Cultures & Contexts: China

Catalog description

Introduces students to some of the defining features of traditional Chinese culture by sampling the most important philosophical and historical classic texts composed in the centuries leading up to and including the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE-24 CE), as well as a number of early texts attempting to codify and transmit technical knowledge of Chinese law, medicine, agriculture, and divination. Both the classics and the technical compendia have played important roles shaping Chinese concepts of the individual, the family, the nation, and the natural world, and have sustained these concepts through times of social turmoil and political division that have repeatedly interrupted the more stable and unified periods that tend to define the orthodox historical narrative of China’s past. We thus develop a sense of the ways Chinese culture has traditionally viewed itself and the ideals to which it has repeatedly returned in chaotic times. Finally, we refer frequently to the easily overlooked, but nevertheless essential, supporting role of writing and the unique ways that it has developed in the Chinese context.