Organizer: Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

Chair: Aihe Wang, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Discussants: Michael Puett, Harvard University; R. Bin Wong, University of California, Los Angeles

This panel will bring together scholars from three fields:  history, anthropology, and sociology.  It will attempt to situate major research problems in Chinese studies within the broader context of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debates within sociology and anthropology.  The key issues include:  How did discourses about the uniqueness of Chinese thought and religion emerge?  What institutional arrangements and affiliations made these research problems important and popular?  Did discussions of such problems reflect mainstream developments in sociology and anthropology—or, did they represent scholarly resistance to frameworks, such as unilineal evolutionism and structuralism?  By addressing these questions, the panel hopes to achieve two goals.  The first is to illuminate the extent to which nineteenth-century debates in social sciences continue to shape, in powerful but often silent ways, the research priorities of humanist scholars of China.  The second is to provide a re-evaluation of such legacies and to ask whether there are some legacies of the nineteenth-century that contemporary scholars can not only live with, but also appreciate.

Chinese Cosmology in Social Scientific Theories
Aihe Wang, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Since late 19th century, social sciences have included ancient China into their grant theorization of human societies, as represented by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Simultaneously, the specialized field of ancient China started to adopt these social scientific paradigms, such as Oriental society, five modes of production, or rational bureaucracy. In this intellectual context, Chinese cosmology has remained a focus of comparative studies and theoretical discussion, providing a crucial meeting point for intellectual exchange between East and West. This paper discusses the study of Chinese cosmology as such a crucial point of theoretical and intellectual exchange. It will focus on points of intersection where different theoretical discourses and disciplinary methodologies have interacted and transformed. Three points will be used to illustrate such exchange and shift: 1) how structuralism has addressed the problem of universality and uniqueness in Chinese correlative cosmology, as represented by Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss; 2) the challenge to structuralism from theoretical front, such as neo-Marxism and post-structuralism and post-modernism; 3) the shift away from structuralism in Early China studies stimulated by archaeological discoveries; and 4) the shift of scholarly attention from mind to body and from theory to practice within the parallel development of China Studies and social science theory.

Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

This paper re-evaluates a persistent but controversial claim in studies of China—to wit, that Chinese thought exhibited a different logical structure than that found in Europe. By situating what is now largely regarded as a Sinological problem within the broader context of the debate between Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) about primitive thought, it argues that this line of inquiry about cultural difference, as exemplified by the work of its earliest exponents, Marcel Granet (1884-1940), Joseph Needham (1900-1995), and Angus Charles Graham (1919-1991), is still significant. The significance of these works lies not so much in their specific arguments about China as in the general approach they provide for explaining cultural difference, an approach that can steer clear of the dangers in evolutionary and essentializing approaches to the study of human mentality.

How Confucianism became a World Religion: Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Studies of Religion
Anna Sun, Princeton University

This paper examines the social and institutional processes through which the conception of Confucianism as a world religion became legitimized in the turn of the 20th century Great Britain. I suggest that this has to do with the emergence of a new intellectual discipline, namely the comparative studies of religion. In this paper I shall be focusing on the career trajectory of Fredrich Max Müller (1823-1900), arguably one of the founders of comparative studies of religion, and I shall show how he was one of the key actors in the making of Confucianism as one of the eight "great world religions."

Based on my examination of archival materials, I argue that the legitimization of Confucianism as a world religion was a by-product of the legitimization of the new discipline. Through strategies such as establishing new professorships, building professional associations, organizing international conferences, and publishing important texts such as The Sacred Books of the East, Max Muller and his associates helped to establish a legitimate intellectual field to promote their new discourse, of which Confucianism was an essential part.