To learn from the ancestors or to borrow from the foreigners: China’s self-identity as a modern civilisation

Abstract

This article is a shortened version of a lecture. It deals with the duality of China's modern ‘civilisation’ – its connectivity with the ‘ancestral landscape’ and its openings to the outside world. In presenting the duality, the author examines a wide range of intellectual and political discourses of ‘civilisation’ emerged in the past three decades and relates them to the translation and re-translation of the concept in a longer history. The author argues that much of the ‘dynamics of civlisation’ come from the circulation of such ideas as ‘civilisation’ itself, and anthropologists can understand ‘civilisation’ better if they take ethnography of ideas more seriously.