Humanities Research Journal Series: Volume XIV. No
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humanities humanities research humanities research Vol XiV. No. 1. 2007 Historicising Cross-Cultural Research Cross-Cultural Historicising Historicizing Cross Cultural Research The journal of the Research School of Humanities 1, 2007 The Australian National University HUMANITIES RESEARCH GUEST EDITOR Benjamin Penny EDITORIAL ADVISORS Tony Bennett, Open University, UK; Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago; James K. Chandler, University of Chicago; W. Robert Connor, Teagle Foundation, New York; Michael Davis, University of Tasmania; Ian Donaldson, The Australian National University; Saul Dubow, University of Sussex; Valerie I. J. Flint, University of Hull; Christopher Forth, The Australian National University; Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut; Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge; W. J. F. Jenner, The Australian National University; Peter Jones, University of Edinburgh; E. Ann Kaplan, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University; David MacDougall, The Australian National University; Iain McCalman, University of Sydney; Fergus Millar, University of Oxford; Anthony Milner, The Australian National University; Howard Morphy, The Australian National University; Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Australian National University; Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago; Paul Patton, University of New South Wales; Paul Pickering, The Australian National University; Monique Skidmore, The Australian National University; Mandy Thomas, The Australian National University; Caroline Turner, The Australian National University; James Walter, Monash University. Humanities Research is published by the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. The Research School of Humanities came into existence in January 2007 and consists of the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, National Europe Centre and National Dictionary Centre. Comments and subscription enquiries: Editor, Research School of Humanities, Old Canberra House Building #73, The Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia. Research School of Humanities general enquiries T.: +61 2 6125 2434, Email: [email protected] URL http://rsh.anu.edu.au Published by ANU E Press Email: [email protected] :EG:HH Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au © The Australian National University. This Publication is protected by copyright and may be used as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 provided appropriate acknowledgment of the source is published. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyrights and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Copyright in the individual contributions contained in this publication rests with the author of each contribution. Any requests for permission to copy this material should be directed to RSH Administration. The text has been supplied by the authors as attributed. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Printed in Australia Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 ISSN: 1440-0669 (print), ISSN: 1834-8491 (Online) CONTENTS HISTORICIZING CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH 1 Benjamin Penny Historicizing “Cross-Cultural” 11 Bronwen Douglas The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis: Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World 31 Benjamin Penny More Than One Adam? Revelation and Philology in Nineteenth-Century China 51 Henrika Kuklick The Rise and Fall — and Potential Resurgence — of the Comparative Method, With Special Reference to Anthropology 67 Paul D. Barclay Contending Centres of Calculation in Colonial Taiwan: The Rhetorics of Vindicationism and Privation in Japan’s “Aboriginal Policy” 85 P. G. Toner The Gestation of Cross-Cultural Music Research and the Birth of Ethnomusicology Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 ISSN: 1440-0669 CONTRIBUTORS PAUL D. BARCLAY is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently writing a social and cultural history of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan's highland territories. BRONWEN DOUGLAS is a Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. Her current research project is exploring the entanglements of the scientific idea of race with encounters in Oceania. She has also written extensively on the intersections of Christianity and gender in Melanesia and on the colonial history of New Caledonia. She is the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (Amsterdam; Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998) and has edited several collections, including Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), co-edited with Anna Cole and Nicholas Thomas. HENRIKA KUKLICK is a Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the history of the human sciences, her publications include The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 1992, 1993), an edited collection, A New History of Anthropology (forthcoming 2007, Blackwell Publishing), and articles in The American Ethnologist, The Annual Review of Sociology, The British Journal for the History of Science, History of Anthropology, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Sociological Quarterly, and Theory and Society. BENJAMIN PENNY is a Research Fellow in the History of China in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. He is the editor of Religion and Biography in China and Tibet (London: Curzon Press, 2002) and Daoism in History: Essays in Honour of Liu Ts’un-yan (London: Routledge, 2006). He is currently writing a monograph on the Falun Gong as well as iii Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 undertaking projects on the cult of the South Sea God in southern China and the history of Sinology. PETER TONER is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He has conducted almost two years of research on Yolngu music, principally in Gapuwiyak, N.T., on issues relating to social identity, cultural change, and historical aspects of music research. His current research interests also include folk music and Irish cultural identity in Atlantic Canada. iv HISTORICIZING ªCROSS-CULTURALº BENJAMIN PENNY In 2000, a few years into the 10-year his- in recent changes in the state of the world tory of the ANU's Centre for Cross-Cultur- and of academic disciplines, it is clear that al Research, a new field of research for the ªtransaction and translation between cul- Centre was announced: ªConceptualising turesº has been going on for as long as Cross-Cultural Researchº, which in later there have been people, and the ªtracing years became ªInterrogating Concepts of of patternsº in this process is by no means the Cross-Culturalº.1 The 2007 iteration only a recent phenomenon. The essays in of the website summarizes it in this way: this volume are concerned with examining how such patterns were traced before the By "cross-cultural research" we middle of the twentieth century, when the mean scholarship that is oriented term ªcross-culturalº was coined. They towards tracing patterns of trans- therefore involve studies both of particular action and translation between encounters between people of different cultures. Methodologically, such cultures and investigation of the disciplin- scholarship transcends convention- ary categories in which those studies took al national and area studies frames place. of reference by recognising the The literature of encounter between increasing porousness of cultural people from different cultural back- boundaries. This program exam- grounds is, of course, vast and the essays ines both the disciplinary and in- here only address a few examples of the terdisciplinary ramifications of the rich legacy of work left by generations of term "cross-cultural" in Humanit- explorers, traders, missionaries and consu- ies research. It does so by explor- lar officials, as well as people who thought ing the theoretical links between of themselves as scholars. Some small the notion of the "cross cultural" amount of this work is well known but as it has emerged in the disciplin- more of it is much less read than it should ary fields of anthropology, history, be and, in general, deserves rediscovery literary studies and linguistics, and and reassessment. The people who conduc- contemporary conceptualisations ted this research worked within the of "cultural difference" in the paradigms of their owns eras: the ways transdisciplinary fields of postco- they thought through what they saw and lonial, migration and globalisation heard may sound unfamiliar, if not simply studies.2 odd, to a contemporary ear, but such per- Although this description locates the par- plexity is all to the good, as it makes us ticular interest of ªcross-cultural researchº ponder the earlier forms Ð indeed, often 1 Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007 the foundations Ð of the disciplines that duped by surface similarities or currently hold sway. fictitious analogies, a great deal of labor may lead to incorrect conclu- However, just as the essays in this 3 volume seek to historicize ªcross-cultural sions. researchº, it is also possible, and illumin-