The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China

The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China PDF Author: Uffe Bergeton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429797850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book provides a conceptual history of the emergence of civilizational consciousness in early China. Focusing on how words are used in pre-Qín (before 221 BCE) texts to construct identities and negotiate relationships between a 'civilised self' and 'uncivilised others', it provides a re-examination of the origins and development of these ideas. By adopting a novel approach to determining when civilizational consciousness emerged in pre-Qín China, this book analyzes this question in ways that establish a fresh hermeneutical dialogue between Chinese and modern European understandings of 'civilization.' Whereas previous studies have used archaeological data to place its origin somewhere between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE, this book explores changes in word meanings in texts from the pre-Qín period to reject this view. Instead, this book dates the emergence of civilizational consciousness in China to around 2,500 years ago. In the process, new chronologies of the coining of Old Chinese terms such as ‘customs,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘the Great ones,’ are proposed, which challenge anachronistic assumptions about these terms in earlier studies. Examining important Chinese classics, such as the Analects, the Mencius and the Mòzi, as well as key historical periods and figures in the context of the concept of ‘civilization,’ this book will useful to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history.

The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China

The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China PDF Author: Uffe Bergeton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429797850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a conceptual history of the emergence of civilizational consciousness in early China. Focusing on how words are used in pre-Qín (before 221 BCE) texts to construct identities and negotiate relationships between a 'civilised self' and 'uncivilised others', it provides a re-examination of the origins and development of these ideas. By adopting a novel approach to determining when civilizational consciousness emerged in pre-Qín China, this book analyzes this question in ways that establish a fresh hermeneutical dialogue between Chinese and modern European understandings of 'civilization.' Whereas previous studies have used archaeological data to place its origin somewhere between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE, this book explores changes in word meanings in texts from the pre-Qín period to reject this view. Instead, this book dates the emergence of civilizational consciousness in China to around 2,500 years ago. In the process, new chronologies of the coining of Old Chinese terms such as ‘customs,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘the Great ones,’ are proposed, which challenge anachronistic assumptions about these terms in earlier studies. Examining important Chinese classics, such as the Analects, the Mencius and the Mòzi, as well as key historical periods and figures in the context of the concept of ‘civilization,’ this book will useful to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history.

Rethinking China's Rise

Rethinking China's Rise PDF Author: Jilin Xu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108470750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
A vision of contemporary China from the inside, Xu's essays offer a liberal reaction to the complexity of China's rise.

Here in 'China' I Dwell

Here in 'China' I Dwell PDF Author: Zhaoguang Ge
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004279997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Here in ‘China’ I Dwell is a historiographical account of the formation of Chinese historical narratives in light of outside pressures on China — the view from China’s borders. There is a special discussion of the inf luence of Japanese historians on the concept of China and its borders, including the nature of their sources, cultural and religious and more. In Ge’s comparative account, a new portrait of Chinese historical narratives, along with the views and assumptions implicit in these narrat ives, emerges in the context of East Asia, a similarly constructed concept with its own multitudes of frontiers and peoples.

Vietnam Over the Long Twentieth Century

Vietnam Over the Long Twentieth Century PDF Author: Liam C. Kelley
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819736110
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description


Origins of Moral-political Philosophy in Early China

Origins of Moral-political Philosophy in Early China PDF Author: Tao Jiang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197603475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of He

Rethinking Civilizational Analysis

Rethinking Civilizational Analysis PDF Author: Said Amir Arjomand
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781412901833
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Although the concept of 'civilization' has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to re-think it for contemporary times. Rethinking Civilizational Analysis points to an exhaustion in using 'the nation state' and 'world system' as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the 'soft power' variable of cultural factors involved in global aspects of development.

Documentation and Argument in Early China

Documentation and Argument in Early China PDF Author: Dirk Meyer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110708604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This study uncovers the traditions behind the formative Classic Shàngshū (Venerated Documents). It is the first to establish these traditions—“Shū” (Documents)—as a historically evolving practice of thought-production. By focusing on the literary form of the argument, it interprets the “Shū” as fluid text material that embodies the ever-changing cultural capital of projected conceptual communities. By showing how these communities actualised the “Shū” according to their changing visions of history and evolving group interests, the study establishes that by the Warring States period (ca. 453–221 BC) the “Shū” had become a literary genre employed by diverse groups to legitimize their own arguments. Through forms of textual performance, the “Shū” gave even peripheral communities the means to participate in political discourse by conferring their ideas with ancient authority. Analysing this dynamic environment of socio-political and philosophical change, this study speaks to the Early China field, as well as to those interested in meaning production and foundational text formation more widely.

Questioning Borders

Questioning Borders PDF Author: Robin Visser
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Ovid in China

Ovid in China PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004467289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This collection of essays, unquestionably a first of its kind, examines the challenges of translating Ovid into Chinese and the emerging role Ovid’s poetry has played in Chinese culture, including material culture and comparative studies in a wide international context.

Structures of the Earth

Structures of the Earth PDF Author: D. Jonathan Felt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176441
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the “middle kingdom”—literally the cultural and political center of the world—remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western understandings of China. This worldview was primarily constructed during the earliest imperial unification of China during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE). But the fragmentation of empire and subsequent “Age of Disunion” (220–589 CE) that followed undermined imperial orthodoxies of unity, centrality, and universality. In response, geographical writing proliferated, exploring greater spatial complexities and alternative worldviews. This book is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during that period. Early medieval geographies highlighted spatial units and structures that the Qin–Han empire had intentionally sought to obscure—including those of regional, natural, and foreign spaces. Instead, these postimperial metageographies reveal a polycentric China in a polycentric world. Sui–Tang (581–906 CE) officials reasserted the imperial model as spatial orthodoxy. But since that time these alternative frameworks have persisted in geographical thought, continuing to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.