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The Case for the Integrity of Sinology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Frederick W. Mote
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Extract

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).

Type
Symposium on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , August 1964 , pp. 531 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1964

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References

1 See Schafer, Edward H., “Open Letter to The Editors of Jaos and Jas,” JAOS, LXXVIII (1958), 119–120Google Scholar, and JAS, XXVII (05 1958), 509.Google Scholar

2 What do the natives call Sinology? If it exists there, they must have a native word for it. Die Ausländer usually, and curiously, have employed the Chinese world Han-hsüeh as their translation of “Sinology,” but this clearly is chop-suey. At home, the term of course designates only one of the narrowest and most specialized, and in fact one of the latest to develop, of the market-towns of the central provinces. The whole realm of learning of civilized man traditionally was called “hsüeh-wen,” a term as broad in scope as the term t'ien-hsia for the empire. Sinology then should imply all of the subject matter of traditional learning though not, of course, necessarily only the traditional ways of pursuing it. In the recent century or so, at the same time that the t'ien-hsia concept was becoming difficult to maintain under the limiting conditions of international reciprocity, the term kuo-hsüeh has come to be used to designate the realm formerly called hsüeh-wen. I propose that the alien residents of the realm should use kuo-hsüeh as the Chinese name for Sinology. This word is usable any place, as long as the language is Chinese, for it will always mean Chung-kuo-hsüeh (a “non-sayable” word), or Chung-kuo ti kuo-hsüeh (“sayable” but too lengthy), for speakers of Chinese always invoke an inviolable extra-territoriality;—eavesdrop on any such persons, conversing anywhere in the world, and note whom they mean when they say “wai-kuo-jen,” or what they mean when they say “kuo-hsüeh.” This term, then, I think serves very well in our time to designate our intellectual realm. And I see no particular reason to abandon “Sinology,” its semantic analogue, when speaking English. The usual complaint against it was that it was misappropriated by the early explorers, and that their followers have tended to perpetuate a kind of misuse of it. I believe that the word will survive. The serious issue is not that of names, but of content.