Monday Methods|Dealing with Earlier Standards of Scholarship.

[u/Commustar]

Today's Monday Methods was inspired by a question from /u/VineFynn.

An underlying assumption in modern mainstream historical scholarship is that authors are striving towards historical truth/accuracy/historicity. Through various theoretical bents, they may privilege certain pieces of information, but the underlying goal is to understand "history as it really was".

/u/VineFynn's question was, how long has this been the case? Did earlier historians (or documenters of history) see their priority as documenting as much as they knew, or could they prioritize selling a narrative, glorifying a royal lineage, or shaping popular opinion around a political or national goal?

How and when did standards of scholarship change?

[u/AshkenazeeYankee]

As it is, most histories I read of China that aren't biographies (so, say, history of a dynasty), in Chinese, tend to be woefully lacking in analysis and mostly a litany of facts.

Would you be willing to elaborate on this?

[u/fire_dawn → u/AshkenazeeYankee]

I went away and had a shower thought about this. I remembered that Jin Yong, a well known (perhaps THE most well known) Chinese martial arts fantasy historical genre author (commonly the genre is known as wuxia), was well known for not being able to complete his education due to political turmoil in his youth. He made the decision later in life to do a PhD in Chinese History, but in Cambridge, despite already being a professor of historical literature in China with honorary degrees. He once said the following when asked about what makes his continuing studies at the age of 80s in Cambridge interesting:

"It's not that I read any books particularly good here that I can't get elsewhere. It's that I wanted to come here and apply research methods in England that are wholly different from those in China. In China, people writing papers know what they believe in and are writing from a place of high towers. In England, the professors require that you back up every line you write with evidence. In academics you have to have evidence."

He sums up my frustrations far better than I ever could.

Source from the newspaper article where he said this: http://hk.crntt.com/crn-webapp/cbspub/docDetail.jsp?coluid=1220&docid=10738

Edit to add: an interesting analysis of the state of historicity in commonly accepted and unchallenged Chinese histories in The American Anthropologist circa 1950s that I generally agree with:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1525/aa.1946.48.1.02a00040/asset/aa.1946.48.1.02a00040.pdf;jsessionid=47B8F5977B1FD57DD4DA073EDF89B423.f02t04?v=1&t=imn1vp7a&s=50ef53bd8cb7d42633b7ba217fe5a229c14ccf55

I particularly like the bit where he talks about how even a western college trained historian who might have persistent biases and myths in his or her own culture can come at some of the uncontested points in Chinese history with fresher and more critical eyes.

This may be the crux of my dissatisfaction with Chinese research of Chinese history. I was educated and trained in the US but read fluently in Chinese due to having been there for the first 9 years of my life and having continued to read in Chinese and studied it in university. I'm seeking Chinese perspectives in my own people's history but desiring western methodology in historical research. I think my perspective may be inherently flawed and impossible.

Also, an exchange I had with a mod and expert in Chinese history of linguistics here last year on this frustrating subject:

https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z3v61/chinesereading_historians_living_outside_of/

[u/AshkenazeeYankee → u/fire_dawn]

Do you think there is a non-political explanation for any of these methodological differences?

I guess what I'm thinking is that what is considered "good" historical writing in "the West" changed fairly drastically starting in the early 1970s with the "cultural turn". Is this methodogical deficit, if we can all it that, partially attributable to isolation from global conversations and general disruption (to be overly euphemistic) that Chinese intellectual culture suffered in the later 20th century?

You yourself sound like you might be in a excellent position to help bridge this cultural and methodological gap.

Final thoughts: I have heard is that many Chinese humanities journals don't use peer review quite the way it is understood in the United States. I have been told by Mandarin-speaking colleagues that many Chinese universities have their own in-house journals that publish the output of their departments, which leads to a very fragmented and insular type of academic discourse. Can you confirm or deny this?

[u/fire_dawn → u/AshkenazeeYankee]

I was born after the '70s, so I've never known anything else. I haven't been able to read as deeply into the past in this field, but I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be perfectly right that it's a combination of lots of things, not just political. Part of the problem is the isolation and the disruption of academia in the Cultural Revolution for sure. I think you may be right, but is that maybe also a political reason? For instance, isn't the present climate part of the goal of the Cultural Revolution? Completely different methodology from the West and isolation?

Every university actually does gets assigned its own version of the Chinese ISBN. A limited numbers are assigned to each university each year, so the university publishers are the ones that vet and publish academic material, including journals. If you want to publish academic material or things that might be controversial that commercial publishers refuse to use their ISBN (I keep calling it that, but it's not technically ISBN, just the equivalent) to publish your translation/stuff, the university publishers are pretty much the only way to go.

I think I'm too young and undereducated (only a BA in Linguistics and English [focus on Historical Linguistics]) to really know what I'm talking about with the disruption of academia and intellectual culture, and I am not really in a position to "bridge" the gap because I'm not really in the field at all! But I hope there are others like me who can do so.