Von Falkenhausen, Lothar

English

ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

BOOK REVIEWS 485REFERENCES CITEDPADDAYYA, K.1996 Modern impacts on archaeological sitesin India: A case study from the ShorapurDoab, Karnataka. Man and Environment21(2):75–88.TUHIWAI SMITH, L.1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research andIndigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728;Paperback US $30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196.Reviewed by Lothar VON FALKENHAUSEN, Art History Department,University of California Los AngelesIn his introductory chapter, Leung forcefullydismantles the essentializing notion, pervasivein older Sinological writings, that referencesto the past in early Chinese texts wereoverwhelmingly didactic in their motivation.He instead proposes to focus on the “delib-erate mobilization of the field of the past asideological capital toward the construction ordeconstruction of various political argumentsand ethical ideas” (p. 13). So far, so good, butcan anyone come up with a new and trulysuperior understanding? As one reads on, suchinitial doubts are quickly dispelled. Chapterby chapter, Leung carefully builds a compel-ling and, as far as I am able to judge, quiteoriginal argument that does justice both to thediversity of the texts and the agency of theirauthors in their historical and sociopoliticalcircumstances. The textual loci adduced insupport of this new narrative are judiciouslychosen and conscientiously translated. Ratherthan attempting to cover every pertinent text,Leung deliberately restricts himself to alimited range. The result is a slim butintelligent volume that is eminently worthreading.Chapter 1, by far the longest in the book,ranges from the Western Zhou bronzeinscriptions to the Confucian Analects andthe Mozi. In contradistinction to the prota-gonists of the Bronze Inscriptions, whodwelled upon their genealogical links toillustrious ancestors in ritual settings, Con-fucius—in what strikes one as an astonishinglymodern gesture—was the first to treat the pastas a veritable smørgåsbord of precedentsavailable to all comers, regardless of back-ground, to help them determine their courseof action as autonomous moral agents in thepresent age. The authors of the Mozi, whilesharing a similar outlook on the past, flippedConfucius’s vision by treating the past as aseries of negative examples illustrating thechaos that would ensue if individuals were toexert their autonomy instead of submittingunder the discipline of an orderly régimeimposed by a sage ruler.Chapter 2 juxtaposes the Laozi (as repre-sented in the manuscript text excavated atGuodian, Jingmen [Hubei]) and the Mengzi.According to Leung, these two approximatelycontemporaneous texts both implicitly denythe relevance of any historical reference: theLaozi by initiating a “cosmogonic turn” andtracing the origins of the world way back to apatently mythical female figure; and theMengzi by insisting that it is only one’s inbornmoral nature, rather than any precedent fromhistory, that will determine human action inconcrete situations of the present.Chapter 3 treats the attitudes to the pastespoused in the writings of the WarringStates-period Legalist thinkers and the imper-ial Qin ideologues. While the former con-stantly referred to the past as a way ofemphasizing that times had changed andhistorical precedent was useless in dealingwith new circumstances, the latter proclaimed486 ASIAN PERSPECTIVES • 2020 • 59(2)the end of all history. The Qin world orderwas intended to work like mechanical clock-work, creating a never-varying pattern thataccommodated all conceivable situations andevents, and that, if successfully imposed,would have removed all need to accountfor individual cases; in other words, it wouldhave assimilated human life to natural history.In chapter 4, Leung describes how the earlyWestern Han thinkers Jia Yi and Lu Jia reactedto the failure of Qin by reviving, in Jia’s case, aConfucian vision of autonomous agencyguided by historical precedents (which nowincluded the failures of the Qin), or anchor-ing, in Lu’s case, a new view of the world inthe study of the Confucian classics, whichwere now reinterpreted as revealed knowl-edge transmitted from the sages of the past.Chapter 5 zeroes in on two chapters in theShi ji that deal with economic issues. Leungjuxtaposes the anarchist model of a naturaleconomy that works best without anyinstitutional interference presented in the“Huozhi liezhuan [Biographies of themoney-makers]” chapter against the realityof grievous economic mismanagementdescribed in the “Pingzhunshu [Treatise onthe balanced standard].” Leung demonstrateshow the Shi ji authors enabled their informedreaders to use the past in a comprehensive andutterly devastating critique of current govern-ment practices.As evident even from this brief summary,the past is a moving target for Leung. QuotingR. G. Collingwood and Pierre Nora, theauthor helpfully explains in a footnote(though this seems important enough to havemerited mentioning in the main text) that“this study does not engage with the questionof memory in early China.Memory is what oneremembers from the past, and history is thosepieces of the past that fall outside collectivememory and therefore need to be put intonarratives” (p. 19n36; italics in the original).This distinction is hard to sustain with respectto an age with little archival documentation,especially since whatever documentationexisted at the time was likely unavailable tothe intellectuals who made arguments invol-ving the past. Many of the “historical”narratives in Leung’s sources were undoubt-edly drawn from cultural memory, tweakedwhenever necessary to fit the respectiveauthor’s agenda. Of course, for Leung’spurposes, the historical validity of the asser-tions made about the past in the texts understudy does not matter, since his concern ismeta-historical. But in order to measure theirpersuasiveness in their time, it may not beentirely pointless to try to ascertain the factualbasis, or lack thereof, of the historicalexamples (or counterexamples) adduced inpre-Qin and early Imperial-period texts.Absent supporting archival sources, archae-ology may be able to provide a kind ofyardstick for examining at least some of thesecases.Leung does not make a pronouncement onwhether his five successive stages constitute anevolutionary development or a graduallyemerging typology. The latter alternativeseems more likely. What is traced in thebook is an emerging panoply of modes ofengagement with the past that did not replaceone another, but continued to exist side byside and, as time went on, were occasionallyhybridized. Leung does not claim that thevariants he has identified are altogetherrepresentative, nor that they constitute thetotality of approaches to the past that wereavailable in their time.The book, though reasonably well written,still bears some traces of its origins in adoctoral dissertation. It seems to be mainlydirected at a small but growing number ofscholars writing in English, most of themyoung, who are dealing with early Chinesetexts mainly as a source of concepts, whiledeemphasizing the detailed consideration ofphilological detail that has for so long been atthe center of traditional Sinology. A look atthe bibliography makes this abundantly clear.At the same time, one is struck at the paucityof secondary works in Chinese or Japanesereferred to. I suspect that the reason is by nomeans an oversight on the part of the author,who clearly has both the linguistic skills andthe access to library resources necessary toengage with such scholarship. The problemmay be, simply, that there are not very manyscholarly writings in East Asian languages inexistence that resemble, not to mentionengage with, the Anglophone literature hereadduced. What might explain this apparentBOOK REVIEWS 487bifurcation of interests among specialists basedin East Asia and their (much less numerous)colleagues in Europe, Australia, and NorthAmerica? Are the former still bogged downby the hard work of philology, freeing thelatter to cherry-pick issues that relate tothe broader themes of current concern to theWestern humanities? Are we, in other words,witnessing a disjuncture—or an emergingpecking order—between the erudite and thesophisticated? This situation, if real, obviouslycannot be blamed on Leung, but it may call forsome intellectual bridge-building in thefuture.In any event, if a book like this one were toaim at making an effective contribution to thewider discourse in the Humanities, it wouldhelp if it were explicitly comparative. Leung,to his credit, gives the reader numerouspointers (mostly in footnotes) in such adirection, but, perhaps due to the timeconstraints of dissertation writing, does notfollow up on them. Here, as well, remains achallenge to future scholarship.Although it is too narrowly focused to besuitable for ordinary undergraduate-levelteaching, the book deserves a careful readingby China specialists of all stripes. It is also ofpotential value to scholars interested incomparative historiography. To profit fullyfrom Leung’s insights, the reader will needsome previous acquaintance with the textsunder discussion and with the basics of earlyChinese intellectual history. Fortunately, suchbackground knowledge is relatively easy toacquire today, even for the nonspecialist, sincethe relevant texts are all available in decentEnglish translations.World Heritage and Human Rights: Lessons from the Asia-Pacific and Global Arena. Editedby Peter Bille Larsen. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. xxii + 325 pp., 26figures, 2 tables. Paperback US $43, ISBN 978-1-13822-422-3; Hardback US $124,ISBN 978-1-13822-421-6; E-book $27, ISBN 978-1-31540-278-9.Reviewed by Michael HERZFELD, Department ofAnthropology, Harvard UniversityHeritage and rights, ethical domains thatsometimes overlap like Venn circles, also oftenerupt into discord, pitting local cultural valuesagainst a universalism born of colonialdomination and still embedded in the loftypresumptions of what UNESCO recognizesas “Outstanding Universal Value.” Regional(Asia-Pacific) coverage is necessarily unevenboth because the record is itself highly variableand because authors are treading on politicaleggshells. That much is clear from the ninecase studies and five legal reviews laid out inthis cautiously optimistic volume. Amidmultiple contradictions in legal writ andpractice, several important common themesemerge. Consent, participation, and prosper-ity, along with a near-worldwide commit-ment to according dignity to all, loom large asrights, including the right to heritage, but alsothe right to ask, “Whose heritage?” Owner-ship itself is a conceptual quagmire for socialistsocieties or where land and material objectsare not culturally viewed as individualproperty.Micro-histories of struggles for recognitionchallenge the triumphalism of national andinternational heritage regimes. Larsen arguesthat the UNESCOWorld Heritage program’s“original sin” (p. 7) is reflected in the absenceof people from narratives of success;Alexander H. E. Morawa and Gabriel Zalazarcall for “cross-referencing” (p. 198), allowinglocal groups and the international bureaucracyto learn from each other. As Larsen suggests(p. 16), “vague win-win language” can mask avariety of damaging concessions to economic

The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728;
Paperback US $30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196.

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The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728; Paperback US$ 30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196.

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ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US 100,ISBN9781108425728;PaperbackUS100, ISBN 9781108425728; Paperback US 100,ISBN9781108425728;PaperbackUS30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196.

Abstract

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ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

The Politics of the Past in Early China. Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 202 pp. Hardcover US $100, ISBN 9781108425728; Paperback US$ 30, ISBN 9781108443241; E-book US $80, ISBN 9781108619196.