What and How Is Sinology?

Tang Studies 8-9 (1990-91) What and How Is Sinology? EDWARD H. SCHAFER I am most grateful to everyone who had anything to do with the invitation that brings me here tonight. This is partly because I like Colorado, and partly because it gives me a rare opportunity to voice my prejudices about the subject closest to the academic segment of my heart, without, under the circumstances, too much risk of rebuke. Most importantly, the occasion does me honor—indeed I suspect that some of my friends and colleagues will think that it does me too much honor. If so, they must unpurse their lips and swallow their disapproval , since I propose to carry out my irreverent plan without shame. But first you should be warned that I shall from time to time show an alarming tendency to rely on juicy quotations to underline my meaning. My excuse is that I am modest enough to admit that others have said important things more trenchantly than I could. If this is too much for you to swallow, I will confess a less honorable motive— that this technique tends to associate my opinions with those of recognized authorities, even men of genius, and may give me the comforting belief that I am rescuing myself from the not uncommon view that I am merely a maverick. First of all: what do the words "sinology," "sinologist," and the obsolescent "sinologue" mean? In 1958, when I was appointed Editor of the Journal of the American Oriental Society, I proposed in an open letter that the words "sinology" and "sinologist" should be abandoned , because I believed that they tended to confound quite different disciplines under too broad a rubric, making it easy for partisans of one discipline to regard theirs as "better" sinology than others. Political scientists concerned with China regard philologists as mere grubbers after textual variants. Philologists concerned with China look upon political scientists as mere prophets of the unforeseeable . We have even witnessed the recent tendency to use the Inaugural lecture for the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder; delivered 14 October 1982. Originally published in a bound edition of 150 numbered copies (Boulder, 1982). 23 Schafer: Wliat and How i$ Sinology? term "sinologist" as a popular synonym for what used to be called a "China watcher." The title now includes journalists, commentators, and indeed almost anyone who has opinions about modern China. Clearly my proposal of 1958 has not been widely accepted. Now I have come to think that what I should have advocated, rather than the abandonment of the offending words altogether, was their retention , with the understanding that "sinology" would once more be used in its original sense of the study of the Chinese language, and especially the study of early texts written in that language—in short, in the same sense that "latinist," "egyptologist" and "assyriologist" have always been used. I imply that the term "sinology" is the correct term for the business of this new department. Such a definition puts sinology squarely and unambiguously in the field of the Humanities. This is not to say that the study of languages is restricted to the Humanities. Psychologists and many linguists, for instance, are engaged in language studies that differ in important ways from ours. Although we share with them the aim of discovering truth with the same commitment to careful evaluation of evidence, we differ in the levels of abstraction on which we seek that truth. The physical sciences operate on a very high level of abstraction; the so-called social sciences and some types of history on a rather lower one; some historians are like humanists in their concern for the concrete, the unique, and the individual. Strangely, many persons believe that humanists are preoccupied with such matters as "beauty," "soul," "expression" and the like. But these words too are abstractions. In fact, we humanists are committed to the discovery and characterization of unique aspects of human experience and their interrelationships. We are concerned with what is concrete rather than abstract, with what is particular rather than general—that is, with what is truly incomparable. More precisely, we study the specific...