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What Social Science Can Do for Chinese Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Maurice Freedman
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Extract

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

Type
Symposium on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , August 1964 , pp. 523 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1964

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References

1 See e.g. Wright, Mary C., “The Social Sciences and the Chinese Historical Record” (review article), The Journal of Asian Studies, XX (02 1961), 220.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Leach, E. R., Rethinking Anthropology (London 1961), p. 74.Google Scholar

3 In moving into the modern world of scholarship, Sinology had to free itself from “the incubus of Orientalism” by learning how to write history. See Wright, Arthur F., “The Study of Chinese Civilization,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXI (04–06 1960), 245ffGoogle Scholar. By the same token, it has had to take account of social science ideas (ibid.) and has shown itself willing to seek sociological help, as some of the volumes published under the auspices of the Committee on Chinese Thought of the Association for Asian Studies witness. See especially Fairbank, J. K., ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar and Nivison, D. S. and Wright, A. F., eds., Confucianism in Action (Stanford, Calif., 1959).Google Scholar

4 See Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “Social Structure,” in Krocber, A. L., ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago, 1953), pp. 530ff.Google Scholar, and the same author's Anthropologie Structurale (Paris, 1958), pp. 311ff.Google Scholar

5 On this and a number of other points touched on in this talk, cf. my paper “A Chinese Phase in Social Anthropology,” The British Journal of Sociology, XIV, (03 1963).Google Scholar