>Yesterday, (on Anthro-L) I cited some material from Angela Zito's _Of Brush
>and Body: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century China_.
>The more I read of this book, the more I find myself in awe of a scholar
>who combines deep knowledge of historical sources with fluency in critical
>theory. What strikes me is how Zito's analysis of the texts and
>performances combined in Chinese imperial ritual speaks to urgent issues
>confronting the academy today. Here Zito describes the preoccupation with
>philology that peaked in China during the eighteenth century and would
>later be blamed, by Chinese and foreign scholars alike, for China's
>impotence in the face of European and Japanese invaders during the
>nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
>
>"A *yu-lu* was the record by his students of a master's words. It was
>favored by Song-Ming students of the Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucian school of
>Nature and Coherence, and its referents were the master's words that had
>been uttered with didactic intent. Speech and writing were held together
>tightly by this intent and encompassed the writer himself in an elision
>enabled by anonymous transmission. The result was a fixed text, one that
>could only be supplemented by commentary.
>
>"Evidential scholars rejected this emphasis upon 'lecturing' (*jiangxue*)
>and 'question and answer'(*wenda*) styles of teaching popular with
>neo-Confucians...As Naquin and Rawski note:
>
>>The introversion of this specialized community, seen in its rejection of
>>Socratic modes of discourse or any kind of lectures (to the public or to
>>one another), was in deliberate contrast to those Ming neo-Confucian
>>schools inspired by the sixteenth century philosopheer, Wang Yangming
>>(1987:66)<
>
>In other words,face-to-face teaching aloud was abandoned for writing; the
>'specialized community' became far more interested incommunication within
>itself and less inclined to speak across the barrier of literacy to
>commoners.
>
>"Their methodological doubt broke the intentional connection between speech
>and writing. Evidential method required that the writer be a separate
>observer, writing down what he had seen or overheard...Writing was thought
>to reflect observation directly, and the writer inserted himself as the
>author of this process. In other words, as observer and object split,
>author and text separated. Battles raged in the scholarly world over
>author-ity in issues such as who had answered certain questions first. It
>did not matter if the object under scrutiny was a book, an inscription, or
>an astronomical event... It was not so much the idea of what constituted a
>'classic' changed as it was that the very idea of what could stand as a
>proper text itself changed. Classical scholars had created texts that could
>be shared, amended, and plundered as *data* by other scholars..."
>
>Am I totally insane to imagine that in this description I see a process
>like that which has led the academy to its present malaise, i.e., the
>replacement of teacher-student relations in which the teacher's presence
>and voice play a central role with a focus on texts that exist like so many
>commodities arrayed on a supermarket shelf, ready to be consumed however
>the consumer wills? There is something about that "specialized community"
>whose members are more concerned with what they write for each other's
>consumption than with speaking across the barrier of their (specialized)
>literacy to reach a public from whom they become increasingly estranged.Add
>that "methodological doubt" and fights over "author-ity." Something sounds
>remarkably familiar here.
>
>I welcome any and all thoughts that these musings may provoke.
>
>
>
>John McCreery
>The Word Works
>55-13-202 Miyagaya
>Nishi-ku, Yokohama 220-0006
>JAPAN
>
>"Making symbols is what we do."
>