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Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. By DAviD B. HONEY. American Oriental Series, no. 86. New Haven: AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 2001. Pp. xxxv + 359. $35.
The reverential title of this account of the work of Western scholars working in the field of Chinese studies up to the middle of the twentieth century, with some survivals into the early decades of its second half invites us not merely to acknowledge and respect the work of our predecessors but also, in chosen cases, to worship them. We are asked to go back to them for a comprehensive, "philological" method that has been too much pushed aside and forgotten in the compartmentalization of scholarship along the lines of disciplines such as history, linguistics, comparative literature, etc. Ancestor worship is an important aspect of traditional Chinese culture, but is it really something we should import into modern scholarship? I think not. As I have recently had occasion to point out in connection with the development of Chinese historical phonology in the twentieth century, uncritical acceptance of the errors of some of the major players, Bernhard Karlgren, Chao Yuen Ren and Li Fang-kuei, continues to bedevil the field.1 Appreciation for the contribution of our predecessors should be this side idolatry. We must build on the achievements of our predecessors but not uncritically.
Raising the issue of philology (and sinology as a branch of philology) versus disciplinary studies also seems to me to be a rather perverse attempt to reawaken controversies that were fought out during the period of rapid expansion of Chinese studies that took place after the end of the Second World War. The war against Japan and the Communist Revolution in China had revealed how ill-equipped Western countries were to understand East Asia. In the rapid expansion of East Asian studies that took place in the immediate post-war decades it is not surprising that there were conflicts between established scholars whose interests had been mostly focused on the classical, formative period of Chinese civilization and those who thought that attention should be transferred to more recent times and what they felt were more immediately relevant problems.
If we look at the present state of Chinese studies in North America and...