汉学跨文化研究外文文献翻译

汉学跨文化研究外文翻译

英文

Sinology: Chinese Intellectual History and Transcultural Studies

Pablo Blitstein, Ruprecht Heidelberg

The guest editors of this journal issue have kindly asked me to provide a short overview of the relation between transcultural studies and Chinese intellectual history in Euro-American academia. There was a certain risk in accepting this request, as it might be either too small or too big a task. It would be too small if I narrowed it down to a review of explicit references to transcultural studies within Chinese intellectual history; but it would be too big if I extended it to a study of all the questions, approaches, and methods that the two fields have developed in the last few decades. To overcome these difficulties, I decided to focus on the legacy of one shared methodological point: the critique of so-called “methodological nationalism,” that is, of the assumption (explicit or not) that the nation is the ultimate framework of research.1 This critique has become a constitutive principle of transcultural studies, while it came to represent only a particular approach within Chinese intellectual history. Still, the two fields have developed a shared agenda in this regard. This essay limits itself to pointing out the presence of this critique in both fields—which might be as much a sign of open scholarly exchanges as evidence of the parallel adoption of common references— and offers an

illustration of the complex relations that exist between institutional labels, methodological agendas, scientific communication, and actual scholarly practice.

Chinese intellectual history and transcultural studies have resulted from a specific division of intellectual labor within the Euro-American academic world. Transcultural studies, a relatively new research field, has only taken institutional shape in the last few decades; it represents a critical response to the abuses of the concept of culture as a heuristic tool, and attempts, among other things, to overcome the institutional partitions and conceptual biases that area studies have fostered in the humanities and social sciences (although transcultural studies are, to a large extent, grounded in the findings of area-based research). Chinese intellectual history is an older field. A particular branch of Chinese history, it has inherited many of its basic approaches and methodologies from a long tradition of area studies—Chinese studies—and from its immediate ancestors, “history of Chinese philosophy” and “history of Chinese thought.” The respective scientific habitus of transcultural studies and Chinese intellectual history have been the ground of sympathetic but uneasy relations. Transcultural studies scholars find in Chinese intellectual history the necessary expertise on China-related questions, and have actually taken from it some of its debates and approaches (many transcultural studies scholars actually come from Chinese studies);