Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West

Abstract

Even as globalization has exposed the Eurocentric character of the academic theories used to understand the world, most scholarship continues to rely on the same parochial vocabulary it critiques. Against those who insist our thinking cannot escape the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity, this book shows how methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory. Examining a Chinese conversation over “Western Learning” from the 1860s to the 1920s, the book argues that we might follow these Chinese thinkers in viewing foreign knowledge as a theoretical resource—as a body of knowledge that formulates methods of argument, goals of inquiry, and criteria of evidence that may be generalizable to other places and times. The call of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to bianfa—literally “change the institutions” of Chinese society and politics in order to produce new kinds of Western knowledge—was simultaneously also a call to “change the referents” those institutions sought to emulate, and from which participants might draw their self-understanding. They show that the institutional and cultural contexts supporting the production of knowledge are not prefigured givens that constrain cross-cultural understanding but dynamic platforms for learning that are tractable to concerted efforts over time to transform them. These thinkers point us beyond acknowledgment of cultural difference toward reform of the social, institutional, and disciplinary spaces in which the production of knowledge takes place.