The West As the Other: A Genealogy of Chinese Occidentalism

9. Conclusion:Towards Other Perspectives of the Other

NINE Conclusion: Towards Other Perspectives of the Other I began with the story of an unsuccessful endeavor in late Qing to continue a tradition of cherishing the West, and ventured into the long history of the major transformations in “directionology.” In the Far East, the “ends of the world” of Kunlun, India, and Europe, together with the intermediaries of the Western Territories, the Southwest, and the South Sea, entertained the contrast of the East and the West in local ways. The myth of Kunlun was constantly re-narrated, in official or non-official accounts throughout the Central Kingdom’s past. But the directional orientations changed several times, from the age of King Mu to the age of empire, from “Westernization” between late Han and Wei to the Southern Sea during Tang, from the Southern Sea to the Western Ocean in Yuan. On the way to the foreign country of the past, I witnessed a sequence of shifts and turns, hardly any of which supports the belief that “everything about human history is rooted in the earth” (Said, 1993, p. 5). In “ancient times,” the Chinese world was not merely territorial; like any other human world, having “a door to the world above” (Eliade, 1961, p. 26), it was also celestial. It relied upon the wisdoms of cosmo-geography in dealing with the relationship between this world and other worlds. These wisdoms were ancient, advanced as early as in the Neolithic Age and refined in the age of Antiquity. Later, as knowledge -power systems comprising both a science of Heaven and a science of Earth (Needham, 1981b), they continued to yield altered expressions of cosmo-geography. TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 253 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 253 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 254 The widely accepted perspective of Tianxia, or All under Heaven, systematically expressed in Zhou and continued afterwards, refers to what we now describe as “the world” (Y. Feng, 2008, pp. 391–395). In Tianxia, or, in what Granet calls “the Chinese world,” archaic concepts of the universe worked to make “eternal returns” to the original oneness of the self and the other. Integral to the infused cosmos were the perspectives of the West—the examples I have brought forth to shed light on our revelation of the old and new variations of anthropological alterity. In presenting the perspectives of the infused cosmos, I have adopted the approach of the selective synthesis, making use of Chinese and nonChinese scholarly studies of China as well as anthropological understandings derived from the representations of “other cultures.” In theorizing the case of the Chinese world in particular, I have paid attention , not only to more recent anthropological and historical studies of cosmology, but also to older works. I have depended especially heavily upon Granet’s inspirations and have compared and related the Central Kingdom with the mythic axial mundi or “sacred space” (Eliade, 1961) and the “trinity” of the “Three Functions” (Dumézil, 1970). Though I have not confined my own historical narratives to Granet’s pendulum of time, I have nevetherless taken his interpretation as being truthful to the unity and diversity of Eurasian civilizations. Emily Lyle (1990), a rare contemporary scholar specialized in the study of traditional cosmology, draws from Granet and argues in her Archaic Cosmos that the two civilizations of the East and the West share a cosmological structure. Lyle stresses that the two civilizations both integrate marked canonical orientation of one kind or another into a society under royal rule. The East and the West are also similar cultures in the sense that they both relate spring and summer to East and South and, moreover, both correlate such polarities with the upper, and hot, half. Lyle goes on to argue that the East and the West are different as well. One difference is that the Chinese give pre-eminence to the left hand (left being yang and right being yin),1 whereas the IndoEuropeans give pre-eminence to the right hand. Another major difference is that the canonical direction of facing for the Chinese is South, whereas for the Indo-Europeans it is East. Lyle’s re-interpretation of Granet is relevant to our project here— and, for me, as a cosmological approach, it is an important addition to TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 254 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 254 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM CONCLUSION...