Page 23 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

16 R. T. Ames

As in Europe, there was no single term in the languages of the premodern
Sinitic cultures—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese—that had a con-
ceptual reach comparable to that of our modern, extended uses of the word
“culture.” But the term that emerged to be used throughout this geographical
region in the nineteenth century to translate and appropriate this modern Western
concept differs markedly in its metaphorical implications from those assumed with
the English word “culture.” While the languages of the traditionally agrarian Asian
societies abound with terms that, like “culture,” are rooted in instrumental
physical processes of cultivation and nourishing, for example, yang (养), xu/chu
(畜), pei (培), xiu (修), yu (育), zai (栽) and so many more. These terms are bypassed
as points of metaphorical departure in favor of wenhua (文化), a compound
expression that combines the characters for the “transforming” (化) effected by
“the inscribing and embellishing processes undertaken by literary, civil, and
artistic traditions” (文). Whereas metaphorically rooting “culture” in practices of
plant and animal domestication invites us to see cultural norms as having a
transcendent disciplinary force with respect to that which is being “cultured,” wen
was understood (with significant political implications) as the disclosing processes
of civilization: that is, of collaborating with nature’s beauty, elaborating upon it,
elevating it, and achieving a decidedly aesthetic if not spiritual product, rather than
as merely regulating its spontaneous growth.
As is demonstrated by its provenance in texts dating to the Han dynasty (202
B.C.E.–220 B.C.E.), the term wenhua itself is an ancient one. Wenhua as a modern
Japanese kanji term that translates “culture” is a term derived from classical
Chinese that first appears explicitly as early as the court bibliographer Liu Xiang’s
(刘向 77 B.C.E.–6 B.C.E.) Garden of Stories (说苑): “It is only when civilizing efforts
do not bring the people up to the appropriate standards that punishments are to
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be imposed.” And, by at least the fifth century, Chinese literary theorists such as
Liu Xie (刘勰 ca. 465–522) associated human wen practices explicitly with the self-
arising and ceaselessly creative dynamics (生生不息) of the natural world,
affirming that nature and nurture far from being in opposition, were rather a
coevolving, contrapuntal process understood to be at the heart of realizing a
symbiotic and mutually entailing, natural and societal harmony.
This disparity between European and Asian languages in the cultural
metaphors in which “culture” is embedded—teleologically informed versus
fundamentally open-ended, aesthetic sensibilities—is certainly related to a
persistent, skewed understanding and application of “creativity” in the
Abrahamic traditions in which an ex nihilo creativity properly belongs to a self-
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sufficient Creator God. Indeed, such ex nihilo creativity when exercised by the
3 文化不改，然后加诛。