Introduction: Toward an old understanding of philology: Exploring the literary construction of place as religious and social commentary in Asia

James Marcel Hegarty

doi:10.15388/aov.2007.1.3753

Abstract

Cardiff UniversityThere is no doubt that the idea of place matters. Human beings have long been willing to fight and die for rights, symbolic and material, over both tangible and intangible places. However, the types of expression and performance that transmit and adapt ideas of place are less well understood than the brute fact of the enduring power of certain charged locations. That is to say, we know that certain places are significant but we are less sure as to the mechanisms of how and why they are made so. In addition, scholarly work in this area has tended to consider the literary and performative construction of place to always be bound up with these determinate locations rather than a variety of social functions. Literary engagements with the category of place, as this volume will demonstrate, encompass a wide range of uses. A suggestive but by no means exhaustive list of those that reflect the analytic content of this volume would have to include: political and religious legitimation, the construction of the significant past, the expression of agreement and dissent in relation to prevailing and emergent ideologies, and the transmission and adaptation of systems of socially significant knowledge in response to a wide variety of historical circumstances. Literatures of place, then, provide an extraordinarily rich source of information as to the ways in which human beings maintain and transform their understandings of not just the world around them, but themselves.

Highlights

Toward an old understanding of philology: Exploring the literary construction of place as religious and social commentary in AsiaJames Marcel Hegarty Cardiff UniversityThere is no doubt that the idea of place matters
The particular context in which we explore the theoretical capacities of narrative in this volume is in the construction and adaptation of ideologically charged understandings of place
When Jacob Neusner suggested that ‘... stories do constitute facts of history. If they are not factitious for the history of the period of which they speak, they surely testify to the social relationships and imaginative life—the history—of the periods to which they speak’ (Neusner 2004, 243)

Summary

James Marcel Hegarty Cardiff University

There is no doubt that the idea of place matters. Human beings have long been willing to fight and die for rights, symbolic and material, over both tangible and intangible places. If they are not factitious for the history of the period of which they speak, they surely testify to the social relationships and imaginative life—the history—of the periods to which they speak’ (Neusner 2004, 243) He opened up an area of analysis which can be enriched by a wide variety of new theoretical orientations to the forms and functions of human conceptualization and communication. It is still, a considerable undertaking to attempt to put together an idea of the social relationships and imaginative life of the people of a given period or location: and it is one which we only initiate here in relationship to the focalizing concept of place. This is a concept that has led an active and varied life in the humanities and social sciences of recent years, and it is to this that we turn

The theoretical context of the volume

The shape of the volume