Keywords in Chinese Culture

Editor:
Wai-yee Li and Yuri Pines

Publication date:
October 2019

Publisher:
The Chinese University Press

Abstract:
Like every major culture, Chinese has its set of keywords: pivotal terms of political, ethical, literary, and philosophical discourse. Tracing the origins, development, polysemy, and usages of keywords is one of the best ways to chart cultural and historical changes. This volume analyzes some of these keywords from different disciplinary and temporal perspectives, offering a new integrative study of their semantic richness, development trajectory, and distinct usages in Chinese culture.

The authors of the volume explore different keywords and focus on different periods and genres, ranging from philosophical and historical texts of the Warring States period (453–221 BCE) to late imperial (ca. 16th–18th centuries CE) literature and philosophy. They are guided by a similar set of questions: What elevates a mere word to the status of keyword? What sort of resonance and reverberations do we expect a keyword to have? How much does the semantic range of a keyword explain its significance? What kinds of arguments does it generate? What are the stories told to illustrate its meanings? What are political and intellectual implications of the keyword’s reevaluation? What does it mean to translate a keyword and map its meaning against other languages?

Throughout Chinese history, new ideas and new approaches often mean reinterpreting important words; rupture, continuities, and inflection points are inseparable from the linguistic history of specific terms. The premise of this book is that taking the long view and encompassing different disciplines yield new insights and unexpected connections. The authors, who come from the fields of history, philosophy, and literature, explore keywords in different genres and illuminate their multiple dimensions in various contexts. Moreover, despite their different temporal focus, they take into consideration the development of selected keywords from the Warring States to the late imperial period, sometimes adding excurses that extend to contemporary usage.

Table of Contents:

The Making of Keywords

1 How to Name or Not to Name: That Is the Question in Early Chinese Philosophy /
Carine Defoort

2 Chinese he 和 in Many Keys, Harmonized in Europe /
Joachim Gentz

3 From “Scribe” to “History”: The Keyword shi 史 /Stephen Durrant

Socio-political Keywords

4 What’s in a Slogan? The Political Rationale and the Economic Debates behind “Enrich the State” (fuguo 富國) in Early China /
Romain Graziani

5 “To Die for the Sanctity of the Name”: Name (ming 名) as Prime Mover of Political Action in Early China /
Yuri Pines

Virtue Keywords

6 Embodied Virtue: How Was Loyalty Edited and Performed in Late Imperial China? /
Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu

7 Filial Piety as an Emotion in Late Imperial China /
Maram Epstein

Keywords of the Self

8 Before the Emergence of Desire /
Andrew Plaks

9 Looking for the True Self /
Wai-yee Li

Afterword
Philological Reflections on Chinese Conceptual History: Introducing Thesaurus Linguae Sericae /
Christoph Harbsmeier
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