| This dissertation is a meditation on the plural shapes of coherence formed by the terms "Confucianism" in the West and ru in China. These constructs, long held to be identical and timeless, are ubiquitously invoked in histories of China, yet rarely is their made-ness or their inequivalence questioned. By examining the conditions under which these terms were manufactured, this study seeks to make strange something that has heretofore been familiar, so that we may better grasp the manner in which it has come to be transparent. Thus, we look at the texts of native culture in new ways while appreciating our complicity in the production of a narrative of China's putative, immemorial cultural continuity. The history of ru and "Confucianism" we have inherited and reproduced, appears to possess an enviable constancy of values preserved by the symbolic rituals of Chinese traditions. But ru, an applied tradition, not our narrative of "Confucianism," was episodic, rather than uniform and continuous. This dissertation critically re-presents selected episodes in the invention of this tradition to disclose the lack of "fit" between indigenous understanding and its representation as a comprehensive religious, philosophical, and social system, treating ru and "Confucianism" as myths constituted for various purposes by various communities at various times. In the first half, I examine the Jesuits' encounter with the tradition to which they gave the name "Confucianism" in the sixteenth century, sharing that their intellectual and psychological contexts motivated their focus on the religious aspects of Kongzi. In the second half, I examine two early twentieth-century Chinese scholars, Zhang Binglin and Hu Shi, and their efforts to comprehend the tradition they knew as ru by constructing an evolutionary model that enclosed all of its meanings, past, present, and future. In this endeavor they demonstrated that their own peculiar nationalist and rationalist strivings had much to do with the conclusions they drew from philological and historical evidence. Contemporary scholars of China often draw on the work of these predecessors, without grasping how "made" were their interpretations. Ultimately what we learn is that it is representation that gives life to the past. |
