HIST 310: The Other Studies Another, Spring 2019 (b)

On this date on Round and Square's History 

20 August 2015—China's Lunar Calendar 2015 08-20

20 August 2015—Social and Cultural Theory Syllabus 2015 (b)

20 August 2014—China's Lunar Calendar 2014 08-20

20 August 2014—Social and Cultural Theory Syllabus 2014 (b)

20 August 2013—China's Lunar Calendar 2013 08-20

20 August 2013—From the Geil Archive: Curly Fives

20 August 2012—The New Yorker and the World: Introduction

20 August 2011—Displays of Authenticity: Real Coffee

Click here for the other half of this two-part syllabus post:
HIST 310: Weeks 1-8                        HIST 310: Weeks 9-16

[a] More than a Trifle RF

The Other Studies Another
French Scholars of Chinese Culture 

Spring 2019 

Tuesdays

7:10-11:00 p.m. 

Robert André LaFleur                                                     Office Hours:

Morse Ingersoll 206                                                         Tuesday      4:00-5:30 

363-2005                                                                           Thursday    4:00-5:30    lafleur@beloit.edu                                                            ...or by appointment        

Required Books          

La Tour de la France par deux enfants 

Mauss, Manual of Ethnography (Berhgahn Books)

Durkheim, Emile. Selected Writings 

Fournier, Marcel. Marcel Mauss: A Biography 

Granet, Marcel. Chinese Civilization (.pdf file/Word file)

Granet, Marcel. Chinese Thought (.pdf file/Word file)

Granet, Marcel. Festivals and Songs in Ancient China 

Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People (.pdf)

Higonnet, Patrice. Paris: Capital of the World 

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 

Steven Lukes. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work 

Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days  

Weber, Eugene. Peasants into Frenchmen 

Robb, Graham. Discovery of France 

James, Wendy. Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute 

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. 

Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August

***  *** 

Evaluation 

Weekly Quizzes (15)                                                  15%

Biographical Letter                                                     15%

Biographical Review Essay                                        15%
Seminar Paper                                                            55% 

Class attendance and participation is expected.  More than one absence will significantly affect your grade.  Late assignments will be penalized. 

[b] Triumphal RF

In this advanced seminar, we investigate the manner in which history and anthropology, two “total” disciplines (each considering all aspects of human life their purview), have engaged “the other”—different cultures, social classes, and economic groupings, to name just a few.  

The seminar will begin with an overview of the history of significant cultural interactions from earliest times (particularly Homer, Herodotus, and Sima Qian) to the present.  

The bulk of the seminar is devoted to careful study of French engagement with the outside world, as well as the disparate elements of a growing and changing French countryside in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  

Students will use the skills that they develop in their study of French anthropologie et histoire to prepare their own essays on specific traditions of engaging the other.

History 310

The Other Studies Another
Spring 2019

Week IX (March 21)—Note Thursday Meeting 
Marcel Mauss, The Gift 
Marcel Mauss, The Concept of the Person (.pdf file) 
Wendy James. Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute 

Week X (March 26)        
Graham, The Discovery of France 
            Part One 
                  The Undiscovered Continent

             The Tribes of France, I
             The Tribes of France, II
             O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Ou Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua
             Living in France I: The Face in the Museum
             Living in France II: A Simple Life
             Fairies, Virgins, Gods, and Priests
             Migrants and Commuters
             Interlude: The Sixty Million Others
        Part Two
             Maps
             Empire
             Travelling in France I: The Avenues of Paris
             Travelling in France II: The Hare and the Tortoise
             Colonization
             The Wonders of France
             The Postcards of the Natives
              Lost Provinces
              Journey to the Centre of France
             Epilogue: Secrets

 
Week XI  (April 2) 
Eugene Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France
             Introduction 

                  Part I: The Way Things Were 

                  A Country of Savages

                  The Mad Beliefs

                  The King’s Foot

                  Alone With One’s Fellows

                  From Justice, Lord, Deliver Us!

                  A Wealth of Tongues

                  France, One and Indivisible

                  The Working of the Land

                  Give Us This Day

                  From ‘Subsistance’ to ‘Habitat’

                  The Family 

             Part II: The Agencies of Change 

                       Roads, Roads, and Still More Roads

                  Keeping Up With Yesterday

                  Rus in Urbe

                  Peasants and Politics

                  Migration: An Industry of the Poor

                  Migration of Another Sort: Military Service

                  Civilizing in Earnest: Schools and Schooling

                  Dieu Et-il Français?

                  The Priests and the People

             Part III: Change and Assimilation 

                       The Way of All Feasts

                  Charivaris

                  Markets and Fairs

                  Veillées

                  The Oral Wisdom

                  Fled is That Music

                  Le Papier Qui Parle

                  Wring Out the Old

                  Cultures and Civilization

Week XII (April 9)   
Patrice Higonnet. Paris: Capital of the World 
                  A City of Myths

                  Capital of the Modern Self

                  Capital of Revolution

                  Mysterious Capital of Crime

                  Negative Myths of La Parisienne

                  Capital of Science

                  Reading the Parisian Myths

                  Capital of Alienation

                  Paris in the World

                  Three Literary Visions

                  Capital of Pleasure

                  The American Imagination

                  From Myth to Phantasmagoria

                  The Surrealists’ Quest

                  Capital of Art

                  A Universal City

Week XIII (April 16)      
Barbara Tuchman. The Guns of August 
                        A Funeral   
                   Plans   
                        "Let the Last Man on the RIght Brush the Channel with his Sleeve"
                        The Shadow of Sedan
                        "A Single British Soldier"
                        The Russian Steam Roller 
                   Outbreak
                         August 1: Berlin
                         August 1: Paris and London
                         Ultimatum in Brussels
                         "Home Before the Leaves Fall"
                   Battle
                         "Goeben...An Enemy Then Flying"
                         Liege and Alsace
                         BEF to the Continent
                         Sambre et Meuse
                         Debacle: Lorraine, Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons
                         "The Cossacks Are Coming"
                         Tannenberg
                         The Flames of Louvain
                          Blue Water, Blockade, and the Great Neutral
                          Retreat
                          The Front is Paris
                          Von Kluck's Turn
                          "Gentlemen, We Will Fight on the Marne"
                          Afterword    

Week XIV (April 23)   
xxx. xxx 
                  xxx       
                  xxx 

Week XV  (April 30)  
xxx. xxx 
                  xxx       
                  xxx 

 Final Papers Due by 5:00 p.m. on xxx  

Click here for the other half of this two-part syllabus post:
HIST 310: Weeks 1-8                        HIST 310: Weeks 9-16

[c] On the Seine RF

La Pensée Cyclique—Introduction

[a] Cyclical RF

I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine—someone with whom I have spent inordinate amounts of time over the last quarter century. His name is Marcel Granet, and he is from France. I met Professor Granet (1884-1940) during my first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and he has been my constant companion ever since—accompanying me all over the world, appearing in many of my classes, and climbing with me up and down all of China's sacred mountains (especially those sacred mountains). The cyclical patterning that I find so riveting in Chinese cosmology and centuries of thinking about China's sacred mountains appears prominently in all of Granet's writings. It is the reason that this series is entitled La Pensée Cyclique—Cyclical Thought.

***  **

[b] UC RF

During the fall and spring of the 1987-1988 academic year, I participated in a seminar on French sociological thought given by the sociologist Edward Shils. At the same time, I began a year of classical Chinese study, covering five separate courses, with Donald Harper, an early China specialist in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Chicago. By the middle of October, I had heard the name “Marcel Granet” mentioned several times by Professors Shils and Harper. Why hadn't I heard of him before?, I wondered.

Over the course of the year, I heard his name many more times, but I became more and more puzzled as time went on. In my seminars and my outside reading, it appeared to me that Marcel Granet was being claimed by sociologists and China scholars, respectively, with few clearly articulating where he fit into either scholarly tradition. There was a broad range of agreement on one point, however—he was a highly imaginative and brilliant scholar. Maurice Freedman puts it succinctly in his introductory essay at the beginning of the English translation of La religion des chinois (The Religion of the Chinese People).

       Nobody familiar with French thought between the Wars is likely to be surprised 

       to see a book by Marcel Granet in a series devoted to sociology, but it might at 

       first seem odd that  work entitled The Religion of the Chinese People should 

       appear as a contribution to “interpretive sociology.” It looks more like sinology 

       or ethnography. As a matter of fact, even if it had been merely either of those 

       things, it would have been worth translating, for it is to my mind the best single 

       brief work on the subject. Yet its significance goes deeper. It is an important 

       document in the annals of Durkheimian sociology.  And it was written by a 

       genius.[1]

[c] Social thought RF

As Freedman intimates, neither sociology nor Chinese studies really has a place anymore for Marcel Granet. The situation is far worse today than it was even in Granet’s own time. Freedman notes that sociology has distanced itself in many important respects from the study of societies other than Western industrial ones. The study of China today (something that, in a more innocent time, used to be called sinology, a term with which Granet and his peers were quite comfortable) is almost wholly innocent of sociological insights of the kind made by Granet and his colleagues more than sixty years ago. During the 1920s and 1930s, when Granet was in his scholarly prime, it was not at all unusual for sociologists to explore written materials from other societies for use in the their comparative work. In the late nineteenth century, there was an even more intense focus on Chinese society on the part of many scholars who would become known as founders of academic sociology, with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim being two of the most prominent. The fields were linked.

Even as a sinologist, Marcel Granet was also hardly alone in his interest in sociological theory—in France and beyond.  Most scholars of China were well-acquainted with the writings of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss, among others. Indeed, the rise of both disciplines from esoteric or personal studies to fully academic disciplines coincided to a very great extent. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw both fields "cement" their academic statuses in substantial ways—with university professorships created where none existed before. During Granet’s prime in the years between the world wars, each discipline entered (depending on how one counts) a second or third generation in which methodology and theory was ever more precisely defined. By the beginning of World War II, sociology had been taught in major universities for several generations and Chinese studies had begun to take hold as an academic concentration in Europe and North America.

[c] Social persuasion RF

More than seventy years after Marcel Granet’s death, however, relatively little has been written about his life or his scholarship, and the contrast with publications on his teacher, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), or his close friend, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), is stark. It occurred to me, as I studied with Professors Shils and Harper in their seminars, that what was needed to remedy the situation was a retrospective of Granet’s work that included not only all of his published writings, but the writings of the sinological and sociological traditions that inspired him. 

Even though I went on to other areas in my own graduate studies, this “synthetic project” continued to intrigue me, to the extent that I offered a seminar of my own on Marcel Granet in the Continuing Education program at the University of Chicago in 1991, and two others in 2002 and 2004 at Beloit College. In 2006, I received a grant from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (the title is the same as that for this series of posts) to study Granet. My mountain project grew directly out of that grant, and this series of blog posts is for me a way of introducing Granet to a wider readership and exploring ways to further our understanding of his odd and brilliant scholarship

***  ***

My main "academic" point is simple, and it dovetails quite nicely with a biographical approach to Marcel Granet. For the last seven decades, scholars have read Granet's works (or neglected them) through the lens of their current-day disciplines. I maintain, however, that we will never adequately interpret Marcel Granet’s work without understanding the sociology behind his sinology. It is precisely Granet’s rich background in sociological theory that makes him appear strange to scholars of China. It is why they neglect most of his books and even why they fail to understand the one they admire (the untranslated La pensée chinoise—Chinese Thought).

Sociologists have been even more neglectful of Granet’s scholarship, although the reasons are at least easier to understand. The more Granet's research engages details of Chinese literature, philosophy, and history, the less sociologists have read it. It is as if they have given him back to the sinologists because of their inability to read Chinese texts.  

[d] Intersecting RF

The reason that I am teaching and writing about Marcel Granet is quite direct—almost no one else has done so and the neglect is a stain on our studies, a pox on both our houses. Although writers occasionally give voice to the fact that Granet must be understood as both a sinologist and a sociologist—and as a student of two eminent mentors, the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the sinologist Edouard Chavannes—they rarely follow through and engage the complex issues and texts that make up Granet’s oeuvre.

It is true that China scholars have an advantage in this regard, since they know the Chinese textual tradition so dear to Marcel Granet in a way that is closed to sociologists without knowledge of Chinese. That those same China scholars have, almost to a person, failed to read deeply in the French sociological tradition is inexplicable. More than seventy years after his death, few scholars have written more than a handful of pages that directly address the sociology behind Granet’s sinology, and the sinology behind his sociology.  The work of a truly great scholar and fascinating human being has thus been needlessly marginalized.

My purpose is quite humble, and you might want to think of this series as a cluster of writings that amount to a very long review essay on Granet and his work. I have worked through a wide range of sources in French and Chinese, reviewing in the process all of Granet’s writings as well as his sociological and sinological influences. It is the very least that a truly great scholar deserves.

[e] Sociomagical RF

Back in graduate school a quarter century ago, it seemed straightforward (everything does before we realize how much time everything takes). Then, as now, my goal was to reread, with care and diligence, all of the major works of Marcel Granet, Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Granet’s sinological mentors and students, and the Chinese sources that formed the core of Granet’s work—the French sociological journal L’année sociologique and a solid core of Chinese texts from the Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties.  Even that initially "modest" aim has contained enormous challenges, but it appears to me that we will never begin to understand any great scholar's work without returning to those sources that were his inspiration. And it's as simple as that. In order to put Marcel Granet back together again—to reintegrate the Granet of the sociologists and the Granet of the sinologists—it is a "straightforward" matter of reading, and thinking carefully about, everything he wrote...and everything he read.

These posts present just a little bit of the work that is coming out of that engagement. 

Notes 

[1] Maurice Freedman, "Marcel Granet, Sociologist" in Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 5. 

Bibliography 

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

     Harper & Row, 1973.

[f] Square RF

---

Endings (6)—Primitive Classification

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series "Endings."

[a] On the cover of "Primitive Classification"

As endings go, Primitive Classification—the intriguing, inconsistent, and insightful minor classic written by uncle and nephew, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss—seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. Like a good deal of social scientific writing, it sums up what the authors have stated throughout their slender text. In this case, it says again that the individual is overrated.

[c] Nephew

[b] Uncle

A more careful reading of the last few paragraphs of the essay, however, starts to give the reader a feel for the spirit of the "Durkheimian" school of social analysis. Originally published in the seminal journal Année sociologique, the essay builds to a point that was powerful when originally written, and even now is too easily forgotten in what we might call everyday social analysis. In a nutshell, social forces swirl and penetrate all aspects of life, from individual thought to social organization.

By the time our authors reach their final paragraph, they are thoroughly in their element, stating boldly the sweeping power of social analysis to break the tangles of muddled, overly "individualistic" thought. The careful reader is spellbound. Even today, I cheer them as they tackle what seems to be the entire Western philosophical tradition focusing on individual action and thought. They build to an enveloping crescendo with the alliterative power of the penultimate line. I get a rush just typing it. It is a rich and powerful ending...like Beethoven.

As soon as they are posed in sociological terms, all these questions, so long debated by metaphysicians and psychologists, will at last be liberated from the tautologies in which they have languished.

And then they blow it with one of the worst final sentences I have ever read. I am a great admirer of Durkheim and Mauss, but I cannot understand how their final sentence—which directly follows the robust writing, above—got past their inner (or outer) editors. You'll find it in the quotation below.  I cannot bear to repeat it here.

Note to aspiring writers—don't back off of your forceful point at the very moment you have your readers within your grasp. Liberate them from their tautologies and close in triumph.

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification

[d] Classified

It has quite often been said that man began to conceive things by relating them to himself. The above allows us to see more precisely what this anthropocentrism, which might better be called sociocentrism, consists of. The center of the first schemes of nature is not the individual; it is society. It is this that is objectified, not man...This is how it is that the idea of a logical classification was so hard to form, as we showed at the beginning of this work. It is because a logical classification is a classification of concepts. Now a concept is the notion of a clearly determined group of things; its limits may be marked precisely. Emotion, on the contrary, is something essentially fluid and inconsistent. Its contagious influence spreads far beyond its point of origin, extending to everything about it, so that it is not possible to say where its power of propagation ends. States of an emotional nature necessarily possess the same characteristic. It is not possible to say where they begin or where they end; they lose themselves in each other, and mingle their properties in such a way that they cannot be rigorously categorized...

[e] Durkheim's journal

Now emotion is naturally refractory to analysis, or at least lends itself uneasily to it, because it is too complex. Above all when it has a collective origin it defies critical and rational examination. The pressure exerted by the group on each of its members does not permit individuals to judge freely the notions which society itself has elaborated and in which it has placed something of its personality. Such constructs are sacred for individuals. Thus the history of scientific classification is, in the last analysis, the history of the stages by which this element of social affectivity has progressively weakened, leaving more and more room for the reflective thought of individuals. But it is not the case that these remote influences which we have just studied have ceased to be felt today. They have left behind them an effect which survives and is always present; it is the very cadre of classification, it is the ensemble of mental habits by virtue of which we conceive things and facts in the form of co-ordinated or hierarchized groups.

[f] Liberated from tautology

This example shows what light sociology throws on the genesis, and consequently the functioning, of logical operations. What we have tried to do for classification might equally be attempted for the other functions or fundamental notions of the understanding. We have already had occasion to mention, in passing, how even ideas so abstract as those of time and space are, at each point in their history, closely connected with the corresponding social organization. The same method could help us likewise to understand the manner in which the ideas of cause, substance, and the different modes of reasoning, etc. were formed. As soon as they are posed in sociological terms, all these questions, so long debated by metaphysicians and psychologists, will at last be liberated from the tautologies in which they have languished. At least, this is a new way which deserves to be tried.[1]

[1] Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification [Rodney Needham, editor and translator] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 87-88. Italics mine.