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The journal Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident has been publishing continually for overtwenty years. A unique comparative journal, it is far less known in the Anglophoneworld than it deserves to be.

Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident: reflections on twenty years of comparative scholarshipReview >China

By L i sa Raphals

Founded in 1982 under the editor-ship of François Jullien, Extrême-

Orient, Extrême-Occident began with theexplicit goal of opening Sinology to thehuman sciences and making it morewidely available. This approach parallelsan analogous development in classicswhich, as a field, was revolutionized bythe introduction of structuralist andother anthropological perspectives in the1960s and 1970s by Jean-Pierre Ver-nant, Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and others.

For its first ten years, the journal coveredmainly literary and historical topics,focusing on problems that bore on mod-ern China involving complex interactionswith pre-modern Chinese culture. Theissues were thematic, but as Jullien point-ed out (14:8), a single issue can do nomore than open a door for investigation.This matters because the objects of ‘Sino-logical’ reflection are not pre-constituted.

Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident under-went a shift ten years later. Under theeditorship of Karine Chemla andFrançois Martin, its perspective becameexplicitly comparative. Many of the com-parative essays are by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd,who has contributed to almost everyissue since. Readers familiar with hisrecent studies of Greek and Chinese sci-ence will find much of their groundworkin these pages. Issues were often indi-vidually edited. To illustrate the depthand variety, I will discuss three issues indetail.

From numbers, the world Issue 16, Sous les nombres le monde:matériaux pour l’histoire culturelle dunombre en Chineancienne, pres-ents and inter-prets material forunderstandingthe cultural histo-ry of the numberin ancient China,covering very different perspectives onthe subject. This entails a deliberatedeparture from the common presump-

tion that correlative cosmology and itsnumerological corollaries form the basisof the Chinese understanding of thenature of the number. For example,Redouane Djamouri argues in a quasi-Benvenistian manner that the formationof the Shang number system was close-ly connected to the grammatical func-tion of numerals. Karine Chemla usesthe ‘Nine Chapters on MathematicalProcedures’ (Jiuzhang suanshu) to rein-terpret the meaning of the term ‘num-ber’ (shu), arguing that Liu Hui’s com-mentary deliberately used polyvalentterms in order to apply the same gener-al procedures to both numbers and algo-rithms.

Alexei Volkov addresses the finiteness ofnumbers in Xu Yue’s (+3c) Shushu jiyi,and examines methods of generatinglarge numbers (like those in Archimedes’Sand Reckoner) and the role of countingdevices in establishing general notionsof number. Isabelle Robinet exploressymbolic uses of number in the Daozangand the use of arithmetical operations toconnect numbers with spatial and tem-poral aspects of Daoist ritual, alchemyand cosmology. John Major looks at rela-tionships between calendrics and musi-cal scales in Huainanzi 3, including atranslation of the section on the calcula-tion of the lengths of pitch-pipes and adiscussion of the importance of ‘cosmicboards’ (shi) in establishing correspon-dences between calendric data and astro-nomical phenomena. Hans Ulrich Vogelconsiders the ‘metrosophy’ and ‘metrol-ogy’ of Hanshu 21 and of Liu Xin’s incor-poration of symbolic correlations intostandard measures. G.E.R. Lloyd pro-vides an ulterior perspective by compar-ing Chinese notions of number to thoseof ancient Greece.

The value of the example:Chinese perspectives A later issue, La valeur de l'exemple, per-spectives chinoises (19), takes as its pointof departure the European tendency,originating with Aristotle, to down-valuethe use of example as a form of argu-ment. It subsequently presents con-trasting Chinese studies revealing theimportance of processes of exemplifica-

tion in various aspects of Chinesethought and social practice. JéromeBourgon begins with the law, and showshow practices of citing examples fromthe classics to support legal decisionsgenerated legal norms and categories.Christian Lamouroux contextualizesOuyang Xiu’s idea of the historical exam-ple in relation to the Guwen movementand Chunqiu interpretation, while AnneCheng discusses specifically Confuciannotions of exemplification, including therole of the Sage as exemplar and theimplications for ethical and philosophi-cal problems of knowledge and action.

In a very different vein, Karine Chemlaasks what was understood as a ‘problem’in ancient Chinese mathematics. Sheuses the Jiuzhang suanshu to examine theuse of general procedures to solve par-ticular problems of the same category.Additional perspectives are provided byFrançois Hartogand G.E.R. Lloyd.Hartog considerschanging notionsof ‘examples’ forunderstandinglife in Greek his-torical writing,and argues thatthe notion of thepast as a key to thepresent, for emulation, only emerged inthe early fourth century, after the defeatof Athens in the Peloponnesian war.Lloyd attempts to use ‘the example ofexample’ to demonstrate some of the pit-falls and value of comparative study ingeneral. He links epistemological atti-tudes and social practices, arguing, forexample, that suspicion of the authorityof exempla went hand in hand with sus-picion of authority in general. He alsoshows the complex use of example inmathematical proof, and comparesGreek and Chinese methods of manag-ing examples in mathematical reasoning.

Divination and rationality inancient China Divination et rationalité en Chine anci-enne (21) was an eponymous successorto Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Divination etRationalité (1974), which addressed the

rationality and coherence of divinationand its significance in the formation ofsocial institutions. Vernant showed howthe symbolic operations of divinersimposed their rationality and legitima-cy on the intellectual and social fabric ofthe societies in which they operated.This issue explicitly pursues Vernant’soriginal agenda in the context of ancientChina, and shows how divination affect-ed the development of medicine, law,philosophy, politics, and the history ofscience. Redouane Djamouri reviewsShang bone and tortoise divination andargues that divination and writing weredistinct practices that involved differentkinds of artefacts and different types ofrationality. Marc Kalinowski analyses theelements of predictive style in the struc-ture of Zuozhuan oracular rhetoric. Heargues that predictions had consistentstructures and performed significantnarrative functions throughout the textwithin a sequence of circumstance, pre-diction, argument, and verification.These cycles were used to render ethicaljudgments and to oppose the predictivewisdom of the text’s authors to the fail-ings of its narrative subjects.

Jean Levi explores the hermeneutic con-tinuities between Warring States div-inatory practice, empirical conjectureand rationalist critique. John Hender-son explores the connections betweenexegesis of the Confucian classics (espe-cially the Yi and Chunqiu) and the div-inatory arts. Some of the Confucian clas-sics had divinatory origins, anddivination itself was considered a formof exegesis, with similar assumptionsand functions to the exegesis of texts.Donald Harper explores the commonmilieu of physicians, diviners,astrologers, and fangshi specialists. Heuses the Huangdi neijing and excavatedtexts from Baoshan and Shuihudi toshow the evolution of iatromanticthought from a primarily exorcistic med-icine to new cosmological (and mechan-ical) methods of hemerological diagno-sis. He shows that iatromancy was animportant vehicle for the introductionof correlative cosmology into medicine.Physicians imitated the rhetoric of divin-ers in their diagnoses, and drew onastrological, calendrical, and hemero-logical systems for their theory. Marc

Csikszentmihalyi compares the inter-pretive practices of diviners and of theQin legal codes, using debates abouttechnical procedures and their results inboth areas, while Jérome Bourgonexamines the role of divinatory schemesin the codificationof Chinese law,showing how Yiexegesis by theSchool of Myster-ies informed legalcodification dur-ing and after theTang Dynasty. Jean-Jacques Glassnerprepares the ground for a comparativeapproach to Chinese and Mesopotami-an divination by considering the com-parative contexts for the development ofwriting, the roles of rulers and exorcists,and the relation of divination to modesof rationality and to the writing of his-tory. G.E.R. Lloyd concludes by com-paring the roles of Chinese and Greekdivination in the development of self-conscious reflection and methods of sci-entific inquiry.

This brief examination shows howExtrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident haspioneered and maintained a felicitousapproach to the problem of reconcilingapproaches that nowadays seem hope-lessly at war. Individual contributionsdeal with specific texts and cultural par-ticularities, but under an aegis that isself-consciously and deliberately com-parative. In this way the journal hassteered a course between the Scylla ofhistorical and cultural particularism andthe Charybdis of essentializing general-ization and comparison. It merits studyand emulation. <

- Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident: cahiers de

recherches comparatives, eds. Karine Chemla

and François Martin, Presses Universitaires

de Vincennes, Université de Paris VIII.

Lisa Raphals is Professor, Department of

Comparative Literature and Foreign Lan-

guages, at the University of California, River-

side Her research interests include Chinese,

Greek and comparative history and philoso-

phy and history of science.

Illustrations courtesy of Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident

1.19

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> App

pend

ix:Iss

ues