College aantekeningen (Lectures) Culture and Language: East Asia (5181KC82)

Culture and Language East Asia
Compilation 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




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,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)


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, - 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:



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, 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


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