Theoretical Curiosity and the Encounter

OK everyone. This is our final group blog assignment for the semester and I invite you to comment on the Greenblatt, Sahlins, Chatwin, Eco, and Zhang in the context of the rise and development of theoretical curiosity. In the spirit of this exercise permit me to share a reflection of my own that appears on page 119 of my book _Manufacturing Confucianism_. In this instance I am addressing how we can see in the European reception of 17th century Jesuit missionary works in translation a critical movement away from the religious to the real, from divine to empirical authority. "Travel literature became increasingly popular in the late seventeenth century because something akin to ethnographic authority was developing, which was, in turn, part of a larger epistemological shift away from faith and insight to experiment and observation as the basis of reliable knowledge. In this intellectual context the Jesuits and their Chinese texts were construed as scientific authorities providing testimony on behalf of the universality of divinely authored creation." This development was a misconstrual, but still a meaningful misapprehension (of the sort discussed by Eco and Zhang) that revealed the self-assertion of the European imagination at the same time that it closed the gap between western self and Chinese other. So, as we glance back across the sweep of the last fifteen weeks let us reflect on the complex history of cultural encounter and take some inspiration from the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who once wrote (rather apropos of the disorientation of the encounter):

A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, "Where am I?"
What he really wants to know is, "Where are the other places?
He has got his own body, but he has lost them.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality