Western Categories Research Articles

Mao Zedong, Sinization of Marxism, and Traditional Chinese Thought Culture

The informed perspective presented here may rouse a sensitivity to the differences in reading Marxist philosophy from the perspective of the Inseparability of One and Many worldview and philosophy (a doctrine of internal, constitutive, relations––“intimacy”) on the part of Chinese intellectuals, particularly Mao Zedong, a great campaigner for philosophic and discursive Sinicization of Marxism. Marxism has provided an opportunity for a philosophical conversation with Chinese tradition, and this conversation was not launched by a government or official campaign, but instead by the efforts made on the part of countless grassroots intellectuals. It is argued that the reason for this was perhaps due to the fact that certain of Marx’s cosmological assumptions, in contrast to those of the main Western categories, are more capable of being understood and Sinicized in terms of particular philosophical currents in the Chinese tradition. This was particularly so for the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, and until the end of the 1970s when Deng Xiaoping came to power and openly declared the start of his “Economic Reform” with the slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”

Associations between dietary patterns and the risk of breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

BackgroundEpidemiologic evidence suggests that certain dietary patterns were associated with breast cancer risk, but the results have been inconclusive. We assessed the associations between different dietary patterns and the risk of breast cancer by conducting a meta-analysis of observational studies.MethodsRelevant articles were searched in PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane library databases through September 2017. Multivariable-adjusted relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) comparing the highest and lowest categories of Western and prudent dietary patterns were combined by using the random-effects meta-analyses.ResultsWe identified 32 eligible articles including 14 cohort and 18 case-control studies (34 Western and 35 prudent studies). The pooled analyses found that a Western dietary pattern was associated with a 14% increased risk (RR 1.14, 95% CI 1.02, 1.28), whereas a prudent dietary pattern was associated with an 18% reduced risk of breast cancer (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.75, 0.89). In addition, sub-group analyses showed that the positive association between a Western dietary pattern and breast cancer risk was significant among postmenopausal (RR 1.20, 95% CI 1.06, 1.35), but not premenopausal women (RR 1.18, 95% CI 0.99, 1.40), and significant for hormone receptor-positive tumors (RR 1.18, 95% CI 1.04, 1.33), but not receptor-negative tumors (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.83, 1.12). In contrast, the inverse association between a prudent dietary pattern and breast cancer was significant in premenopausal (RR 0.77, 95% CI 0.61, 0.98), but not postmenopausal women (RR 0.88, 95% CI 0.74, 1.03), and significant for both hormone receptor-positive and receptor-negative tumors.ConclusionsThe results of the current meta-analysis suggest a possible increased risk of breast cancer associated with a Western dietary pattern and a reduced risk with a prudent dietary pattern. Large-scale cohort studies with a high quality need to be conducted to further confirm the findings of the current meta-analysis. As dietary patterns are modifiable, these findings may provide viable strategies for breast cancer prevention through changes in dietary intake.

Puppies for the Ancestors: The many roles of Shang dogs

Current anthropological approaches to animals have noted that the contemporary Western categories of human and animal are historically particular ones, and that different ontologies can and do organize the categorical and practical relationships between beings in a variety of ways. The ritual use of dogs in ancient China illustrates this point well. At Anyang (ca. 1250–1050 BCE) dogs played a number of roles in the significant doings of both kings and commoners and occupied a unique position in the Shang web of being – patterning with humans in some practices and with other domestic animals in others. The surprising discovery that Anyang mortuary ritual dogs outnumber those found in other contexts and that they are almost exclusively juvenile individuals argues for both the development of the Shang ritual economy and at the same time its basis on more than just an equation of economic expenditure with status. Finally, an epigraphic and zooarchaeological contextualization of dog sacrifice reveals that the Chinese archaeological practice of equating sacrificial deposits with whole interments reveals only the tip of the iceberg and full understanding of animal sacrifice in the Shang and other early complex societies must consider the full range of zooarchaeological deposits and cultural practices involving animals.

Ceremony Found: Sylvia Wynter’s Hybrid Human and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

This paper engages Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the hybrid human as a prism for reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony. Wynter’s work aims at decolonizing Western categories of knowledge, positing the notion of an Autopoetic Turn/Overturn to unsettle the coloniality of Man as an epistemo-ontological category. The epistemic break Wynter envisions to catalyze this unsettling involves an understanding of the human as a hybrid species, made up of biological as well as symbolic life, bios and mythos. Such an understanding of the human is revealed in Silko’s novel, as its protagonist, Tayo, undergoes a ritual of ceremonial healing that mirrors Wynter’s Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, disentangling himself from Western modes of knowledge by scripting a new story for himself and his people. Drawing on two of Wynter’s essays that carry “Ceremony” in their titles, my paper explores the intersections between Wynter’s theory and Silko’s fiction. By showing how Silko fictionally reenvisions new futures of being hybridly human beyond the category of Man, this essay points to epistemic pathways of decoloniality not predicated on anger.

Afterword

This afterword reflects on how the Matsutake Worlds Research Group project can be considered as ontological. The multispecies ethnographic engagements presented in this special issue manifest not only the concepts inherent in the worlds of others that defy the categories of Western metaphysical thought (e.g., life forms seen as ‘events’ rather than mere things), but also the way in which non-human life forms themselves can demand that we practice another kind of thought and embrace another vision of our own selves. By succumbing to the allure of the matsutake fungus, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group has begun one of the most suggestive and original conceptual enterprises today, a practice that perhaps could be named ‘heeding headless thoughts’.

Colonial erosion: unearthing African American history in the settler colonial West

ABSTRACTIn ‘Colonial Erosion: Unearthing African American History in the Settler Colonial West’, Anthony W. Wood argues that scholars of African American studies and the American West must consider the sedimented legacies of US settler colonialism if those fields are to articulate a distinctly western narrative of African American history. Wood’s colonial erosion thesis draws on postcolonial theories to examine the history of African Americans in the West after emancipation. As a non-indigenous, community of color, black westerners fall into an uncertain space in settler colonial theory. As an ongoing structure, settler colonialism continues after the violent appropriation of Indigenous lands appears to culminate. The thesis of ‘Colonial Erosion’ is two-fold: The logic of settlement together with the logic of anti-blackness created distinctly western categories of racial exclusion. This western, colonial racism acts as an erosive force across the American West, targeting the stability and place identity of western black communities. Moreover, the society that develops in tandem with colonial erosion necessarily continues to live with the sedimented legacies of settler colonialism via its process of racial exclusion. The second point contends that this provides scholars of African Americans in the American West a method to discern a distinctly western black historical narrative. The paper is divided into two parts, a theoretical overview and argument, followed by three short case studies illustrating the potential of this new methodology.

African Philosophy and the Challenge from Hegemonic Philosophy

The position defended in this article is that African philosophy has the potential to grow into a philosophy that could eventually attain a significant place in the philosophy curriculum in Africa. This could be attained if those who are genuinely concerned with its present demotion to an inferior philosophy also actively participate in its development and dissemination. This is an admission that there might be something wrong with the way African philosophy has been received and treated in the academy even in present times. This is a difficult position whereby some indigenous people of Africa and others consider African philosophy to be somewhat inferior to Western philosophy. One might be tempted to think that since most of the people who end up studying and writing on African philosophy would have been, first and foremost, initiated into Western philosophy, the temptation might be to judge it using Western categories. The result might be a philosophy which is, by definition, a proxy of Western philosophy. Yet, as argued in the present article, authentic African philosophy ought to grow and flourish within the existential situations and terms of the indigenous people of Africa without appeal to external categories.

Being Mesolithic in Life and Death

Fifty years ago, approaches to Mesolithic identity were limited to ideas of ‘Man the Hunter’ and ‘Woman the Gatherer’, while evidence of non-normative practice was ascribed to ‘shamans’ and to ‘ritual’, and that was that. As post-processual critiques have touched Mesolithic studies, however, this has changed. In the first decade of the 21st century a strong body of work on Mesolithic identity in life, as well as death, has enabled us to think beyond modern Western categories to interpret identity in the Mesolithic. These studies have addressed the nature of personhood and relational identities, the body, and the relationship between human and other-than-human persons. Our paper reviews these changing approaches, offering a series of case studies from a range of different sites that illustrate how identity is formed and transformed through engagements with landscapes, materials, and both living and dead persons. These are then developed to advocate an assemblage approach to identity in the Mesolithic.

Sixty years of dog management in Nunavik

For centuries, Inuit have used the qimmiq (commonly known as the Canadian Inuit Dog) for transportation and hunting. Since the 1950s, these dogs have been framed by the Canadian authorities as dogs that may potentially transmit rabies and may thus be killed to prevent contagions. It is not the killing of dogs itself that has shocked the Inuit, since they have several rituals where dogs can be killed when there are threats of disease, but rather the massive aspect of the killing, which relies on Western categories, such as the distinction between sedentary and roaming dogs. A collaboration between veterinarians and Inuit people is therefore necessary to bridge the gap between incompatible views of dogs with rabies.

“Religious” as a Category: A Comparative Case Study

AbstractRightly noting that premodern non-Western cultures lacked a version of the modern Western category of “the religious,” some scholars have proposed simply abandoning it. Meanwhile, other scholars continue to wield it uncritically. In this article I propose a middle way, using premodern China as an example. Although China had no category exactly matching “the religious” in meaning and scope, it did, I argue, have an analogous category, one that functioned somewhat similarly in a partially analogous discourse that, like the Western category, formed part of an imperial project. More generally, I suggest that we do well to inquire into the extent to which the cultures we study possessed analogues to the categories and concepts in terms of which we characterize them, rather than assume either that they did or that they did not.

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies Ashley Currier (bio) and Thérèse Migraine-George (bio) Queer studies in the global North has inspired growing research on gender and sexual variance in the global South, yet it has framed issues in the language of post-industrial societies that does not address African needs. Queer African studies has emerged since the early 2000s. Scholars have not only contested the "homosexuality as un-African" myth; they have also documented indigenous same-sex sexual practices throughout the African continent and adopted Afrocentric perspectives in their works, resisting the imperialism of Eurocentric and US-based queer studies.1 However, there are tensions between queer African studies and queer studies that need to be articulated. Many publications in queer African studies remain anchored in national case studies that, while helping generate organic knowledge about African gender and sexual dissidence, can become mired in descriptions of lived experience and politics instead of theorizing African gender and sexual diversity in a continental, pan-African, or transnational-comparative context. In addition, queer African studies is institutionally and geopolitically dislocated. In this short essay, we address the question of the transnational, or rather of the "transnationals" in queer African studies, [End Page 613] which traverse the back-and-forth trajectories linking "Africa" and the "West," the local and the global. Through the concept of incommensurability, we grapple with new ways of representing queer African subjects and communities as subjects rather than objects of transnational discourses. TRANSNATIONAL (DIS)LOCATIONS: AFRICAN STUDIES AND QUEER STUDIES Poised at the shifting intersection of queer studies and African studies, queer African studies constitutes a nexus of crisscrossing and often competing discourses. In their investigation of queer modernities in Asia, Howard Chiang and Alvin Wong advocate for queer regionalism in an attempt to "recalibrate the uses of transnationalism as an unquestioned dominant framework within queer studies" (2016, 1645). Chiang and Wong's project to reconceptualize "queer regionalism as crisscrossing temporality and spatiality that emerge from within transcolonial encounters" echoes Achille Mbembe's description of the "postcolony" as "a period of embedding, a space of proliferation" that escapes historical and geopolitical confinement (2001, 242). The transnational in African studies itself still needs further development. Indeed, the US system of racialization and racism confined African studies to the African continent, whereas Africana and black studies became invested in exploring diasporic identities and formations, both real and symbolic. Divisions between African scholars and Africanist scholars (both African and Western-based) have been exacerbated by regional, linguistic, and disciplinary divisions in African studies and proliferating avatars of "Africa," "Africans," and "African-ness." A renewed conception of Africa as "people" foregrounded in the works of writers, artists, and critics has fostered kaleidoscopic views of Africa. Moreover, diasporic articulations of Africa have been propounded by critics who challenge the notion of race as seen mainly through the prism of the transatlantic slave trade (Arondekar and Patel 2016, 157; Macharia 2016, 184–85). The motivation to decenter Western categories stems in part from postcolonial feminist theorizing, which challenges the dominance of white Western feminist perspectives in transnational discussions about feminism, gender, and sexuality. Queer of color critics, anthropologists, and feminists of color engage with the [End Page 614] global south by working at the crossroads of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism and by challenging the narrow parameters of Western-based identity politics.2 For example, some feminist scholars of African descent interpreted the practice of woman-woman marriage in some African societies in markedly different ways. In a woman-woman marriage, an affluent woman paid bride-price to an unmarried woman's family and married her. The female husband claimed her wife's children as part of her lineage. In social interactions, men usually treated the female husband as a man. It is important to note that after the colonization of different African societies, the introduction of a capitalist cash economy transformed intimate relationships, marriages, and family arrangements. As a result, woman-woman marriages declined in frequency. African feminist Ifi Amadiume (1987) claims that woman-woman marriages never entailed same-sex sexual contact. In contrast, African American feminist theorist Audre Lorde contends that same-sex sex "has existed for...

Mana: A History of a Western Category. By Nicolas Meylan

Mana: A History of a Western Category. By Nicolas Meylan

A Different Buddhist Revival: The Promotion of Vinaya (jielü 戒律) in Republican China

The aim of this exploratory study is to provide an outline of the Vinaya renewal in China in the first half of the twentieth century, and to point to its meanings and effects in the context of the Buddhist revival of the Republican period. Based on a preliminary investigation of monastic codes compiled by four influential Buddhist leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, my paper draws attention to their endeavor to promote Chinese monastic discipline in practice and in discourse. I argue that, during the Republican period, Chinese Vinaya represented the benchmark for both molding religious regeneration and setting the limit for Buddhist institutional innovation. The promotion of Vinaya was a long-standing, indigenous, pattern for the revitalization of the Buddhist tradition, and it also played a fundamental role in the modern evolution of Chinese Buddhism by helping the monastic community strengthen its religious authority and political legitimation. I hope to show that a deeper analysis of this phenomenon may in the future help balance current visions on Chinese modernism, dominated by Western categories, theories and dichotomies related to modernity and secularism.

Os refugiados e as nossas categorias de moral, política, direito e democracia

This article deals in several aspects with the incompatibilities between the modern and western categories of politics and law with the demands concerning the migratory phenomenon, especially regarding the refugee problem. It analyzes, at first, the insufficiency of theses that depart only from a moral duty to the inclusion of refugees. Then, it discusses the issue of the granting of rights to immigrants, especially refugees. Finally, it presents a critique of how democracy becomes excluding by keeping the conflict in the same patterns of a class struggle. Keywords: legal sociology, migration policies, refugees.

State formation and the political economy of India: The Rudolphian paradigm

ABSTRACTLloyd and Susanne Rudolph were world renowned political scientists and iconic academic couple who devoted six decades of their lives to teaching and researching India and South Asia. The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in their numerous works. Their writings show the innovativeness and interpretative richness of methodological pluralism questioning the hegemony of western theories and categories. The Geertzian notion of “culture bound” contextualism was central to their ideas on concept formation and “situated knowledge” paradigm. The phrases like “situated knowledge,” “self as other,” “imperialism of categories,” “modernity of tradition”, “living with difference,” and “post-modern Gandhi” provided newer conceptual tools and vocabularies in their writings. Writing within the broader framework of liberal-centrism, they continued to counter generalizations and deepen our understanding about the puzzle of Indian democracy and nature of the Indian state.

Translation Section

Translation Section

An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day

An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day

Understanding cultural capital and habitus in Corporate Accounting: A postcolonial context

ABSTRACTResearch documenting professionalisation in the accounting domain is, with few exceptions, restricted to accounts in which the meaning of profession is defined and understood through membership rules of professional accounting associations. Researchers studying profession in postcolonial societies have argued that sociopolitical factors linked to elitism, the presence of British public accountants, and British-affiliated professional associations, have contributed to restricting public accounting opportunities to a privileged group. While this acknowledges the role of colonisation in the emergence of profession, what remains unclear is to what extent are occupational field self-regulations and exclusionary mechanisms present in the absence of British affiliated professional associations. This paper analyses perceptions of corporate accountants to show how profession in a postcolonial environment can be enacted with Western categories constituting cultural capital. ‘Corporate accounting’ in this paper is conceptualised as a social field in which missionary education, Western professional certifications, English language proficiency, and a Westernised image contribute to privilege and shape accounting opportunities. Such an examination may expand the profession research agenda to informal rules of closure and less familiar forms of profession.

A New Field:History of Humanities

A New Field:<i>History of Humanities</i>

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue

Reviewed by: Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue Émilie Pigeon Hogue, Michel– Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Michel Hogue’s 2015 monograph develops a masterful paradigm-shift in the field of Metis studies, whose contributors often frame their analyses from either side of the forty-ninth parallel. In contrast, Hogue presents a transnational history of a geopolitical space imbued with continuous affirmations of Metis peoples’ sovereignty and mobility, from the 1870s until the early 1900s. Hogue approaches the borderland as an analytical framework and researches the legacies and transformative effects of settler state policies in Canada and the United States on Metis people across the Great Plains. This book argues that the creation of the Canadian and American border dividing Indigenous territories required the categorizing of Indigenous nations using the construct of race. Colonial governments reinforced the identity categories they created in response to the expressions of Metis sovereignty they witnessed. In so doing, Metis and the Medicine Line offers a nuanced look at a historical nation too often conceived of as “Canadian.” It highlights the historical survival strategies of Metis people confronting two settler-state projects based on Indigenous land dispossession and implemented by violence. Relying on a remarkable breadth of archival research, a testament to the mobility of his research subjects, Hogue incorporates state and provincial archive materials of fifteen locales, transcending the often-cited national limits to histories of the Prairies/Great Plains. He crafts a historical account that followed the movements, seasonal patterns, and survival strategies of Metis men and women, whose primary mode of subsistence was in the midst of irreparable collapse. The wide-ranging body of research encompassed in this monograph assembles diverse materials such as government documents, oral histories, missionary records, military documents, tribal histories, and diaries, to name only a few examples. [End Page 207] By centering the study on the biography of Antoine Ouellette and his spouse, Angelique Bottineau, Hogue skilfully reconstructs the legal decisions increasingly imposed on Metis people as the 1800s advanced to a close. Laws and decisions made by military leaders preoccupied with clearing the land for the advance of white settlers systemically disadvantaged Metis people, transformed the borderland landscapes, and broke up Indigenous kinscapes. The study of the treaty-making policies of Canada and the United States, and their effects on Metis families, such as the Ouellettes, Azures, and Gladues, shows that both countries used Metis mobility and traditional territorial claims in a political game of dispossession. The social history methodologies deployed in this monograph sheds light on the explicit effects of state policies on the health, happiness, and lifeways of Metis people. Hogue highlights the frustrations of individuals whose histories of mobility and sovereignty did not fit into the Western categories of life, labour, and identity. The historical accounts of the lives presented throughout demonstrate the very real and lived consequences of being an outsider, or an obstacle, to statecraft. Metis conceptions of their ancestral territory did not acquiesce to the imaginary of the colonizers. Ancestral claims to territory that transcended the forty-ninth parallel were systematically denied, often by violence or economic means. Hogue’s historical analysis highlights a renewed focus on the importance of the forty-ninth parallel’s Indigenous appellation as the Medicine Line. Indeed, Metis men and women, and people of many other Indigenous nations, came to conceive of the border that divided the Canadian and American Prairies as the Medicine Line. It was a space imbued with power, and one that military forces did not cross. The choice and the ability to cross the Medicine Line was an assertion of Metis sovereignty. In the 1870s, as Hogue demonstrates, the frontier offered new economic survival strategies and opportunities to Metis families willing to use that space to their advantage. This ideological positioning is especially important in light of the timely discussions undertaken on the topic of settler colonialism found throughout Metis and the Medicine Line. The increasing reliance by nation-states on violence, removal, dispossession, economic marginalization, starvation, and race-based discrimination, proved to be most disruptive...