Starting Up the Mountain(s)

Round and Square is the title that I have chosen for a blog that will engage history, culture, and...other stuff.  Really, though, most of it (and I mean by that life) is history and culture.  Physics and geology (and chemistry and biology and language and, well, you get the idea) are important, too, and I will not neglect them.  They fascinate me.  Neurobiology, too.  Nonetheless, the title of this blog takes its name from a vast gulf between East and West.  I happen to be an anthropologist and historian of East Asia—mostly China, but with language and culture (and history) interests in Korea, Japan, and as much of central and northern Asia as I can comprehend.  I have spent twenty years studying Chinese and Japanese, and teaching history and anthropology courses to undergraduates at several liberal arts colleges.  You can see an overview of that material at http://www.beloit.edu/history/faculty/rob/.

My interests go much further, however, and that is why I have chosen my title.  Round and Square is so named because of the Chinese idea (seen on traditional coinage, in the smallest form, and in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, in one of its largest) that heaven is round and earth is square. Westerners from St. Anselm to Kant have taught that round and square are opposites—never successfully to be linked. Chinese cosmological thinking has always linked them, and the traditional imperial fengshan sacrifices on China's sacred mountains are among its greatest examples (I will have much more to say about sacred mountains).  This break between east and west (round and square) is something I seek to examine in a blog that will take up everything from "do-overs" and "remonstrance" (criticizing one's superiors) to the rich, earthy substance of social and cultural theory.  Round and square.  East and west.  Never the twain shall meet (it has been said).

Except when they do.  And that is where all of this is going.