10 - Critiquing critical thinking: Asia's contribution towards sociological conceptualisation

Summary

Introduction

Foucault famously begins his book, The Order of Things, by saying that the book arose out of the laughter when he came across a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ where animals were divided into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (1970 & 1994, p. xv)

The laughter was mixed with a sense of disturbance and threat against ‘the ageold distinction between the Same and the Other’ (1970, 1994, p. xv). Foucault then introduces the notion of a ‘tabula’, a table or a space where entities (for example, words and things) are sorted out, ‘to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences’ (p. xvii).

In the transcultural space of Asian Studies, where I work as a Japan specialist, we regularly face the challenge of sorting out similarities and differences between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. While this challenge is rarely as preposterous or exotic as in the case of the ‘Chinese encyclopaedia’, the increasing intermingling of cultures associated with globalisation has added further complexities to the task. One such complexity that has drawn considerable attention in the Western academy is the perceived weakness in critical thinking among international students from Asia (Nichols 2003, p. 141).