La Pensée Cyclique—Rural Religion in China (2)

One year ago on Round and Square (6 August 2011)—Longevity Mountain: Carvings and Caverns.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Rural Religion in Early China."

Click here for the introduction to "La Pensée Cyclique" the "umbrella topic for this series.

[a] Countryside life RF

Click here for other posts in Round and Square's "Rural Religion in China" series:

Rural 1          Rural 2          Rural 3          Rural 4          Rural 5          Rural 6           Rural 7          Rural 8 

Rural 9          Rural 10        Rural 11        Rural 12        Rural 13        Rural 14         Rural 15        Rural 16        Rural 17        Rural 18        Rural 19        Rural 20        Rural 21        Rural 22         Rural 23        Rural 24
Rural 25        Rural 26        Rural 27        Rural 28        Rural 29        Rural 30         Rural 31        Rural 32        Rural 33

 

Historicism and Granet's Discontents
This post will be brief (don't get used to it, though). You see, we concluded yesterday's entry with a quotation from Marcel Granet that should have startled you. In setting up the quotation that I have included below, he makes a preemptive strike against people who care about such silly things as "facts." Really...facts. And chronological precision. Nope, he ripped them up one side and down the other. Go back and read the last two or three paragraphs from yesterday if you don't remember. It is startling stuff. He just called you a fanatic, and, for good measure, adds that by studying "individual facts and chronological precision" you are really messing up your studies.  Unhappy? His tone suggests unrepentance, not unlike that of a certain Justice Scalia with regard to one of his big interpretations. Indeed, Granet claims that the narrative that will follow (the heart of The Religion of the Chinese People) is valid for a long span of time and for the whole of China.

Wow. He said that?

No, actually he wrote it, but he pretty much takes the entire discipline of history and disembowels it with criticism of detail—chronological and geographical. Why he would make such an argument requires a long detour into Durkheimian sociology. It is not quite as obtuse (although it is highly confrontational) as you might think, even if there is room for disagreement. Here is the brief version. There is a reason why Emile Durkheim sought to find the "elementary forms" of religious life. He bemoaned the fact that the careful historian of ideas and anthropologist of religious practice who tries to understand, say, Catholicism by studying Vatican policy, theology, and priestly conduct...will end up knowing nothing about the core of (Catholic) religiosity. So many details, relics, mulitple papacies, and world events have "covered over" what Durkheim perceived as the elementary forms of true religiosity that such an expedition into the archaeology of knowledge is flawed to the core.

[b] Detail RF

You can't reason backward, he maintains. We have to return, wrote Durkheim, to the forms of religiosity that underpin everything that has been obscured by ninety-plus theses, Trentian councils, and Easter homilies from the Vatican during times of war. That's just too much turbid water under the ol' analytical bridge for Monsieur Durkheim. We need to get back to Peter and that rock (so to speak). Durkheim (and Granet) would go further, though. He would say that we need to get back to the rural and kinship-rooted origins of desert peoples even to have an interpretive chance. This is why Durkheim's big book on religion focused on Australian aboriginal peoples.

It is also why Marcel Granet, a decade later, wrote of rural religion in early China. Whether this is attractive to you or sends historiographical shudders down your spine, Marcel Granet will lead us for the next 120 pages in analyzing the elementary forms of religion among the Chinese people. I teach history, to be sure, but I find his argument strangely appealing. Don't get me wrong; it is problematic. Still, a knee-jerk, "just the facts," stance won't answer the question that concerned Durkheim, Granet, and the scholars around them.

What were the "elementary forms" of religious life...en Chine?

          At the beginning of the feudal period (which came to an end roughly in the second century 

          B.C.; it had begun six centuries earlier and possibly even before that), probably also at its 

          close, certainly before it had begun and perhaps still after it had ended, in the collection of 

          countries making up the Chinese Confederation (that is to say, the middle region of the Yellow 

          River, mainly in its eastern part, apparently also in some of the border territories to the south), 

          this is what life was more or less like in the countryside. 

          Au début de la période féodale (elle finit à peu près au IIe siècle avant notre ère ; elle était 

          commencée six siècles auparavant et, apparemment, depuis longtemps), sans doute aussi 

          à sa fin, certainement avant qu'elle n'ait commencé et peut-être encore après qu'elle fut 

          terminée, dans l'ensemble des pays formant la Confédération chinoise (c'est-à-dire dans la 

          région moyenne du Fleuve Jaune, surtout dans sa partie orientale, vraisemblablement aussi 

          dans quelques pays limitrophes, vers le Sud), voici, à peu près, ce que devait être la vie 

          aux champs.

[c] Elementary RF

Click here for other posts in Round and Square's "Rural Religion in China" series:

Rural 1          Rural 2          Rural 3          Rural 4          Rural 5          Rural 6           Rural 7          Rural 8 

Rural 9          Rural 10        Rural 11        Rural 12        Rural 13        Rural 14         Rural 15        Rural 16        Rural 17        Rural 18        Rural 19        Rural 20        Rural 21        Rural 22         Rural 23        Rural 24
Rural 25        Rural 26        Rural 27        Rural 28        Rural 29        Rural 30         Rural 31        Rural 32        Rural 33

 

Notes
[1] Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 38.
[2] Marcel Granet, La religion des chinois (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1922), 11.

Bibliography

Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman]. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Granet, Marcel. La religion des chinois. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1922.