Universalist Pretensions Research Articles

Heritage Foodways as Matrix for Cultural Resurgence: Evidence from Rural Peru (Russian Translation)

This article explores critical directions in the study of cultural heritage and, in particular, food heritage research. Its goal is to deliver insight into local perspectives produced outside mainstream heritage organizations. Strategies implemented jointly by peasant farmers of rural Peru and non-governmental organizations committed to promoting cultural resurgence show how food discloses the symbiotic relation between nature and culture in these indigenous worlds, and allows for claims grounded in social, political, and economic imaginaries. The initiatives described in this article develop within transnational networks of partners and interlocutors but outside of universalist pretensions. They constitute food heritage that differs from that of global cultural actors such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the United Nations by addressing only the needs of local communities and not complying with mechanisms that bring prestige and revenues to states and powerful cultural entrepreneurs. Globally nurtured, but locally implemented, these locally based initiatives seek out and take advantage of opportunities in strategic, proactive fashions.

Democracy After Virtueand the Circumstances of Modern Politics

<i>Democracy After Virtue</i>and the Circumstances of Modern Politics

Religionis et societatis, la mirada arcaica de la razon

In these times of generalized neoliberalism that we are living, as totalitarian gazes are falling, it seems relevant to discuss the social role of religion from the critical-social perspective of modernity and especially, from the humanism of the future. Of course, I will drastically limit the scope this analysis being the topic so broad and complex. Thus, with rigorous humility, I will look at only one basic aspect of Max Weber’s religious thought, framing it and contrasting it with the critical vision of the Mesoamerican tradition. Max Weber argued that all religions form part of a historicaluniversal process whose evolution can be explained as driven by an inner logic constructed by the relentless urge toward the rationalization of ideas and life, especially in the case of salvation religions. This line of thought, with its universalist pretensions, leads us to question the validity of deterministic schemata that should be limited to the Western world and to European concerns -given their reductionism not only when compared to religious visions such as Kierkegaard’s with respect to Christianity (for him rationalism was not enough)- but also inasmuch as they leave out polytheistic projects and syncretic combinations such as the traditional conceptions of colonized peoples (where religions are monotheistic in name only, not having followed the steps of the Weberian protocol), or the ancient civilizational horizons such as China, India or Mesoamerica, whose evolution does not necessarily lead to the sort of final-stage rationality the German thinker had in mind

THE TRIANGLE OF THE BYZANTINE-BULGARIAN-RUSSIAN CONFLICT IN THE WESTERN BLACK SEA REGION OF THE 10TH CENTURY IN THE INTERPRETATION BY MARIN DRINOV

The article deals with M. Drinov’s perception and evaluation of the enemies of Bulgaria in the Russo-Byzantine-Bulgarian confrontation of the tenth century. Particular attention is paid to the impact of Drinov’s personal socio-political views on his interpretation of the Byzantine-Bulgarian war of 966–972 and Prince Sviatoslav’s struggle for supremacy in the Balkans. The «anti-Byzantine position» of Drinov, though a common knowledge in historiography, remains almost without confirmation in his depiction of the Russo-Byzantine-Bulgarian conflict of 966–971. M. Drinov refrains from negative characterizations of Greeks, considering the conquest of Bulgaria by the Rus’ worse than Byzantine control. M. Drinov views Byzantines as a «lesser evil» for Bulgarians than the Rus’. This view is confirmed by the cited examples of the Rus’ army’s atrocities in Bulgaria, such as the execution of over three hundred boyars and twenty thousand civilian population. M. Drinov sympathizes with the Orthodox Emperors more than with the pagan Rus’ Prince; at least the actions of the Byzantines in the Bulgarian lands are not depicted negatively, although it is unlikely that they refrained from pillage. Turning the eastern areas of the Bulgarian state into a Byzantine province made them closer to the powerful Empire and was objectively a progressive development. The rule of the familiar Byzantine Empire, with its orderly system of government and shared Orthodox faith, appeared to M. Drinov a better outcome for Bulgarians. It was to assure a further development of Bulgarian society by following the lead of the brilliant Byzantine civilization. The possible submission to the rule of the cruel pagan Rus’ Prince Sviatoslav, on the other hand, would have thrown Bulgarians back into the recent barbarity, which they had managed to escape thanks to the Empire. Analyzing the context of Drinov’s study thus shows that, according to the scholar, Bulgarians saw in Byzantium their near future and were determined to follow the Byzantine example in developing their statehood. Sviatoslav’s Rus’, on the other hand, presented to them an image of their recent barbaric past to which they by no means wanted to return. In his study “Southern Slavs and Byzantium in the Tenth Century” M. Drinov came very near to the key idea in the conception of the Byzantine Commonwealth, formulated almost a hundred years later by D. Obolensky. This conception underscored the attractiveness of the Byzantine model for the ruling elites of the peoples that entered the imperial orbit. The elites’ wish to copy the Byzantine civilization paradoxically went hand in hand with hostility towards the Empire’s Universalist pretensions and with a desire to distance them from the Empire and to affirm their own independence. At the same time, when it was necessary to choose between Byzantium and a more backward semi-barbaric nation, the choice was unequivocally in favor of the Empire.

Time to break up with the international community? Rhetoric and realities of a political myth in Cambodia

AbstractThe international community is as ubiquitous as it is elusive and its universalist pretensions remain unchallenged in political and academic discourse. In response, this article turns to Bottici's work on political myths. Against the notion of myths as falsehoods, we argue that they create their own sphere of shared social and political reality. The analysis centres on the case of Cambodia, a country that served as an experiment of liberal interventionism. It draws on archival and field research on two consecutive international interventions, a review of public statements by international actors, and interviews with Cambodian actors and activist. We argue that to understand the ideas actors use to orient themselves as they press for change, it is necessary to consider how decades of engagement with the myth have shaped the political imaginary. Our empirical analysis points to three different phases in the use of the myth: Its production during UNTAC, the reinforcement of its narratives through subsequent legal, aid and development interventions, and finally its contemporary use in a post-liberal context. We observe that Cambodian actors increasingly engage the myth to question the terms of transnational cooperation for democracy. Our work has implications for assessments of the legacies of liberal peacebuilding.

The Alien as a Subject of Bernhard Waldenfels’ Responsive Phenomenology

This article outlines the basic traits of a responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels by focusing on the issue of the Alien. For the reason that we are commonly confronted with the Alien (or the Foreign) in everyday life, it is of crucial importance for us to understand and describe such experience without neglecting its special features. This is shown concerning the phenomenological issues of intentionality, by emphasizing the dimension of pathos. More precisely, pathos describes such a kind of affection which starts “somewhere” and cannot be reduced to previous horizons. The Alienness is characterized as a hyperphenomenon which we experience in a paradoxical way only. In this respect, all our efforts to grasp the Alien transform into universalist pretensions that worsen the intercultural communication. To defend the modern politics from overwhelming eurocentrism, Waldenfels offers a method of a responsive epoche: the latter unveils the contingency of each order and the partiality of every universal claim. Moreover, this article covers the role of responsivity while interacting with the Alien, as well as the possible connections in the ethical perspective. In order to deepen the understanding of responsivity and its functioning, the author outlines the distinction between an answer as a merely typical reaction and a response as a part of creative discourse. All in all, the responsive phenomenology is believed to ground upon such concepts and principles which, if methodically developed, will enable more a sufficient and accurate international dialogue, as well as deepen the self-awareness. The main purposes of such phenomenology of the Alien are to demonstrate the “preceding” of the outer Demand and to introduce a special logic of responding that provides this dialogue with the peculiar dynamism.Article received 08.08.2019

Heritage Foodways as Matrix for Cultural Resurgence: Evidence from Rural Peru

Abstract:This article explores critical directions in the study of cultural heritage and, in particular, food heritage research. Its goal is to deliver insight into local perspectives produced outside mainstream heritage organizations. Strategies implemented jointly by peasant farmers of rural Peru and non-governmental organizations committed to promoting cultural resurgence show how food discloses the symbiotic relation between nature and culture in these indigenous worlds, and allows for claims grounded in social, political, and economic imaginaries. The initiatives described in this article develop within transnational networks of partners and interlocutors but outside of universalist pretensions. They constitute food heritage that differs from that of global cultural actors such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the United Nations by addressing only the needs of local communities and not complying with mechanisms that bring prestige and revenues to states and powerful cultural entrepreneurs. Globally nurtured, but locally implemented, these locally based initiatives seek out and take advantage of opportunities in strategic, proactive fashions.

E Pluribus Unum? A Divisible College?: Reflections on the International Legal Profession

Anthea Roberts’ ambitious monograph, Is International Law International?, calls on international lawyers to suspend our universalist pretensions and reflect from the perspective of different communities of international lawyers, conceived instead as a ‘divisible college’. Her innovative and contemporary empirical work – on the educational and discursive practices across the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – represents nothing less than a first stab at a sociology of the international legal profession. In doing so, Roberts has adopted a consciously descriptive approach, with all of the consequences entailed thereby. Moreover, her privileging of certain methods and the focus on the five veto-wielding powers has the potential to reproduce the very power imbalances that she seeks to illuminate and possibly to challenge. Finally, an important counterpoint to the divisibility of the international legal profession is that, however diverse we may be, we nevertheless remain united by certain other tenets – in particular, our shared understanding of what concepts and ideas find purchase on the international plane and our engagement with, commitment to, or resistance to these concepts and ideas. The ties that bind our epistemic community might be obscured by undue emphasis on our profession as a divisible college.

Christian Ethics, Actors, and Diplomacy

While theme of this issue of International Journal is future of diplomacy, indicating new trends and instantiation of new forms, actors, and issues, relationship between Christianity and is anything but new. Peeling back secularist assumptions of international politics demonstrates degree to which religious and in particular Christian actors, ignored for much of 20th century, have always been and continue to be part and parcel of diplomatic practice/ Nevertheless, it is still extremely important to ask what types of religious diplomatic practices are occurring currently as opposed to past.Christianity's legacy forms a prominent, though relatively unexamined, component of history of western diplomacy. It also has a historically complicated relationship with state sovereignty, foundational international institution that makes modern possible. Christian guidelines have long helped to construct foundation for western understandings of goals to be achieved in diplomatic practice, including legitimate use of violence and forms of international intervention. Augustinian formulations shaped modern definitions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, laws of war and laws in war, respectively. Christian ethical debates, divisions, and actions shaped creation of nation-state system and ideas of United States's founding fathers, as well as supranational and international forms of governance.2 In other words, Christian debates about nature of sovereignty versus universalist projects address essence of traditional diplomacy: question of how - or insideoutside problem of world politics - is mediated.3Many features of this complicated relationship between Christianity and are important to analyze, but in this article I examine role of Christian actors in diplomatic struggles over meaning of territoriality, representation, and governance during two periods: 1930s and 1940s (from end of interwar years to just after World War II) and postCold War era - 1990s to present. In each case, I focus on James Der Derian's understanding of as mediating to ask what types of estrangement are mediated by Christian ethics and actors.4 I argue, first, that universalist pretensions are a recurring feature of Christian diplomatic interventions, and second, that these pretensions produce ethical tensions over specifically Christian and global character of representation and governance.I first look at way in which Christian attempts to navigate temporal and spiritual played out in interwar ethics and promoted a secularized form of universalism, even while they justified use of force by sovereign states. This form of universalism justified consolidation of global governance from League of Nations to United Nations, but it also privileged United States's role in UN's leadership. As articulated by John Foster Dulles in US, post- World War II great power universalism also owed much to, although it also differed from, dual morality justification for states' use of force legitimized by Rienhold Niebuhr.These universalist pretensions regarding territoriality and governance, along with statist justifications for use of force, shaped diplomatic practice in the west throughout Cold War. They also continue to exist, still frequently in tension, in post-Cold War era. Examining humanitarian diplomacy in post-Cold War era (see also Ole Jacob Sending's article in this issue) offers an opportunity to assess content of Christian ethical struggles over representation within universalist pretensions of global international organization. More specifically, some Christian humanitarians today argue that universal rights to religious freedom allow and even require proselytizing. This type of faith-based participation in tasks of mediating also is not new, as it has important antecedents in successive periods of Christian missionizing. …

East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie

East as True WestRedeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie Greg Castillo (bio) Depicting the postwar world as sundered and under siege, Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech of March 1946 catapulted the phrase “Iron Curtain” into public discourse and U.S. foreign policy. Churchill warned of a West jeopardized by communist infiltrators—a far cry from the eastern menace posed by the Golden Horde of yore. The literary heritage of former Oriental perils lived on, however, in the “Sinews of Peace” address, as György Péteri has observed. Invoking images far more visceral than those of mere doctrinal difference, Churchill characterized communist “fifth columns” as a barbarian invasion’s “challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Churchill fashioned this vivid mental map of a divided Europe to compel Americans to act. His message of impending catastrophe lent impetus to the creation of the U.S. Marshall Plan, which in the words of the economic historian Carlo Spango “can be regarded as the founding act of the postwar Western world” (emphasis in original).1 The trope of Bolshevist barbarism, which came to permeate U.S. Cold War nationalism, found its complement in anti-American discourses shared among the people’s republics, a coalition forged at the initial Cominform conference of September 1947. According to Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo member charged with orchestrating Cominform’s debut, international alliances fell into two factions: America’s imperialist, anti-democratic camp; and the Soviet democratic, anti-fascist camp, which embodied the “aspirations of progressive mankind.” Zhdanov’s “two camps” thesis reversed the polarities of Churchill’s schema of modern barbarism, implying that continuities with fascism implicated the United States—and, by extension, Marshall Plan Europe—in the brutal legacies of Hitler and Mussolini. Soviet fulmination [End Page 747] against American “cultural barbarism” was conveyed to divided Germany by Aleksandr Dymshits, the Red Army officer in charge of cultural affairs in the eastern sector. His denunciation of the United States for contaminating German arts and letters found a sympathetic local audience.2 West European intellectuals and opinion leaders typically regarded America as characterized by “a primitive, vulgar, trashy Massenkultur, which was in effect an Unkultur, whose importation into postwar Europe had to be resisted,” as the historian Volker Berghahn notes.3 The Marshall Plan administrator Paul G. Hoffman believed that dispelling “the old stereotype of the Yank as a cross between a cinematic gangster and an uncultivated bumpkin” was crucial in the struggle for American influence.4 Antithetical, yet complementary, notions of a post-war threat to civilization—Churchill’s warning of a communist assault on Christendom and the Party’s denigration of the Marshall Plan as a conveyor belt for cultural degradation—illustrate what Péteri has called the “systemic relativism” of Cold War discourses, which mobilized common concepts yet defined them in ways that buttressed divergent epistemes.5 Parallel but incommensurable models of barbarian invasion and cultural resistance were indispensable to both camps, grounding their respective identities in an adversarial relationship with a hemispheric “other.” Within the disciplines of architecture and industrial design—the subjects of this essay—Socialist Realism and International-style modernism defined the East/West epistemological divide. The cultural geographies theorized by these opposing design movements, however, were far more complex than the cartography of their practices. U.S. cultural propaganda in Marshall Plan Europe emphasized New World experiments in modernism as the antithesis of “totalitarian” art and architecture—a contention that lumped Soviet and Nazi cultural production in a single catch-all category while conveniently ignoring the fact that neo-traditional design was alive and well in America’s architecturally pluralist society. Even more entangled was the representational [End Page 748] logic of Soviet Socialist Realism, glossed as a creative method “socialist in content and national in form.” As the aesthetic associated with the high culture of “high Stalinism,” Socialist Realism emerged during the USSR’s “Great Retreat” of the mid-1930s and came to the postwar people’s republics through a Party-choreographed cultural revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Abandoning the universalist pretensions of a modernist avant-garde, Socialist Realists proposed a novel form of cultural internationalism clad in recycled and reprocessed...

THE LIMITS OF TRAVEL: YOKO TAWADA'S FICTIONAL TRAVELOGUES

ABSTRACTThe article argues that many of Yoko Tawada's writings are best understood as forms of travel writing. An analysis of Talisman, ‘Wo Europa anfängt’, and Überseezungen demonstrates how they explore diverse experiences of mobility, from migration, to colonial expansion, to more cosmopolitan forms of leisure travel and tourism. In their emphasis on various forms of travel, Tawada's writings avoid the careless celebration of dislocation and instead display ambivalence towards the effects of displacement. They highlight how travel can disrupt the universalist pretensions of one's own point of view and render meaningless identities based on notions of nation or territory. However, they also question whether travel, especially in its more contemporary forms, can offer the sort of radical change of environment that might facilitate such a disturbance of subjectivity. Talisman and ‘Wo Europa anfängt’ both show how travel may in fact reinforce notions of essential cultural identities, while Überseezungen illustrates how the increasing uniformity of modern‐day travel can make movement between locations less distinct, thus offering no alternatives of perspective or identification. These three works thus cast doubt on the subversive potential of displacement that is often posited by cultural studies.

Demagoguery and Democratic Deliberation: The Search for Rules of Discursive Engagement

Demagoguery and Democratic Deliberation:The Search for Rules of Discursive Engagement J. Michael Hogan (bio) and Dave Tell (bio) "For democracy to work," as Patricia Roberts-Miller writes, people "have to talk," and "the ability of the general public to make appropriate decisions depends to a large degree on the quality of public discourse." If democratic deliberation is to produce sound collective judgments, people must look beyond their own "self-interest and limited points of view" and join with others in determining the "general interest" or the "common good." Moreover, there must be "rules" to guide our deliberations, lest they degenerate into name-calling, confrontation, or even coercion and violence. Roberts-Miller is right: for democratic deliberation to work, we must have "rules" for what constitutes "good public discourse."1 Yet there is a dilemma. Too often, the "rules" of public deliberation have "acted (in consequence, if not intention) to exclude already marginalized groups," as Roberts-Miller observes. Indeed, such rules have tended to dismiss, a priori, "the very kind of rhetoric most likely to effect social change by or on behalf of the oppressed": the rhetoric of "populist" social movements. In her view, this is because the rules for "good public discourse" have, in the past, upheld an "objective" ideal, privileging unemotional, materialist, and quantifiable discourse. Quoting Linda Alcoff, Roberts-Miller worries about the "tyranny" of a "subject-less, value-less" conception of objectivity, for such an ideal has the "effect of authorizing those scientific voices that have universalist pretensions and disauthorizing personalized voices that argue with emotion, passion, and open political commitment."2 Hence the dilemma. On the one hand, we need rules of discursive engagement if our deliberations are to be civil and productive. On the other hand, such rules may exclude those voices already marginalized or silenced. Roberts-Miller has raised some important questions, and we applaud her commitment to reinvigorating our deliberative democracy. Yet she largely ignores a whole tradition of scholarship that has long grappled with the dilemma between rules and inclusion, and her attempt to resurrect "demagoguery" as the key term of a new critical rhetoric does not really resolve that dilemma. Contrary to Roberts-Miller's assertion, interest in "demagoguery" [End Page 479] has never "lapsed" in rhetorical studies, although the term—for good reason—has fallen into disfavor. Students of American public address have always been concerned with the basic question she raises: how do we draw the line between responsible and irresponsible (or "demagogic") discourse in a democratic society? And in their efforts to accommodate dissent, such scholars already have "bent the rules" about as far as they can without condoning coercion or violence. We begin by reviewing how, since at least the 1960s, students of public address have addressed the dilemma Roberts-Miller identifies: how do we uphold rules for "good public discourse" without "condemning all activist rhetoric?"3 Over the years, as we shall see, rhetorical scholars have gone to great lengths to legitimize "activist" discourse, even to the point of rationalizing obscenity and threats as rhetorical tactics. In recent years, the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way, as more scholars have become concerned with the breakdown of democratic deliberation in America. Yet even as they search for new rules of discursive engagement, scholars have remained sensitive to the need for inclusion. Resurrecting demagoguery might be useful in the effort to fashion a new critical rhetoric, as Roberts-Miller suggests. But unless we dismantle old stereotypes and distinguish carefully between rhetorical and political definitions of the term, "demagogue" will remain "more of an epithet than an analytical term"—a label that we use simply to "discredit those who offend our rhetorical or ideological sensibilities."4 The Social Movement Dilemma In communication studies, scholars have grappled with Roberts-Miller's "dilemma" since at least the 1960s, when public address scholars first took an interest in the rhetoric of social movements. In Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, Edwin Black identified "the movement study" as one of three "distinct approaches to the practice of rhetorical criticism," and he praised Leland Griffin's pioneering work on the rhetoric of social movements for opening "a new and exciting prospect...

Demystifying democratisation: the global constitution of (neo)liberal polities in Africa

The contest to define ‘democracy’ has become a fundamental concern of global politics. As Noam Chomsky has argued, the guardians of world order have sought to establish democracy in one sense of the term, while blocking it in others. The article interrogates the theoretical and material underpinnings of the great-power-defined agenda of democratisation. It argues that the democratisation project seeks to constitute (neo)liberal polities with a procedural notion of democracy, through coveted transformations in three domains: the minimal ‘neutral’ state, the liberal public sphere or ‘civil society’, and the liberal ‘self’. The impetus to constitute African social relations in its own particular image may be attributable to liberalism's universalist pretensions. But ideas have materiality. Liberal democracy qua liberalism maintains a strong historical association with the birth and evolution of the modern capitalist world. The article contends that the democratisation project endeavours to reproduce within Africa (and elsewhere) the patterns of transformation that characterised the transition to capitalist modernity in north-west Europe.

Philosophical Multiculturalism?

Philosophy may have universalist pretensions; at least it may if its goal is still truth (absolute); goodness (for all) and beauty (as surviving a history-transcending test of time). No doubt such ideals are subject to accusations of Platonism, logocentrism and much else, though it is hard to see what philosophy is without least a taint of such ideals. An accusation these ideals is not properly subject to is ‘Eurocentrism’. Whatever the Eurocentric faults of individual philosophers, the fault lies in the practice, not in the ideal. No doubt there have been faults. At times there has been culpable ignorance of other traditions; at times shouting down of other voices (and this is not confined to other voices from non-Western cultures). One response to such faults is muticulturalism; a subject recently much in the news. Are we multiculturalists? Has multiculturalism failed? What is multiculturalism? These questions increasingly and not before time occupy public discussion; unfortunately generating in the answers given much heat and much confusion.Whatever multiculturalism is, given its Herderian roots, it is at the very least a sense that other cultures, all other cultures, should receive recognition and should be heard. Recognition of others as others, in their otherness, is at the heart of it. And this is, in a sense, a universalist ideal. But it is one which may sit ill with the universalism of philosophy. If recognition is our ideal, what place in our activity is there for the search for truth, which has been defined as culture blind and culture transcendent?

Le Repli du Religieux: Les missionnaires jésuites du 17esiècle entre la théologie chrétienne et une éthique païenne

Le 7 mai 1610, un missionnaire jésuite révolté, Gonçalo Fernandes, écrivit de lamission de Madurai au coeur du pays tamoul à Nicolau Pimenta, Père visiteur de laprovince indienne, pour dénoncer son jeune collatéral, Roberto Nobili, accusé d'avoirdangereusement franchi le seuil du « paganisme » hindou :Sa manière [était] de laisser croire qu'il y a entre nous une certaine ou grandedifférence de religion. Il a paru convenir que les néophytes et les convertis semettent du santal sur le front […]. Le Père [Nobili] lui-même venait d'utiliser dusantal de la même manière. […] Le Père bénit le santal le dimanche avant de commencerla messe et ensuite il est distribué parce que le Père ne dit pas la messe etles fidèles n'y assistent guère sans s'être d'abord lavés et mis du santal.

Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (review)

430 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Dali L. Young is an assistantprofessor ofpolitical science and the author o/Calamity and Reform in China (Stanford University Press, 1996.) mi James L. Hevia. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of1793. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. xv, 292 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0-8223-1625-0. Paperback $15.95, isbn 0-8223-1637-4. There has been much renewed interest in the historical significance of the 1793 Macartney mission to Qing China in both the West and China. For example, Joanna Waley-Cohen, in her recent article on Chinese reactions to Western technology in the late eighteenth century ("China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century," American Historical Review 98, no. 5 [1993]: 1525-1544), has revised earlier assessments of Qing dynasty blindness to world developments in the eighteendi century and has shown how these erroneous assessments grew out ofWestern technological superiority after the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, which was then read back into the Macartney mission to China by later historians and diplomats. This misassessment in Western attitudes toward China, Waley-Cohen argues, was also due in part to the Qing court's need under the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) to reassert the "public Chinese attitude of superiority toward foreigners" in the factionalized domestic politics of1793 at the same time that it avidly employed Jesuit experts in the arts ofwarfare for its late eighteenth-century military campaigns against rebels within the empire. Hevia's book continues this revisionist trend by reevaluating the Macartney mission in light ofQing foreign relations and die development ofmodern European diplomacy. Cherishing Men From Afar explores Manchu and British imperial formations in the late eighteenth century as the cultural productions of two expansive imperialisms with equally universalist pretensions. Their different modes ofpolitical practice based on competing sets ofhierarchical relationships and political claims betray, according to Hevia, substantially different conceptual frameworks and signifying practices. Consequently, the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong court© 1996 by University was not caught up in a simple conflict between a "traditionalist" Chinese tribute ofHawai'i Presssystem and a "modern" European diplomacy whose driving force was an entrenched "culturalism" in the traditional Chinese political world. Instead, Hevia suggests that the Chinese "tribute system" model used by John K. Fairbank and Reviews 431 many others since has overdetermined the confrontation by essentializing it as an inevitable confrontation between tradition (China) and modernity (the West), thereby missing the specific historical challenges that a land-based Qing Imperium and a seafaring British empire each faced when they encountered each other for the first time in 1793. According to Hevia, the two modes of Qing and British diplomacy must each be unraveled in order to understand how the Qing framework for imperial ceremonies ofguest ritual and imperial audience and the British notion ofinternational relations interacted. In the process, we learn how European discourse on diplomacy between equal states was itselfa historical artifact ofEuropean global expansion whose naturalizing discourse of sovereign equality in effect legitimated discursive forms ofsymbolic violence (Western superiority / Qing arrogance) in 1793 before diplomacy was transformed into open warfare (free trade / Opium War) in 1839—an argument that of course derives from Edward Said's Orientalism but is now redeployed in Sino-Western relations. We also see how the Manchu cosmopolitical order for the production and negotiation ofimperial power was based on specific ritual and ceremonial procedures that informed how Qing officials would handle the requests of an emissary ofthe British empire. The strength of Hevia's account lies in its clear delineation ofdie basis for Manchu rulership in the Qing Imperium. In a realm filled with heterogeneous Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and other ethnic lords, the Manchu rulers successfully used lordship as the basis for organizing interdomainal relations and incorporated such lords under the Qing emperor's claims to political preeminence. Ritual and its attendant forms ofceremonial behavior (i.e., "disposition ofbodies" via the kowtow, etc.) were the cosmologica! forms ofpolitical interaction between lords that revealed their inclusion under the Qing and the negotiated forms of that inclusion. Accordingly, Hevia makes it clear how the Macartney embassy to China was perceived by the...

&lt;i&gt;Norms and the State in China&lt;/i&gt; (review)

434 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 knowledge production, becomes historically specific rather than subsumed under die universalist pretensions of only one of the imperialisms. Benjamin A. Elman University of California at Los Angeles Ben Elman is a professor ofhistory specializing in late imperial Chinese intellectual and cultural historyfrom 1400 to 1900. Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, editors. Norms and the State in China. Leiden, New York, and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1993. xxvi, 416 pp. Hardcover $171.00, isbn 90-04-09665-5. Like many anthologies these days, this book is a conference volume with a theme. The theme, as the tide indicates, concerns the relationship between the social norms and the state in China past and present. The book grew out of a conference on "Norms and Their Popularization in Chinese Culture," held in in Leiden in July 1991, and the end result is a total of nineteen essays preceded by an introduction and a preface. Other than the one article on ancient cosmology, which appears by itself for the purpose of "setting the stage," the other eighteen pieces are evenly distributed under three headings: "Norms and Popularization in Premodern China," "Traditional Norms and Contemporary Society," and "Norms and Their Propagation in Mainland China." As the contributors vary considerably in their academic training and orientation, and as the topics cover a large area of research interests, the body ofknowledge assembled in diese tiiree groups of papers reflects different outlooks and approaches. The first group, "Norms and Popularization in Premodern China," presented in the context of cultural history, stays closest to the original design of the conference , with a particular focus on the ways in which political and social norms were manifested. Several of the six authors here (Ubelhor, Clunas, Idema, Zürcher, Zurndorfer, and Wagner) are seasoned hands in diis field and write about topics from their ongoing research. Their command of source materials and the quality of their discussion of die questions at issue—community compacts, consumption y niversi y practiCes, Ming drama, early Chinese Christianity, Ming and Qing women, and Taiping ideology—are testimony to their experience and scholarship. This is not to say, however, that new versions of old work are the only things presented here. Clunas' study on Ming consumption law, Zurcher's analysis of a ofHawai'i Press Reviews 435 Chinese Christian convert in the late Ming, and Zurndorfer's introduction to the eighteenth-century Chinese woman philologist Wang Chao-yuan are all quite fresh and illuminating. One regret is the unusual brevityof these essays; this shortchanges considerably the possibility ofdisplaying the true richness ofthese studies. (The seemingly random length ofthe papers, which range from ten to forty-one pages, is a problem throughout the volume, but diis first section suffers most from brevity, with three laconic pieces each no more than eleven pages long, notes and references included.) Next, considering die title of the book and the heading for this first section, the question ofhow the notion of "norm" is to be defined in the context of Chinese history is not resolved. In the studies offered here, state institutions and Confucian values seem to be vaguely accepted as the main foundation ofsocial and cultural norms during the last five centuries. This is an assumption that readers are allowed to walk away with without any clarification. Given the quality of the essays and the recognized stature of the autiiors, one cannot but feel unsatisfied . The end result would have been livelier and more stimulating if there had been some sort ofvigorous intellectual exchange on the theoretical and empirical aspects ofthe major theme. The offerings do whet one's appetite nonetiieless, however, and they are individually ifnot necessarily collectively rewarding. The next group ofpapers, "Traditional Norms and Contemporary Society," emphasizes social and cultural transformation in postwar Taiwan. Out of the six pieces included here, four focus on changes and developments in the intellectual, social, linguistic, and folklore arenas. One ofthe other two essays, Bordsgaard's study of Confucianism on the mainland, is included here alongside Huang's work on Confucianism in Taiwan presumably for comparison. The remaining essay, Chou's elaboration of the tradition of respect for the...

How Wide the Circle of the "We"? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR iN THE HUMAN MALE. SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN FEMALE.1 The titles imply an inquiry species-wide in scope. The authors were indeed professional zoologists. But the were based on interviews with a highly particular zoological sample: men and women in mid-twentieth-century North America, overwhelmingly the cultural products of the United States. The deflation of the universalist pretensions of these studies began almost immediately upon publication of the first of the two volumes in 1948.2 It was the destiny of the Kinsey Reports to become artifacts in an animated and enduring discourse not about humankind but about a particular society and its culture. Librarians were obliged to catalogue them in the science section; at home, however, individuals found good reasons to shelve these fascinating tomes next to David Riesman's book The Lonely Crowd, Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma, and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land. What started out as zoology ended up as American Studies. Dr. Kinsey and his staff shared with a multitude of their American contemporaries a destiny against which intellectuals of our own time struggle conspicuously. This destiny is to have confused the local with the universal: to have made claims about or claims on behalf of all humankind for which the salient referent was later said to be but a fragment of that elusive whole. In the name of the rights and needs of the entire species, the United States tried to advance through war and diplomacy what we are now told were the historically particular interests of the North Atlantic bourgeoisie. In the name of the epistemological unity of all humankind, philosophers vindicated a scientific practice generated and sustained by what may have been the peculiar preoccupations of European and American

Las humanidades frente al dominio de la razón tecnológica y a la crisis de los grandes relatos

Hoy parece incontestable que la modernización en América Latina aspira a renovar sus ímpetus, y no hay quien reúna suficiente fuerza para oponerle proyectos colectivos con real capacidad de convocación. Una nueva cruzada secularizadora impone un código de pretensiones universalistas. Racionalidad instrumental puesta al día, privatización acelerada, apertura de los mercados y una carrera contra el tiempo por modernizar lo modernizable y administrar lo no modernizable con sus manifestaciones más vistosas.

Singing in Another Key: Surrealism through a Feminist Eye

How to deal, in words, with what is most serious, except with metaphors? What we write must, we persist in thinking, be related to what we are and mean and care about outside the lecture halls, and those relations are frequently metaphoric in nature. Beginning, then, with metaphors and popular description, with a particular movement, and with the form of dialogue called metalogue, this presentation moves implicitly toward a broader conversation into which other figures are invited, from the worlds of legend, of literature, and of literary meetings. Scholars, says George Kennan, in order to work constructively toward hopeful ends, need concepts as guides, these concepts having as their principal quality a modesty that is devoid of utopian and universalist pretensions: