the large cultural systems ... out of which —as well as against it —[nationalism]
came into being” (p. 12)
- the two important cultural systems before nationalism:
o the religious community
o the dynastic realm
- the dynastic realm:
o organisation is pyramidal: everything is organized around “a high centre”
o legitimacy of kingship derives from divinity not from the people (subjects, not
citizens)
o the dynastic realm has porous borders, unlike “the sovereign state”
- the religious community:
3
, o proposition: the religious community is bound together not so much by the different
“great sacral cultures” [= “religions”] (including Confucianism), but by:
sacred silent languages: the community is linked by a language (or: script
language) and especially by dead languages
Latin, classical Arabic, and classical Chinese (“Examination Chinese”)
were the “sacred, silent languages”:
spoken by (practically) no one and therefore claimed by no one
Through script and language the community also shared a world view that
was propagated through that script language.
o with regards to the proposition that the religious community is bound together not
so much by the different “great sacral cultures” [=“religions”]:
N.B. even though Anderson does make a gesture towards ‘religions’ by
explicitly naming “the great sacral cultures (to include ‘Confucianism’)” [p.
12], his point is that:
we should not begin with assuming that religion is the fundament of
a culture, but that it starts with sharing that sacred script-language
through which a shared worldview is conveyed (and part of that
world view is the more narrow, institutionalized ‘religion’)
o and, yes, it is a bit confusing that Anderson nevertheless
calls such a culture system a “religious community”
o I assume that “worldview community” simply is not as
catchy
- the rise of the nation then means:
o end of the religious community (= a new worldview)
o fragmentation of shared “sacred” script-language (= rise of national languages)
o shift from texts in shared sacred script-language to print community (esp.
newspapers) (= a new medium for worldview)
o a shift from a hierarchical (‘pyramidal’) organisation of society to an (in theory) equal
one (= a new social order)
- “imagined community” = Anderson’s definition of a nation:
o “imagined” because citizens of a state do not know each other but imagine the
existence of fellow citizens
o “communities” because people believe in the nation as a “deep, horizontal
comradeship” It is a matter of belief
Q for next week: How do you make people believe in an “imagined community”?
‘nation’ ‘nation state’
- The notion of a ‘nation’ becomes important throughout the late 19th and early twentieth
centuries and is tied to the (19th-century) ideal of the nation state.
- Q: what do we mean with these terms: nations, nation states and culture?
‘East Asia,’ the cliché
- ‘East Asia’ is first of all a historians’ definition
- emphasis on a cultural definition
- a shared ‘script-language’: classical Chinese
- through this, a shared worldview (that some would call ‘culture’): Confucianism
aside – Anderson on ‘time’/synchronicity : premodern vs. modern
4
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