Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor.:Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor (original) (raw)
How are Historical Texts to be Read? My Final Rejoinder to John N. Schumacher, S.J
Kritika Kultura, 2004
, considered "one of the most provocative books" for the 1990s decade in the 10-volume Southeast Asian History Readers, published by Iwanami-shoten in Japan. Dr. Quibuyen's professional experience ranges from teaching (University of the Philippines and the University of Hawaii at Manoa) to filmmaking and video production.
Chapman, A. (2016) Historical Interpretations
This chapter explores the nature of historical interpretation and the conceptual challenges that understanding plural interpretations can pose for pupils. A framework is proposed to enable both academic and popular cultural interpretations of the past to be considered comparatively in terms, inter alia, of their contexts, the conceptions of history that they express, their interpretive frameworks and their textual forms. The chapter outlines the kinds of conceptual understanding that pupils will need to develop in order to build rational explanations for variation in interpretation and criterial evaluations of plural historical interpretations.
2018
Bevir´s works open a window that introduces us in the discussion of contemporary exegesis through his work The history of political Philosophy 1 , specially, when he state: there are several contextual, historical approaches to texts 2 . Simultaneously, Bevir, offers us an interesting progression of the history of hermeneutics and the contextual approaches experienced during the first part of the XX century. In fact, starting the reflexion, Mark, showed the different conflicts that Cambridge School faced mainly lead by J.G.A Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and the Cambridge tradition that was working the interpretation issue. At the same time, he introduces us to Peter Laslett considering him as a kind of ¨contextualism father¨, and who had a strong influence over that generation, specially, for John Locke´s works. The inflection point in the discussion is related with the convinience of continuining to using the traditional method of interpretation or the consideration to transiting to a new one (adding a little more ¨rigor¨). While Laslett brought modernist empiricism to the history of political thought, many Cambridge historians remained more committed to elder approaches to the subjet 3 . As the reading progresses the reader can see that Skinner had interest to defend the contextualism trying to be more accurate in the analysis, we must grasp the author´s intention to address a particular question at a particular time 4 . Pocock, meanwhile, has consistenly adopted more structuralist vocabularies to suggest that language gives authors their very intentions 5 . So, for one side, we
Interlude III: On Interpretation
Theory Matters, 2016
The essays in Part III of this volume indicate to what extent critical theory draws on resources from beyond the realm of literary and cultural theory in the narrower sense, such as ecological thinking (Zapf), ethics (Attridge, Domsch, and Middeke), or complexity science (Walsh). While doing so, all contributions insisted on the particular cultural productivity of literature, which in turn inspires theoretical refl ections. All contributions in Part III thus provide good examples for the 'dispositional, as well as institutional, anchorage' (Brubaker 216) of literary and cultural theory highlighted at the end of Interlude II. The medium for this particular cultural productivity of literature is, of course, the text, just as it is, albeit with different rules, the medium for the particular cultural productivity of literary and cultural theory itself. If there is a unique selling point for the expertise accumulated in the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, it should be just this: that there is a long and very sophisticated tradition of refl ection on the role of texts in modern culture in terms of the features that can be described under the rubrics of philological comparison, rhetoric, form, or
2005
This thesis discusses one central problem: What happened to Indonesian historiography in the New Order (1966-98)? To analyze the problem, the author studies the connections between the major themes in his intellectual autobiography and those in the metahistory of the regime. Proceeding in chronological and thematic manner, the thesis comes in three parts. Part One presents the author’s intellectual autobiography, which illustrates how, as a member of the generation of people who grew up in the New Order, he came into contact with history. Part Two examines the genealogy of and the major issues at stake in the post-New Order controversy over the rectification of history. Part Three ends with several concluding observations. First, the historiographical engineering that the New Order committed was not effective. Second, the regime created the tools for people to criticize itself, which shows that it misunderstood its own society. Third, Indonesian contemporary culture is such that people abhor the idea that there is no one single truth.
Chapter 3: Schleiermacher's Historical Hermeneutics Dilthey traces the origins of modern hermeneutics to the Renaissance and the Reformation, that is, to the recovery of classical texts which could not be regarded as transparent, and to the breakdown of clerical authority and the consequent democratization of reading practices. On the one hand the sheer remoteness of Graeco-Roman texts from the (then) present called for new and more self-conscious interpretative methodologies. On the other, the pluralism of the Protestant revolution which generated a new kind of reader of biblical texts required a spelling out of interpretative principles so as to create a degree of order in a potentially chaotic cultural and political situation. But I would like to take the argument further by focussing on the immense historical changes taking place from the later eighteenth century onwards, changes which in a startlingly short time generated the technological, economic and cultural face of European modernity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century these changes are still in train, only operating still faster with the e-revolution. The contemporary term for the process, theorized by Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and others, is postmodernity. But, as the German theorist Jürgen Habermas has argued, the "post" simply represents a further phase of the larger project of modernization. In short, we are still living out the massive historical transition initiated, let's say, two to three hundred years ago. My interest here is in one aspect only of modernity: its capacity to generate crisis, what has been termed the shock of the new. Modernization, change accelerating much too fast, creates an unprecedented historical, that is, cultural rupture. It means all too suddenly losing touch with your past, something Europeans had perhaps never before experienced on the same scale. When you lose touch with your past, that is, when settled traditions collapse, you become specifically aware of the past as something in its own right, i.e. as different from the present-and from you in the present. This produces, in the nineteenth century, theories of "alienation" which would have been incomprehensible a little earlier-because alienation from one's own past, which amounts to a self-alienation, is a strange and deeply disturbing phenomenon, psychologically and socially unsettling, requiring a complete revision of systems of belief, ways of behaving and so on. In this situation it becomes necessary to thematize the past, to foreground the idea of the past. In short, to become conscious of something called "history". The birth of historical consciousness by the beginning of the nineteenth century goes hand in hand with industrialization, the gradual failure of church authority, the rapid decline of feudal aristocracy following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which spread the principles of the revolution throughout Europe and, finally, the coming to dominance
Thoughts on Four Subversive Words
My interest in anthropological studies in China began with the relationships between Han Chinese and China's various minorities, especially in Yunnan. But it was only recently that I noted the attention being paid by anthropologists in China to larger questions of 'empire' and 'civilisation'. What are anthropologists doing with words that describe such a large historical entity like China? This may be no more than a reaching out beyond the confines of the discipline, the kind of subversion produced whenever academics refine and expand their intellectual concerns. However, when it concerns anthropologists working on China, it is intriguing. Anthropology has long been a contested area, from the time when the first generations of ethnographers and ethnologists began to introduce the work of anthropologists to Chinese scholarship. Scholars like Wu Wenzao, Ling Cunsheng and Fei Xiaotong before the Second World War did a remarkable job under very difficult circumstances. They were able, including in practical areas pertaining to the country's minorities, to help reshape national policy and redefine some of the ethnic boundaries within China. Over the decades, however, Fei Xiaotong's generation may have failed because they also provoked official questioning of the very nature of anthropology when applied to China. What seemed subversive arose from the discontent aroused towards aspects of methodologies when these were applied to different periods of Chinese history and different areas of Chinese society. Unfortunately, the scholarship that was criticised also included some important and stimulating studies that had opened up a wide range of research possibilities. Subversive here does not mean that the scholars had conducted acts 1 against the profession, but their work raises doubts about the nature and value of the field of anthropology in China. Wang Mingming and his colleagues have shown how words that were used to open up the field were contextualised for the specific time and place when the research was done and the reasons why the research was done, for example, how new concepts were first brought into China and how scholars responded to them. That is familiar to historians who often face the same questions. I recently wrote about the word 'geming' meaning revolution, how the modern concept came to China and what happened to it,