Abstract
The present study aims to introduce a metaphor of “ornamentalization” in regard to a methodology of cross-cultural philosophical exchange derived from Confucian cultural practices. The term is closely related to the original semantics of the Chinese notion of wenhua 文化, which is conventionally translated as “culture” but far more embracive than that. The model of ornamentalization demonstrates that a certain narrative—or ornament—that is unable to inform a given set of actual socio-cultural practices, is inscribed upon these practices, on their periphery. One can look through the lens of ornamentalization theory vis-à-vis contemporary Confucianism, which appeared after the rapid Westernization of China in the early 20th century and has called for the coexistence between Confucianism and Western philosophical traditions. Its represenatives use classical Confucian patterns to ornamentalize the existing “Westernized China” image. Ornamentalization—concerning cross-cultural philosophical exchange—is therefore associated with meaningful decoration, or with the inscription on a material that effects no substantial change in the material but, at the same time, makes it open for interpretations. The idea of ornamentalization is helpful in avoiding the trap of Eurocentric representation and could further advance the task of transcultural (post)comparative philosophy.
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Introduction
Methodological Eurocentrism is a massive discourse entangled with numerous pressing issues in today’s world. Substantial research has revealed the complexity of the topic, and in particular—the difficulty of locating a definite source of distortions brought by it. Dealing with it could help human epistemologies step beyond Eurocentrism—as well as any other centrism. The present study is grounded on the premise, which is substantiated in the first section, that if there is something that needs to be transgressed, that is the Western (not geographically or institutionally but adhering to a certain political narrative) privilege to conceptualize and channel philosophical interactions. Consequently, there is a need for not just phenomenological but also methodological insights from non-Anglophone discourses. Furthermore, this article is meant to offer “ornamentalization,” a notion created according to the semantic rules of the Chinese language, which can serve as a non-Western model for cross-cultural philosophical exchange.
To outline the research track of this study, I should start backward. In my previous work on contemporary Confucianism (an intellectual movement usually dated 1922–), I was particularly intrigued by the peculiar approach to referencing demonstrated in the works by contemporary Confucians, for instance, Liang (2015), Tu (1989), and others. The active use of Western philosophical vocabulary was rarely substantiated by their wish to contribute to the respective philosophical discourses, while the mere mention of landmark names and concepts of Western philosophy was considered enough for the acquisition of the respective ideas for the sake of developing Confucianism. Suppose we assume that referencing one philosophical tradition while creating a text, which is a cultural artifact, in another philosophical tradition. In that case, we clearly have in front of us a case of cross-cultural philosophical exchange. That is why my attempts to discover the underlying cognitive paradigm that could have inspired the kind of writing used in contemporary Confucianism led me to the following questions: What is the Chinese understanding of culture? What is the Confucian understanding of cross-cultural exchange? How did Eurocentrism affect this understanding? And eventually: What concept could help us formulate a contemporary Confucian approach to cross-cultural exchange in a way that would be non-dismissive (and in this respect non-Eurocentric) of the Chinese cultural toolkit but also valid within the Anglophone philosophical discourse? The answer came in the form of ornamentalization, which will be described in the second and third sections.
Methodological Eurocentrism: what is there to transgress
There has been significant debate in contemporary philosophical academia on methodological Eurocentrism and the perspectives on transgressing it. I will name just a few arguments that demonstrate the depth of the matter.
The first one is an account of Eurocentrism in general given by Arun Kumar Pokhrel—one of the contributors to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice published in 2011. As he puts it in his respective article, Eurocentrism is generally defined as a cultural phenomenon that views the histories and cultures of non-Western societies from a European or Western perspective. Pokhrel posits that Eurocentrism is no longer an ideology but rather a matter of the past. The emergence of area studies, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, and other fields successfully counterbalanced this hegemony with subaltern voices and the ideas of proliferating authentic ways of self-representation (Pokhrel 2011, p. 325). Pokhrel refers to the two most prominent works of Edward Said but does not mention Said’s interesting proceeding, namely that Eurocentrism should be systematically exposed as a dangerous distortion that imposes conceptual limits not so much on the non-Western means of self-representation, but even more—on the Western epistemic matrices. Orientalism prevents Euro-American intellectuals from viewing “the East” with an imperative any other than dominative (Said 2003, p. 3). Consequently, that makes the whole “Western knowledge” highly inflexible and non-susceptible to other ways of regulating the dichotomy between the Self and the Other. Therefore, Orientalism—and Eurocentrism—represents an issue far from being in the past and that is restraining the explanatory capacities of Western epistemology to the same extent as the non-Western epistemologies.
Linda Alcoff, in her massively cited paper “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1991), mentions that apart from the problems associated with speaking for (or about) others, there is a problem with speaking for myself. She writes that in speaking for myself, as it happens, I (momentarily) create my self—just as much as when I speak for others, I create their selves (Alcoff 1991, p. 10). This is associated with the issue of membership in a particular group (or groups), which is not that easily defined. For the case of methodological Eurocentrism, this point subsequently highlights that “the West” is far from being a delimited group, making Eurocentrism an even more elusive phenomenon. Alcoff also posits that we should not assume as self-evident that speaking for others implies violence and is therefore not valid in any case since it might not feel right to follow “the other’s lead uncritically.” “We” (from the dichotomy “us” and “them”) can, of course, “move over and get out of the way,” that is, keep silent or deconstruct “our” own discourses rather than speak out for or about “them” in front of the listeners. However, given that the speaker’s context is only partially determinant and is rebalanced by the contexts of the listeners, the speaker loses some part of control over his or her utterance. This, along with “speaking for myself,” Alcoff writes, creates the following problem:
The “retreat” position assumes that one can retreat into one’s discrete location and make claims entirely and singularly based on that location that do not range over others, that one can disentangle oneself from the implicating networks between one’s discursive practices and others’ locations, situations, and practices. […] But there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one's words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between one's location and all others (Alcoff 1991, p. 20).
Another record of problems associated with methodological Eurocentrism can be found in Manuel Vargas’s illuminating essay Real Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, and Metametaphilosophy (2007). He suggested a demarcation between the first-order and the higher- (or second-) order philosophy. First-order philosophical work includes perspectives on what is the good, the true, the beautiful, and other major topics, as well as the famous thinkers’ accounts of what is generally considered to be central to their thinking (David Lewis’s account of possible worlds, Levinas’s discussion of alterity, and Vasconcelos’s articulation of his aesthetic monism). According to Vargas (2007), all first-order philosophizing, despite its acknowledgment of non-Western traditions, complies with the past thirty years of mainstream Anglophone philosophy. The second-order philosophy aims to answer questions such as “What makes something a philosophy?’ or “What is Latin American philosophy?” If, however, it tends to employ sets of instruments from disciplines other than philosophy (be it history and sociology, or, as I would add, sinology or Confucianism) to address their subject matters, it is regarded as disconnected from the principle of pure philosophical inquiry and therefore viewed as marginal, not contributing to philosophy as a discipline (Vargas 2007, p. 57). In other words, nothing that is done with philosophy from outside philosophy, or rather from outside the Anglophone first-order philosophical methodology, is considered a philosophical revolution.
Lucy Allais brings forward Vargas’s idea in her concern about the wrong ways of decolonizing the curriculum in philosophy. She argues that Western philosophy has historically claimed rights for a very wide range of methodologies and ideas, including those originating from what is now hardly seen as Europe or the West. So, it is problematic for a non-Western tradition to define itself in opposition to Western philosophy since there are hardly any topics or methodologies that have not been covered by philosophical thinking, which is identified as Western (Allais 2016, p. 544).
Finally, there was a heated debate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences on April 25, 2019. It circled around the topic of conceptual Eurocentrism, which resulted in a series of academic papers. Andrey Krushinskiy argued that any philosophizing, regardless of its cultural tradition and of the subject matter (which in his case is Russian sinology taking into view Daoism), ends up formulating its core ideas in Euro-American terms and using Euro-American conceptual apparatus. He posited: “Conceptual Eurocentrism, which is conscious of its methodology, is not an embarrassing irremovable impediment to a researcher’s work, but, on the contrary, is an effective instrument which helps us trace the primary origins of universal human thinking” (Krushinskiy 2019, p. 39, tr. VS).
His opponents, Andrew Paribok and Ruzana Pskhu, stated that the relevancy of the Eurocentric conceptual apparatus is not universal, but rather depends on the area of philosophical inquiry in question. At the same time, they agreed that Krushinskiy is partly right if we consider the “non-philosophical” contexts. Namely, due to the long history of Westernization individual researchers of local philosophical cultures have become able to grasp the ways and concerns of Western culture—which makes their philosophizing essentially Western: “If postmodernist phenomena are registered in India, Singapore, or Japan, it is most natural that the thinkers who focus on these phenomena proceed from the findings of French philosophy” (Paribok and Pskhu 2019, pp. 59–60, tr. VS).
To sum it up, firstly, the problem cannot be solved with “the West” retreating into its position, since there is no position that could both assume responsibility for what one is trying to convey and be neutral in a sense that it would not affect the other’s experiences of themselves. Secondly, the philosophical methodologies the non-Western thinkers derive from their rich intellectual legacies, despite their embeddedness in the respective lingua-cultural paradigms, are portrayed as if they were a priori covered by the Western methodologies due to the latter’s highly porous boundaries. Finally, the conceptual engagement with Western philosophy continues to be crucial to some of the non-Western researchers’ self-identification, even if they deal with local cultural phenomena.
The arguments mentioned above show that given the highly complex structure of today’s cross-cultural philosophical communication,Footnote 1 it is not sufficient to simply grant the subalterns a right for self-representation. As Gayatri Spivak once noted, this would only have essentialized them as non-ideologically constructed subjects (Spivak 1988), with the power to essentialize remaining in the hands of “the West,” even if the West is not aware of that.
My belief, which is in line with the recent developments of transcultural studies and transcultural post-comparative philosophy, is that the need to engage with Western philosophy is not an impediment, but rather a possibility for non-Western researchers to develop methodologies, models, and lenses that would meet the needs of highly complex non-Western societies, striving both for modernity and re-integration with their cultural roots. Simply compartmentalizing Western philosophy within its geographical and institutional borders does not contribute to transgressing methodological Eurocentrism in Europe and North America or the philosophical communities worldwide. We need to consider what exactly needs to be transgressed, and that is the Western (not geographically or institutionally but adhering to a certain political narrative) privilege to conceptualize and channel philosophical interactions. As such, the next two sections explain the idea of wenhua as ornamentalization and how this idea can help that cause.
Wenhua as ornamentalization: genealogy of the term
The Chinese notion of wenhua 文化 is mainly translated as “culture” or “cultural.” This translation is relatively stable. For decades, it has been used in the definitions of landmark phenomena of late modern Chinese history, such as the “New Culture Movement” (xin wenhua yundong 新文化运动) of the 1910s and 1920s, or the “Great Cultural Revolution” (wenhua da geming 文化大革命) from 1966 to 1976. It is hard to think of wenhua as something unrelated to culture, and while, to a certain extent, it does embrace the connotations commensurable to the notion of culture, these connotations by no means exhaust it.
We can trace the etymology of wen and hua in the Eastern Han dictionary Shuowen jiezi 《说文解字》. In the section called “Wen” it says that wen means to draw in the way of crossing (xiang jiao wen 象交文). However, mentions of wen can be found earlier in the inscriptions on the oracle bones and bronze ware of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Various interpretations of wen were offered by Chinese archaeologists and historians upon studying these inscriptions, the most remarkable of them listed in the article “Introduce [sic!] to the Non-symmetry of Word Derivation between ‘Wenhua’ and ‘Culture’” by Fei Deng and Jianli Tang. Wen is represented as either a person whose chest is decorated with pictures, or the very act of carving one’s chest and letting the blood flow into the soil. Both interpretations are closely associated with sacrificing and, as Deng and Tang conclude, with the primitive ideas about the relationship between man and nature: “It [the meaning of wen] disclosed that persons are a part of the nature, and human beings must be adapting to the nature from birth to death” (Deng and Tang 2015, p. 146).
The “Hua” section of Shuowen jiezi says: hua is to change through persuasion (jiao xing ye, cong bi cong ren 教行也, 从匕从人).Footnote 2 Again, judging from the inscriptions on the oracle bones, hua is seen as a depiction of one person standing upright with another person standing on the head. This image is surrounded by 20th-century interpretations, such as “to be pregnant,” “to turn somersault,” “to change into,” and “to reform.” Deng and Tang argue that the meaning that the character hua was meant to convey is that before the apparent outer change (like a woman giving birth to a child, or a person starting to make reasonable decisions), there has already been a steadily growing yet largely untraceable inner change: “It is from person’s change to the change’s cause—attempt guided to change by persuasion and protocol and music education. And it also is from the person’s change by nature to outer nature’s change” (Deng and Tang 2015, p. 146).
All the changes in nature adhere to this model, and consequently, it is precisely the model a human being should follow to live harmoniously; that is where we find, supposedly mild and steady, education through protocol and music.
The notions of wen and hua were used together in quite a few ancient texts. Western Han (202 BCE–9 CE) Liu Xiang’s Garden of Stories contains the following saying: “Fan wu zhi xing, wei bu fu ye; wen hua bu gai, ran hou jia zhu. 凡武之兴为不服也。文化不改, 然后加诛。”Footnote 3 It can be translated as: “Each time wu appears, it is always a kind of violation; if not changed through wenhua, then punishment should be exercised” (tr. VS). The Western Jin era (266–316 CE) poet Shu Xi’s poem Buwangshi contains the following: “Wen hua nei ji, wu gong wai you 文化内辑 武功外悠,” which means that “if wenhua is stored internally, it will be easy to master external wugong” (tr. VS). These examples reveal the juxtaposition of wen and wu 武, or wenhua and wugong, which is why researchers tend to explain wen as an antonym of wu, the latter depicting martial, forceful, coercive (Deng and Tang 2015, p. 147). Wen is therefore seen as an antithesis of war, associated with harmonious, sophisticated, aesthetic, and wenhua, which correlates to the rule by persuasion, “education through protocol and music.” As I would argue, this is only one line of the evolution of wen in its connection to hua, while there is at least one more.
To trace it, I suggest dissociating—not permanently, but in furtherance of this analytical operation—both wen and hua from the connotations which they have in common with the Latin-derived word “culture”, such as “cultivation,” “civilization,” “education,” or those relating to a definite type of human experience, that is, aesthetic experience of art, poetry, music, theatre, etc.
Upon doing this, we go back and search for the mentions of wen and hua not in one phrase but, more widely, in one context. One specific mention that I have in view, and that the current research is limited to, is in the Yijing (The Book of Changes), the tuan 彖 commentary on the 22nd hexagram bi 贲: “Guan hu tian wen, yi cha shi bian; guan hu ren wen, yi hua tian xia. 观乎天文, 以查时变; 观乎人文, 以化天下。” The US-American sinologist Roger Ames, who, along with Russian sinologist Artem Kobsev, should take credit for the idea of looking at wen not merely through its juxtaposition to wu 武, translates this Yijing phrase as: “Through observing carefully the heavenly patterns we can gain insight into the changing seasons; through observing carefully the embellishments made by human beings, we can transform the world” (Ames 2022, p. 60). Ames, therefore, interprets wen in two ways: as “pattern,” when it is paired with “Heaven,” and as “embellishments,” that is, when it is paired with human beings. His further text, however, does not elaborate on why this distinction is made, nor does it take a closer look at the hexagram bi, while I see it as crucial in understanding the two modes of wen.
Richard Wilhelm translates bi 贲 as grace (in German: Anmut).Footnote 4 The judgment is: “Grace has success. In small matters it is favorable to undertake something.” (Bi: Heng. Xiao li you suo wang. 贲: 亨。小利有所往。) Wilhelm’s own commentary starts with “Grace brings success. However, it is not the essential or fundamental thing; it is only the ornament and therefore be used sparingly and only in little things,” and that is where we see the mention of “ornament” for the first time, along with the argument that the ornament is not something fundamental, which echoes Ames’ interpretation of wen as “embellishment.”
The image of bi says: “Fire at the foot of the mountain. Thus does the superior man proceed when clearing up current affairs. But he dares not decide controversial issues in this way.” (象曰: 山下有火, 贲; 君子以明庶政, 无敢折狱。) Fire (☲) is the lower trigram, where “a yielding line comes between two strong lines and makes them beautiful, but the strong lines are the essential content, and the weak line is the beautifying form.” Mountain (☶) is the upper trigram, where “the strong line takes the lead, so that here again the strong element must be regarded as the decisive factor.” Wilhelm proceeds with his commentary: “In human affairs, aesthetic form comes into being when traditions exist that, strong and abiding like mountains, are made pleasing by a lucid beauty”.Footnote 5
It is now becoming clear why wen is used in the “Tuan Commentary” to bi, despite it being absent in the original text decoding of the hexagram. The wen of Heaven and the wen of human beings should not be mixed up: the first one is the pattern of nature, which cannot be changed and is only to be observed and abided for the sake of physical survival; the second represents the patterns that humans create when dealing with small matters which cannot affect changes in the most fundamental things, so they are called “embellishments,” or “ornaments.” At the same time, wen is repeated here to indicate that the way the world is transformed is recognizable, that is, it shares the same rhythm with “the change of times’ driven by the patterns of Heaven. As Wilhelm writes, “Grace-beauty of form is necessary in any union if it is to be well ordered and pleasing rather than disordered and chaotic.”Footnote 6
An interesting observation of bi was also made by a Russian sinologist and interpreter, Julian Shchutsky. He renders heng 亨 as development, not as success, but also points out that this “development is only limited to minor, surface reforms and introduces nothing essentially new. These reforms are just shiny decorations which have lost their former value.” (Shchutsky 1937, 363, tr. VS). To substantiate his point, Shchutsky emphasizes the semantics of the ideogram bi 贲, which has “shell” (bei贝) as its part. Cowry shells are believed to have been the earliest form of currency in the region of Central China’s before copper coins were introduced. Having lost their practical value as money, these shells retained their symbolic value as jewelry, which explains why many characters depicting decorative and luxury things have “shell” as a determinative. (Shchutsky 1937, p. 363, tr. VS). I believe that despite his rather dismissive tone, Shchutsky aims to say that the “shiny decorations’ are important and that bi comprehensibly reveals certain phases of human existence characterized by a human inclination to focus on and experience something non-fundamental, peripheral.
To summarize this investigation of the Yijing, wen is used in the “Tuan Commentary” in relation to the bi hexagram to indicate a particular type of order, or rhythm, which can be observed (Ames), contemplated (Wilhelm). As for hua cheng tianxia, it indicates that the world (tianxia, human world) can be transformed (Ames) or shaped (Wilhelm) precisely through reading the “human embellishments,” not “heavenly patterns.” Hua indicates that something has changed to become wen. To read something, one should be able to decode it, that is, to have it resemble an “ornament.” Ornaments cannot be found in nature, nor can they affect nature in any fundamental way, but they are invented to read its rhythms. To ornamentalize something, therefore, means to render it readable, and the notion of wenhua communicates this meaning quite precisely.
Artem Kobsev, in his note dedicated to wen and included in the encyclopedia Дyxoвнaя Кyльтypa Китaя [The Non-material Culture of China] by the Russian Academy of Sciences, also claims that the earliest mentions of wen were associated with woven fabrics. He refers to another Russian sinologist, Artemy Karapetyantz, who suggested that the etymology of the character wen 文 can be traced to the image of crossing threads depicted in the ideogram yao 爻, which are embroidered on fabrics. Kobsev adds that weaving and knitting constitute the basic system of marking that writing evolves from. In China, it traces back to jie sheng ji shi 结绳记事, keeping records by tying knots. Thus, wen must be, first, a system of marking and, second, writing, along with other related components of human material culture. Kobsev, therefore, suggests defining wen—in its broad sense—as “any type of revealed and comprehended sequence.” He names examples, such as niao shou zhi wen 鸟兽之文—“signs of birds and animals,” the systems of their traces, di wen 地文 (which is paired to tian wen)—“contours of the terrain” (Kobsev 2006, p.193, tr. VS). If wen is a “revealed sequence,” then wenhua can be rendered as “to have something resemble a revealed sequence.”
In late modern history, the notion of wenhua started to signify the English word “culture”/“cultural,” or—in some contexts—“civilization”/“civilizational,” the meaning of which is very close to that of the notion wenming (文明). A detailed article by Huang Xingtao points to some important aspects of the historical background against which these two notions acquired their respective English equivalents. According to Huang, the notions of wenhua and wenming were steadily and quite consciously adjusted to the Latin-derived words “culture,” as well as French culture, and German Kultur throughout the period from 1860s to the 1900s, amidst the state crisis in the Late Qing empire, in an attempt for a swift identity change which was supposed to pave the way for the Chinese modernization, the only existing way to which was through Westernization. The Qing intellectuals, who were working on it, took wen for “advanced” and “sophisticated” as opposed to “barbarian” and “primitive”—the meaning that the ancient Chinese notion of wen indeed had acquired at some point, but was not limited to. The notion of wenming was translated as “civilization,” where ming stood for “enlightenment,” making wenming even more firmly embedded in the European mindset. With the equation culture = civilization/progress, which dominated the Anglo-French world during that time, the Chinese intellectuals saw no need to strictly delimit wenhua and wenming: in some works, wenhua was solely mentioned as an abbreviation for the extended Chinese equivalent of “civilization”: wenming kaihua 文明开化), “enlightened and opened up.” Huang’s article introduces another remarkable Chinese historical record, which presents a civilized and cultured nation as a nation that “aims for material development, parliamentary democracy, and scientific progress, and is driven by logical thinking’ (Huang 2006, p. 15, tr. VS). As such, the historical reception of culture and its naturalization as wenhua was much swifter than these two complex notions would have required.
The historian and sinologist Joseph Ciaudo concentrates on the interaction between the German Kultur and the Japanese bunka, a Japanese transcription attached to the characters 文化 (Chinese: wenhua). Indeed, Japan started acquiring and domesticating European terminology earlier than China and did it massively: many Chinese equivalents for European terms, such as “philosophy,” “material,” “constitution,” “rights,” etc., came as characters from Japan. Ciaudo draws our attention to the fact that wenhua first appeared as “culture” in Japanese texts: “As Suzuki pointed out, the term bunka was first used in Japan to translate German political notions such as Kulturstaat, it also held a role in the translation of Kultur as used by Neokantian philosophers” (Ciaudo 2021, p. 29, italics VS).
However, in this case, the connection is also problematic since the German notion of Kultur embraces a wide variety of contexts associated with the rules of understanding and interpretation (Dilthey), the act of attributing value and meaning (Windelband), value as a specific mode of existence (Rickert), etc., everything which made historians of philosophy conclude that philosophy of culture originated in German thought (Dobrokhotov 2008, tr. VS). Finally, as Ciaudo further points out, when the concept of “a special body of native literature and art as a thing-in-itself, independent of and even more fundamental than the political and even social institutions which until then had been intimately associated with it” did appear in the Japanese and then in the Chinese discourse, bunka was not chosen to signify it. Another term was used: kokusui (or in Chinese: guocui 國粹), “national essence” (Ciaudo 2021, 30).
To sum up, the collected evidence listed above is meant to substantiate my idea that the semantical connection between wenhua and “culture” is somewhat improvised rather than sustainable and that it would be valid to offer an alternative reading of wenhua, which is “ornamentalization.”
Ornamentalization: a model for cross-cultural philosophical exchange
While I have shown that there was an infirm semantical ground for adopting “culture” as wenhua and, at the same time, much haste around the process, I am by no means intending to promote the canceling of the already conventional translation of wenhua as “culture.” On the contrary, I believe that this translation did have and still has a certain historical mission, since it serves as a conceptual path towards objectifying and categorizing the Chinese intellectual experience—the instrument that the Chinese nation did not have at its disposal until the end of the 19th century (Blitstein 2021). When Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918, it resonated strongly with Chinese intellectuals despite its seeming non-applicability outside of the European context. The mere fact that Spengler’s theory could spring from Western philosophical tradition and be significant for the cultural identity of the young Republic of China validated the idea of Chinese culture as an essentially autonomous entity.Footnote 7 As can be seen, by the 1920s, China had been gradually abandoning its strategy of radical Westernization of Chinese society.
At the same time, with the rise of transcultural studies, post-comparative philosophy, as well as their intersection known as transcultural (post)comparative philosophy, the very ideas of culture and doing philosophy, especially comparative and cross-cultural philosophy, are being reconceptualized. As the authors of the collective volume Engaging Transculturality state:
One of the principal assumptions of transcultural studies has been that a “culture” is constituted by processes of interaction, circulation, and reconfiguration. […] Culture is constantly changing, moving, adapting—and is doing this through contact and exchange beyond real or perceived borders. (Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019, p. 23)
That opens new possibilities for making a step forward from postcolonial concerns—to exploring the subaltern agency. Post-comparative philosophy also aims to make a step forward—in their case, from the debate on whether there is a way to make different philosophical traditions commensurable through some universal signifier. Ralph Weber and Arindam Chakrabarti showed in the introduction to their edited volume Comparative Philosophy without Borders (2015) that there are three stages, or instead phases, of comparative philosophy (Chakrabarti and Weber 2015, p. 20). Comparative research is driven, first, by the imperative to find “resemblances, overlaps, and anticipations in the Western and non-Western traditions,” second, by the imperative to find “contrasts and context-dependent culture-immanent peculiarities in non-Western philosophies, and to detect specific lacks compared to the Western tradition,” and third, by the attempt to reach a more level epistemic field, so that Indian, Chinese, or Japanese philosophy “is reinterpreted in terms of Western philosophical ideas,” and at the same time they “bring their elements into the English-language philosophy.” However, what Weber and Chakrabarti adhere to is the fourth stage, the “post-comparative philosophy”:
It would amount to just doing philosophy as one thinks fit for getting to the truth about an issue or set of issues, by appropriating elements from all philosophical views and traditions one knows of but making no claim of ‘correct exposition’, and instead just addressing hitherto unsolved problems and possibly raising issues that have never been considered before, anywhere. (Chakrabarti and Weber 2015, p. 22)
By contrast, transcultural (post)comparative philosophyFootnote 8 dissociates itself from the too-fusional post-comparative philosophy. They see their mission as follows:
[…] to create new methods and approaches to develop new, more coherent, and theoretically grounded models for the transmission of meanings and the exchange of knowledge and ideas between Asian and European philosophies. All these new methods and approaches are based on the awareness that we are dealing not only with different philosophical discourses, but also with structures and patterns of thought and language based on a different methodology and associated with different theoretical concerns. (Rošker 2022a, p. 7)
Therefore, the present section’s purpose is to tentatively offer ornamentalization as a new model of cross-cultural philosophical exchange. Inspired and validated by the etymology of wen and hua, it does not replace “culture” as its translation but rather demonstrates that non-Western terms can equally be subjected to productive deconstruction and reconceptualization. Ornamentalization, as I have previously suggested, judging from the etymology of wen and hua, deals with “rendering something readable,” or “having something resemble a revealed sequence” without interfering with the matters of ontology. Ornamentalization (or ornamentation), as an English term, is associated with meaningful decoration, or with the inscription on a material that effects no substantial change in the material, but simultaneously makes it open for interpretation. It is supposed to add to the list of metaphors offered by proponents of transcultural (post)comparative philosophy, such as Jana Rošker’s method of sublation. Rošker writes that in contrast to the metaphor of fusion, the metaphor of sublation preserves the original cognitive substances of the compared elements, and that genuine philosophizing cannot be based on continuous amalgamations of the material it proceeds from, it instead needs to take for granted the epistemological discreteness of both Eurocentric and Sinic cognitive paradigms (Rošker 2022b, p. 83). In this regard, ornamentalization can be used in the same way as cultural appropriation, but without the negative connotations often attached to the latter in the current Anglophone discourse.Footnote 9
To see whether ornamentalization can frame some of the issues in cross-cultural philosophical exchange, I suggest turning to Confucianism. Through the centuries reading, and narrating “classical canons” (jing 经) have been the primary methodological tools of Confucianism, and “the study of the classics” (jingxue 经学), or “Ruism,” “the teaching of the scholars” (ruxue 儒学) have been continuously promoted as better terms to denominate the idea of Confucianism. At the same time, Confucius made a substantial methodological contribution to the tradition by disclosing the agency behind reading and interpretation in his formula shu er bu zuo 述而不作 (Lunyu VII.1), “rather narrate than produce.” As Feng Youlan argued, over the generations of Ruists, the formula shu er bu zuo had gradually evolved into yi shu wei zuo 以述为作, “produce by narrating” (Feng 2013, p. 42). Both formulas indicate that narration is considered as important as production; in fact, the best, and the most ethical, production is narration. The most challenging periods for Confucianism were those when there was a pressing need to expand the body of “classics” in light of the increasing awareness among Chinese thinkers of Daoist and Buddhist canons. Artem Kobsev, who explored Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism in detail, writes that later scholars offered three models to theoretically frame the interaction between Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism during that time. The first one was “synthesis.” Prominent thinkers and scholars, such as Matteo Ricci, Feng Youlan, Joseph Needham, and William Theodore de Barry, claimed that Confucianism changed substantially under the influence of Daoism and Buddhism, with its certain parts (for example, ontology, according to Ricci) being entirely constituted of or substituted by either of them. The second model is “opposition,” which fights Daoism and Buddhism in the spirit of Han Yu, who suggested canceling them and burning down their canons. In recent times, Mou Zongsan and Yang Xiangkui argued that Neo Confucianism evolved from classical Confucianism without any help from Daoism and Buddhism and that everything in it arose from traditional Mencian considerations (Kobsev 2002, p. 24). Kobsev himself brings forward the “assimilation” argument. Agreeing with Mou Zongsan that the Neo Confucian core is essentially Confucian, he suggests focusing on the forms of “digestion,” or “reproduction” of Daoism and Buddhism that were developed in Neo Confucianism and eventually enabled its conceptual evolution (25). If we assume that that interaction was the first major engagement in cross-cultural philosophical exchange for Confucianism, then “synthesis,” “opposition,” and “assimilation” can be regarded as the first three Confucian models of this exchange.
Contemporary Confucianism, or New Confucianism, is the name that usually refers to the works of the 20th-century Chinese and Overseas Chinese intellectuals who sought ways to reconceptualize Confucianism in terms of Western and eventually, as they put it, “global philosophy.” Their texts often come in the typical Song-Ming Neo Confucianism form of either commentaries or reflections on early Confucian classics. After 1949, many “contemporary Confucians” left mainland China and settled in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, or Western countries, which made the movement in its own eyes both an enclave of the living and still potent Chinese tradition amidst the communist revolution in China and a platform for the evolution of this tradition into a systemic entity. Despite the inner heterogeneity of New Confucianism, if we trace the approach to cross-cultural philosophical exchange expressed in it, we can see one common feature shared by many pieces of New Confucian writing.
Liang Shuming (1893–1988) developed such concepts as self (zi wo 自我), will (yi yu 意欲), subject (zhu ti 主体), substance (ben ti 本体), and many others to structure his philosophy: The different forms of confrontation between the “previous self” and the “actual self” was what constituted the core of the three different “cultures”—Western, Confucian, and Buddhist. The term “culture,” as we have previously seen, had been domesticized as wenhua only a few years before the publication of Liang’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1922), yet Liang already developed a “cultural philosophy,” which attributes the three “cultures” three epistemological and moral options: in Western culture, the development of the self and the nation, based on intellection, or biliang 比量; in Confucianism, the deepening of harmonious relations with others, based on moral intuition, or zhijue 直觉; and in Buddhism, the radical quest for transcendence, based on direct perception, or xianliang 现量 (Liang 2015, p. 150). Liang finally concludes by presenting Confucianism as the future of the world culture, stating that intuition is a tool for overcoming cognitive barriers created by the Western self-constrained mind (Liang 2015, p. 170)—the method which, according to Lin Anwu, leans toward solipsism and subjectivism (Meynard 2021, p. 76). There are more examples of the problematic (from the Eurocentric point of view) naturalization of Western concepts in Liang Shuming’s work. The concept of “will” which, according to Liang, orchestrated the projecting of the “self” ahead, had been taken by him from the teaching of the Buddhist School of Yogācāra, though some scholars claim that it is borrowed from Schopenhauer (Lomanov 2010). There is also an “actual will” in Liang’s writing Thierry Meynard describes as “what is commonly called ‘mind’ (xin 心) or ‘spirit’ (jingshen 精神)” (Meynard 2021, p. 75), which looks confusing given how semantically loaded each of these notions is for a reader with a background in Western philosophy.
Alternatively, there is Centrality and Commonality (1975), an early work by Tu Weiming, written in English and addressing the issue of Confucian religiousness. Judging from its structure, it is Tu Weiming’s commentary on one of the Four Books—Zhongyong 《中庸》, a form of recontextualization of classical Confucian concepts, and in this regard, it meets the criteria for a typical Confucian text. But at the same time, it widely employs the conceptual apparatus in which European traditions are supposed to have an exclusive claim, with little if any reference to the genealogy of these terms (there is only one mention of Kant in the book). For instance, throughout the book, Tu argues that the inner logic of Zhongyong is demonstrated by focusing on three interrelated issues: “the profound person, the fiduciary community, and the moral metaphysics” (Tu 1989, p. 9). The concept of moral metaphysics (daode xing er shang xue 道德形而上学) was developed by Tu’s teacher Mou Zongsan, who—uncommonly for a contemporary Confucian—widely referred to Kant and polemicized with him. However, Tu himself does not make any reference either to Kant or Mou here. Tu also widely uses such concepts as “self-cultivation” or “self-transformation,” and while technically he does disclose the meaning he tries to convey by them, his explanations tend to bring even more questions about his use of terms: “The aim of self-transformation is not to go beyond humanity but to realize it as completely as possible,” or “[s]elf-transformation, symbolized by an ever-broadening and ever-deepening stream of humanity, is a process of ‘establishing’ (li) and ‘enlarging’ (ta)” (Tu 1989, p. 96).
What I am trying to say is not that this feature of Liang Shuming’s or Tu Weiming’s writing makes it non-philosophical, or naïve, nor am I trying to extract without considering the philosophical significance of their texts in their whole (Sukhomlinova 2023). I am instead suggesting that judging from the approach to reference applied in their writing, what they—as well as many other contemporary Confucians and unlike the Song-Ming Neo Confucians—were trying to build conceptual bridges with, was not Western philosophy, but Confucian philosophy itself. By that time, Confucianism, as John Makeham interestingly showed, had become a “lost soul,” an intellectual tradition without a major culture in which it could function as the core (Makeham 2008). The 20th-century China that had already switched to the Western paradigm of meaning-making was in need of being ornamentalized and rendered readable to itself by introducing a Confucian mode to the Western philosophical and socio-cultural algorithms.
This is why I suggest using the term “ornamentalization” while analyzing—more substantially than I briefly did here—the contemporary Confucian approach to cross-cultural philosophical exchange. In contrast to “synthesis,” “opposition,” and “assimilation,” the model of ornamentalization is supposed to demonstrate that the Confucian narrative, or rather, Confucian ornament, which is unable to inform the actual socio-cultural practices, is inscribed upon these practices, on their periphery. That is also the reason why the four other prominent contemporary Confucians, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, and Zhang Junmai, drafted a landmark Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture (1958), which calls for viewing the traditional Chinese culture as living, evolving, informing the actual self-identification of many millions of Chinese (Zhang et al. 2006). The Manifesto could not appropriate Confucianism since it was already attributed to Chinese culture, but they needed to refer to it to create a discourse around it. In this respect, ornamentalization takes the cross-cultural philosophical exchange back to the original Confucian reading and narrating. Moreover, it is a metaphor of Chinese semantical origin, proving to be as productive in framing philosophical interactions as those of Western semantical origin.
Conclusion
By the 1920s, when the first texts later marked as contemporary Confucian appeared, Chinese intellectuals had done a substantial effort to adjust the Chinese social, cultural, and philosophical discourses, as well as the vocabulary needed for it, to the standards implied by the Western cultural paradigms. Against this background, it seemed more natural to assume, often without clearly articulating it, the Eurocentric lenses rather than Confucian ones. As long as Confucianism had been viewed as an imperial relict, its reinvention came in the form of discovery.
In this case, I could have argued that Confucian ideas were “appropriated” in the “Westernized-China” narrative (if it is even possible to appropriate what initially belongs to the culture one identifies with), except for contemporary Confucians have drawn on the key Confucian method—“produce by narrating’ (and reading), yi shu wei zuo 以述为作. They aim to refer to Confucianism, to create a discourse around it, and their texts often come in the typical Song-Ming Neo Confucianism form of either commentaries or reflections on early Confucian classics. This is the reason why contemporary Confucianism acquired this name in the first place. All this, firstly, creates a complex model of cross-cultural philosophical exchange, and secondly, the need to define this type of exchange in a non-Eurocentric manner.
I argue that the term needed here is “ornamentalization.” It would be the metaphor of Chinese origin closely connected with the original semantics of the Chinese notion of wenhua, conventionally translated as “culture”—but far more embracive than that. To ornamentalize something means to render it readable, or to have it resemble a revealed consequence, since “revealed sequence” is the meaning the notion of wen is centered around. Ornamentalization is associated with meaningful decoration (in this case, the decoration of Western ideas with Confucianism and the other way around), or with the inscription on a material that effects no substantial change in the material, but at the same time makes it open for interpretation. In the 20th century, China had already switched to the Western paradigm of meaning-making and needed to be ornamentalized, rendered readable to itself by introducing a Confucian mode to the Western philosophical and socio-cultural algorithms, and that was precisely the task contemporary Confucianism contributed to.
Outlined in this model of cross-cultural philosophical exchange is the view of culture as something hybrid and having its emphases constantly shifted, and at the same time—the premise of the epistemological discreteness of both Confucian and Western narratives.
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Notes
Ibid., http://www.shuowen.org/view/5192. Accessed December 5, 2023.
Liu Xiang, n.d. Garden of Stories. https://ctext.org/shuo-yuan/zhi-wu/zhs. Accessed on December 5, 2023.
I refer to the English translation of Wilhelm’s work by Cary F. Baynes sourced from this website: http://www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html. Accessed on December 17, 2023. Though I am aware of the possible constraints it is placing on my research, the Yijing is one of the primary sources of the present study.
Wilhelm, Richard. Translation of the Yijing. Accessed on December 17, 2024. http://www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html. Accessed on December 17, 2023.
Ibid.
For the more detailed analysis one can see my article “Cultural and Philosophical Reflection on Spengler’s Decline of the West in Chinese Thought in the 1920s–1940s”; the English translation can be sourced via the link: https://en.nbpublish.com/library_read_article.php?id=36977. Accessed December 12, 2023.
For more approaches in transcultural (post)comparative philosophy, please check Asian Studies. Special Issue: Transcultural (Post)Comparative Philosophy, Part 1: Methods and Approaches (2022), 10 (3).
There is a good account of what to consider a “benign” cultural appropriation and what—a “wrongful” one in James Young and Conrad Brunk’s introduction to their edited volume The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation. To define a “benign appropriation,” they write: “Sometimes items are freely transferred from one culture to another. An American tourist who purchases a sculpture from a properly authorized dealer in Australian Aboriginal art has, in a sense, engaged in cultural appropriation, but does nothing objectionable” (Young and Brunk 2012, p. 4). It could become a matter of a separate research to compare ornamentalization with the benign cultural appropriation.
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Sukhomlinova, V. Wenhua as ornamentalization: transgressing methodological Eurocentrism. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 11, 97–114 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-024-00287-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-024-00287-x