Editorial Preface

One of the pleasures of editing the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies is the exposure it affords to the latest trends in humanistic scholarship on East Asia. I am impressed with the cosmopolitan sensibility that informs many of the manuscripts that cross my desk, even those that focus on a single country. What a contrast to the mid-1980s, when I began my graduate studies in Japanese history. I convinced myself that no one expected me to be fluent in any modern language other than Japanese or to integrate non-Japanese perspectives into my work, except perhaps to make the occasional desultory comparison with the West. Of course, my youthful impressions notwithstanding, the best East Asian scholarship has always looked beyond the boundaries of its particular place, time, and discipline, and theories and methods developed by scholars working on other parts of the world inevitably inform all our work. Nevertheless, it is exciting to see how much new scholarship, unconstrained by linguistic and political boundaries and unwilling to accept the Western experience as normative, traces the regional and even global journeys of ideas, practices, and goods.

The four articles in this issue of HJAS reflect the new direction in the East Asian humanities. In their diversity they remind us that the globalization of our work can take many forms. Mårten Söderblom Saarela’s study of Manchu lexicography traces the movement of linguistic texts from Qing China to Korea and Japan, where they were read and used in ways that their authors could not have expected. He Bian’s article on pharmacological knowledge in eighteenth-century China looks at a particular local iteration of an intellectual practice whose audience spanned the entire East Asian region. Matthew

Stavros’s examination of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s attempt to remake Kyoto on the model of a mandala demonstrates the possibilities of analyses that look beyond specific national practices. Finally, John Whittier Treat’s essay on Hannah Arendt does not simply apply that thoroughly Eurocentric thinker’s ideas to a consideration of historical events in China and Japan; rather, it contributes to globalizing Arendtian philosophy itself. Whether they frame their work in explicitly transnational terms or write in ways that both draw on and contribute to debates beyond their own national specializations, our contributors show by the careful rigor of their scholarship that a cosmopolitan sensibility is fully compatible with the linguistic and methodological standards that have long underlain our various disciplines within East and Inner Asian studies.

DLH