Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

Universal Values and Win-Win Policy

This is a follow-up to the previous note in the spring 1995 issue of the Policy Studies Journal entitled “Win-Win Policy.” Its purpose is to provide further examples regarding the question, “What policy issues are worth providing examples for?”¹     

5. INDIA,ITIHASA, AND INTER‐HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one‐upmanship, we encounter a presumptuous‐ness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one's own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one's own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, neuter the possibilities of knowledge‐sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the chinese know as history. accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense‐generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

3. NATURE,RELIGION, AND IMAGINATION: COMMENTS ON IMAGES OF HISTORY

After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.     

Crane,Elaine Forman The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport,Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 257 pp., $32.95, ISBN 2131-1 978-1-5017

Elaine Forman Crane’s The Poison Plot opens with the core challenge facing her as a scholar and author. “How,” she asks, “to frame a narrative that more closely resembles fiction than most nonfiction works, while remaining faithful to the historical record?” (xi). It is a matter of historical record that Newport, Rhode Island, resident Benedict Arnold petitioned to divorce his wife, Mary Arnold, in 1738 and that his petition accused her of attempting to poison him. Whether she had, in fact, poisoned him and her motivations for doing so, by contrast, remain unknown, particularly because there are no surviving documents from her perspective. The Poison Plot also poses readers with challenges. What can a reader gain from a historical monograph whose conclusions must, by their very nature, be rooted more in circumstantial evidence and speculation than in concrete documentary evidence? In what contexts might readers approach this book?     

Desire and Selfhood

As Hegel observed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness, for the most part, is desire.” Phenomenologically, the “object of consciousness is itself… present only in opposition” to consciousness, while consciousness is felt as the absence of the longed-for object. According to Hegel, when desire is satisfied, this opposition ends and self-consciousness ceases. My essay seeks to answer the question of why desire never really terminates, why it almost continuously characterizes our waking life. I shall do so by exploring desire not just as a subjective phenomenon but as an ontological condition. What does desire say about the being of the subject? Desiring, the subject is stretched out in time. It is ahead of itself in its directedness to a not-yet present object. What is the condition for this temporal extendedness? What role does our embodied being-in-the-world play in it? How does the very spatiality of our selfhood condition our temporal extendedness? The goal of these questions is to understand desire in terms of the spatial and temporal aspects of our being.     

Joseph Priestley as an heir of Newton

ABSTRACT

Like most Enlightenment philosophers, Priestley acknowledges his debt to Newton. However, despite his mentor’s prohibition against “making hypotheses”, in the 1770s, he embarked on a surprising metaphysical epic that led him, the theologian and scientist, to develop in his Disquisitions a bold system that articulated materialism, necessity and Socinianism. This synthesis constitutes the originality of a thinker who wanted to reapprehend science, metaphysics and theology together at the very moment when their dispersion seemed inevitable (and to give them an educational and political extension). It is based on a monistic ontology to which Priestley did not hesitate to give the unexpected name of materialism, at the risk of a number of misunderstandings, while he claims, much to the dismay of Reid, to closely follow the method of Newton. This paper will focus on the relation between Priestley and Newton’s ambiguous inheritance. What is Priestley’s “science” made of? What is its relationship to Newton and his “rules”, to mathematics, to the theory of language, to the so-called “analysis and synthesis method”, to Boscovich? How important is his claim for hypotheses and metaphysics? If Priestley indeed was a Newtonian, he surely was an unorthodox one.     

THE TRUE FACE OF MOUNT LU: ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSPECTIVES AND PARADIGMS1

From a hermeneutic point of view, understanding is always conditioned by one's own horizon and perspective. as the great poet Su Shi remarks, we do not know the “true face of Mount Lu” because what we see constantly changes as we move high or low, far off or up close. But the point of the “hermeneutic circle” is not to legitimize the circularity or subjectivity of one's understanding, but to make us conscious of the challenge. How do we understand China, its history and culture? What should be the appropriate paradigm or perspective for China studies? More than twenty years ago, Paul Cohen argued for a “China‐centered” approach to understanding Chinese history, but to assume an insider's perspective does not guarantee adequate understanding any more than does an outsider's position guarantee emancipation from an insider's myopia or blindness. By discussing several exemplary cases in China studies, this essay argues that neither insiders nor outsiders have monopolistic or privileged access to knowledge, and that integration of different perspectives and their dynamic interaction beyond the isolation of native Chinese scholarship and Western Sinology may lead us to a better understanding of China and its history.     

The Fundamental Contradiction of Modern Cosmopolitanism

This article is a study of that eminently European contribution to world politics: the idea of cosmopolitanism. The argument is that modern cosmopolitanism depends on two postulates which are contradictory. Cosmopolitans have always claimed, “There are two cities, one higher and one lower.” Modern cosmopolitans, however, claim, without abandoning the first postulate, “There is only one city.” In this article I ask four questions which enable the contradiction between these to be illustrated. These are: Is the cosmopolis the higher of two cities? Is it a community of men and gods? What is the criterion of inclusion in it? How free is one to be cosmopolitan? Along the way I clarify what I consider the fundamental contradiction of modern cosmopolitanism to be by distinguishing it from what I call the fundamental problem and the fundamental paradox of cosmopolitanism.     

Putting Religion into Multiculturalism: Conceptualising Religious Multiculturalism in Indonesia

This article examines the ways in which multiculturalism as a policy, discourse and practice has been conceptualised, implemented and applied in Indonesia. The post-Suharto democratisation process has allowed new space for the expression of previously oppressed identities. While literature on multiculturalism focuses mainly on ethnic and racial difference, this article endeavours to broaden the scope of the term to include religious difference, and evaluate the possibility of “religious multiculturalism”. It addresses the following questions: What are the different interpretations of multiculturalism? How is multiculturalism different from pluralism? How is multiculturalism understood and implemented in Indonesia? How is the Western discourse of multiculturalism different from Indonesian discourses of diversity (kebhinnekaan or kemajemukan), heterogeneity (keberagaman) and unity-in-diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika)? And lastly, in what ways can the concept of multiculturalism be expanded to accommodate multi-religiosity?     

Seeing into hearts and minds: Part 1. The Pentagon's quest for a ‘social radar’ (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

In this two‐part article, explored are the many funded programmes by which security agencies and private companies mine ‘big data’ and attempt to measure the sociocultural and psychological states of whole populations. How is failure or success measured? What kinds of new institutions/practices might these give rise to? Part 1 ‘The Pentagon's quest for a “social radar”’, published in this issue, comes to terms with today's many sociocultural modelling and forecasting efforts, looks in detail at one company in particular, and ends up reviewing the role of anthropologists in their development and critique. Part 2 ‘“Big data”, algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency’, to be published in a future issue, will analyze the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long‐term human survival.     

Small core,big network: a comprehensive approach to GIS teaching practice based on digital three-dimensional campus reconstruction

Geographic information science (GIS) features a wide range of disciplines and has broad applicability. Challenges associated with rapidly developing GIS technology and the currently limited teaching and practice materials hinder universities from cultivating highly skilled GIS graduates. Based on the idea of “small core, big network,” a comprehensive and interesting approach to GIS teaching practice is introduced in which a variety of key knowledge areas and technologies are effectively incorporated into a single project. A year-long assignment based on this approach was conducted, providing the students with practical training and successfully resulting in a digital three-dimensional representation of the campus.     

Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS, with special attention to the under‐examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labour and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that the “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users, good enough software.     

AN OPEN INVITATION?: ADDING LINKS TO THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Gradual changes in the way historians select, interpret, and represent aspects of the past are related to equally or perhaps more gradual changes in museum practice. Edited collections on this subject reflect the state of both disciplines and offer an opportunity to evaluate trends, assess progress, and forecast the future. The collection examined in this review essay focuses on the idea of sharing historical authority: How far have we come? What methods have been used? What is the value of collaborative effort? Have technological developments, including digital media and the “participatory Web,” really enabled more inclusive participation? The analysis of the collection includes specific attention to the text itself as an exhibitionary object and emphasizes the effects of its unusual design elements, deictic signals, and heterogeneous genres—particularly the case studies and “thought pieces” that form a significant part of the collection. Other focal points include: the interrogative mood of the text and its call for active reading; explicit historical, social, and disciplinary contexts; and precursor texts that have addressed similar subject matter.     

ENERGY: GOVERNMENT POLICY OR MARKET RESULT?

From the Truman presidency through that of Carter, the United States worked fitfully toward the development of an energy policy. Now, consistent with the “free market — get government off the backs of the people” philosophy of the Reagan Administration, the 1981 National Energy Policy Plan proposes that “individual choices” and “reliance on market decisions” replace regulations and subsidies in the nation's strategy for energy. This paper starts from the assumption that the Spring, 1982 oil “glut” may turn out to be a rather temporary thing. If one therefore wants to pursue a policy strategy that will protect us in the case of sudden short-term supply disruptions and also work toward long-term energy supply diversification, how far will market reliance carry us? What is a range of policies and programs that might usefully supplement the market? What are the externalities for which compensatory actions may still be needed if one would like to employ the market strategy as a basic thrust? The scope of the paper includes contingency planning, synthetic fuel development, renewables (especially solar energy), conservation, equity issues, environmental externalities, and the conceptualization of policies differentiated as “energy,”“environmental,” or “economic.”     

Layering,Administrative Change and National Paths to Europeanization: The Case of the Water Framework Directive

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) can be seen as a reform effort that intervenes in the member states' domestic administrative system by obliging “whole of government” measures across sectoral lines of authority and levels of government. This puts pressure on the sectoral authorities to coordinate their activities. In this article we ask the following questions: How do the state executives respond to the WFD? How can we understand their behaviour and action choices in the implementation of EU law? And third: What can our findings tell us about changes to the European administrative system? This article reveals that despite resistance and strong cognitive priors among the state executives, the WFD logic of ecosystem-based management is gaining a foothold as an administrative principle. Thus, in order to explain changes in the administrative system, we need to take the regional level into account. Our findings suggest that attention needs to be paid to the role of complex, multi-level structures, which includes the regional, river basin district level in the development of a European administrative order.     

Leaky Borders and Solid Citizens: Governing Security,Prosperity and Quality of Life in a North American Partnership

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States in March 2005, proposes a dramatic reshaping of the continent. This is no simple plan for the intensification of economic and security cooperation. The SPP is much more expansive and includes quality of life issues such as education, science and technology, the environment, and health. But what does it mean that there is an emergent concern with biopolitics, that is, with the lives and bodies of the region's citizens, at the trilateral level? How are these citizens being imagined in the new regional vision? What are the implications for states and sovereignty? This paper addresses these questions by turning first to the trope of “partnership” as it emerges in the SPP, and then to the ways that borders and population mobility are being construed. The discourse of “partnership” signals a new political rationality that is reconfiguring the relationship between the North American states, their markets and their citizens. The repercussions for citizens and citizenship are especially significant, and are most clearly apparent vis‐à‐vis border policies, as I discuss in the following section. While external borders are being hardened against most foreign nationals, mobility across internal borders is becoming more differentiated: more penetrable for some, and impassable for others. The SPP thus promotes a divisive and striated regional space that will help perpetuate the ongoing tensions around illegal immigrants and undocumented workers in North America.     

Towards justice in planning: A reappraisal

The concept of justice is central to a political activity such as planning. This is reflected in the initial influence of consequentialism, particularly utilitarian conceptualizations, in planning thought and more recently in the application of Rawls' notion of “justice as fairness” and Habermas' “discourse ethics”. However, contemporary normative planning theory has been vigorously criticized by studies which take as their starting point the material realities of planning practices. In this paper it is argued that notwithstanding the crucial contributions of Habermas and Rawls to political philosophy their constitutional level conceptualizations were never intended to be applied to the task of situated judgement associated with the highly contested decisions at the heart of the planning activity. Consequently, the issue for the planning community is not so much can the concepts of justice embodied in Rawls' “justice as fairness” or Habermas' “discourse ethics” be found in practice but could they ever. More generally it has been argued that the inevitable abstraction in liberal theories of justice comes so close to idealization that their ability to help individuals and societies to address the question of “what is to be done?” is seriously called in to doubt. This in turn has led to concern that an adequate account of justice should be able to link abstract principles to context sensitive judgement of particular cases. The paper explores some implications of these debates for the future development of theory and practice in planning.     

Gouguo,the “Land of Dogs,” on Ricci's World Map*

When Matteo Ricci designed his famous world map, he made use of European and traditional Chinese sources, which also concerns the distribution of certain toponyms on the map. The present study looks at one particular item: the name Gouguo 狗國, or “Land of Dogs,” which appears near the Bering Strait (then called “Strait of Anián”). Several questions arise in this context: Where does the name Gouguo come from? What can we say in regard to the well-known topos of “dog-headed” people? Which were the works consulted by Ricci? Why did he assign Gouguo to such a remote area and how should we interpret the “layout” of the entire region? The discussion will also look at some adjacent regions and names. The final part offers an hypothesis in regard to the possible political background of this arrangement in ca. 1600.