Section Q — Other

Panel Q1 — EASL Round Table

Chair: Brunhild Staiger; Room 210; Friday, July 16th, 11:30-13:30

David Helliwell

EASL Round-Table Speech

Matthias Kaun

EASL Round-Table Speech

Panel Q2 — Miscellanea

Chair: Sherry Mou; 363 (Hall 30); Saturday, July 17th, 09:00-11:00

Youyou Gu

How the Shoe Shows Wenzhou:The Shoe industry as an Identity Marker and Museal Strategy in Southern China

Panel Q3 — Cultural Interaction Through Education

Chair: Michael Poerner; 363 (Hall 30); Saturday, July 17th, 15:00-16:30

Sherry Mou

Googling the Three Kingdoms: Using Instructional Technology in Literature Classes

Miriam Castorina

Teaching Chinese in Italian Missionary Colleges of 18th and 19th Centuries

Nina Borevskaya

Searching for Points of Contiguity in Confucian and Russian Orthodox Education: Back to the Tradition

Panel Q1 — EASL Round Table

Chair: Brunhild Staiger; Room 210; Friday, July 16th, 11:30-13:30

David Helliwell: EASL Round-Table Speech

Library panel

Matthias Kaun: EASL Round-Table Speech

EASL round-table

Panel Q2 — Miscellanea

Chair: Sherry Mou; 363 (Hall 30); Saturday, July 17th, 09:00-11:00

Youyou Gu: How the Shoe Shows Wenzhou:The Shoe industry as an Identity Marker and Museal Strategy in Southern China

Through an anthropological fieldwork, this paper seeks to report and analyze, how an object – the shoe – becomes an identity marker to which different museums are dedicated in the southern city of Wenzhou, when just 30 years ago, the shoe was just a handcraft and there were no museums at all.

This study is the result of a long field experience looking for the design of a local speech identity and its institutionalization through museums. What is striking about the district’s general museum is its emphasis on the contemporary economic dynamism through several items including the shoe industry. While this public institution focuses on the historical and very local entrepreneurs, at least two other museum projects were exclusively based on the shoe for the last ten years.

These are two indirect opposites with many common points, which include:

- exactly the same name: the Museum of the Shoe Culture of China.

- the same collections: a historical approach of the shoe through the ages in China, and a synchronic dimension on the typical shoes of national minorities

- both do not focus on the industrial process

- both do not relate this industry to Wenzhou, but to two main shoe makers

- both eradicate a nationwide recognition

- both museums have restricted access : the first one is closed for years and the second is into fabric.

Below these similarities and differences, the fieldwork’s best finding is that all these museums are the product of one man’s strategy, the folklorist YE Dabin. This retired scientist makes the collections, promotes museums projects to political and industrial leaders, and designs the scientific speech related to these collections. Fund-raising is an important part of his strategy: he focuses on key products of the Wenzhou industry, and on the scale “of China” as an excellent marketing argument.

Panel Q3 — Cultural Interaction Through Education

Chair: Michael Poerner; 363 (Hall 30); Saturday, July 17th, 15:00-16:30

Sherry Mou: Googling the Three Kingdoms: Using Instructional Technology in Literature Classes

If great literature has universal appeal and is appreciated by general audiences, then we should be able to teach undergraduate students most classical Chinese novels. The difficulty, as anyone who has taught those tomes knows, is gauging students’ knowledge of Chinese history and geography. Obviously, our students usually lack the cultural advantages of Chinese students, but using internet applications that are familiar to them can defuse the “foreignness” of these works. Game developers, film producers, cartoonists, and artists of picture books have all set us good precedents: they transform the classics into palatable consumer goods for children and adults alike. Rather than complaining about the shortcomings (on which one can go a long way) of such adaptations, we can see them as paving the way for us to introduce unfamiliar texts to perceptive audiences. It is up to us to lead the students to where we would like them to go.

I will discuss how Google Earth, video games, and other internet resources can be used in dealing with texts that contain geographical locations, battles, and travel, using Romance of the Three Kingdoms as an example. 2,000+ pages in most English translations, the historical novel is so dotted with the names of people and places that even native readers can be confused. Google Earth maps and tours let users implant other materials (historical accounts, film and television clips, video games, audio files, etc.) into designated maps. Through these means, students are supplied with cultural background information that would otherwise take a long time to learn (and would still remain abstract)—the images, sounds, and activities of ancient China, or at least what modern Chinese perceive as such.

Miriam Castorina: Teaching Chinese in Italian Missionary Colleges of 18th and 19th Centuries

One of the first cultural bridges between China and the West was built by Catholic missionaries who, in many ways, attempted to strengthen their influence in China.

As history shows, their activity wasn’t as successful as that of protestants in South East China who, also thanks to the military supremacy of their countries, were able to set up a most “impressive” bridge between cultures. From a different point of view, however, Catholic missionaries contributed to create the first Western schools in which Chinese language was taught. In this paper I will illustrate the situation in 18th and 19th century Italy, tracing back the history of some important colleges (first of all Collegio de Cinesi in Naples, but also some other Propaganda Fide’s colleges in Rome). I’ll also try to draw a first synopsis of the teaching materials used at that time in Italian colleges in order to give a contribution to the analysis of these precious documents.

Nina Borevskaya: Searching for Points of Contiguity in Confucian and Russian Orthodox Education: Back to the Tradition

I assume that at the modern stage of school internationalization it is extremely important to find points of contiguity between different civilizations, education is the key one in this process.

In global scientific literature there are pretty many studies, which focus on the dialogue of Confucianism with the Protestant and и Catholic branches of Christianity. In this paper I compare the curriculum of medieval Chinese and Russian schools as a reflection of Confucian and the Russian Orthodox approaches to education during the period of their first empires.

A short survey of teaching process before the formation of Han empire in the 3rd century B.C or Kievan Rus in the 9th cent. A.D. give us the foundation to confirm that by the time of establishing a unified state, the cultural situation on the territory of ancient China was much better prepared for developing education as a system.

As a result, during the Han and Tang dynasties, the school became a governmental institution and was well organized for training scholarly officials (shi). As the paper illustrates, two levels of education obtained rather advanced and complicated curriculum.

In the XIth cent. Kievan Rus, the school learning was borrowed after Christianizing together with Byzantine culture in the atmosphere of pagan conscience domination. The first rulers organized some schools, but this model of learning was hardly accepted by the pagan conscience. Since after it was the Church that fully controlled the educational process. As a result, as the analysis of learning materials demonstrates, the level of education was much lower than in China and some important disciplines well developed by that time in China (as mathematics, astronomy, medicine etc.) were prohibited for learning. Up to the XVIIth century, in Muscovia the school as a state institutional organization was a rare exception while different forms of non-school education (domestic, parish, monastic) dominated.

At the end of the paper I summarize the disparities and common features of Confucian and Orthodoxy educational medieval tradition. As some researches by Russian and foreign scholars proved, the Orthodox church was chiefly oriented on Greek monastic culture so it had no need in Catholic type of scholasticism in education; Confucianism, since it became the imperial ideology, also lost its initial scholastic nature. As a result, lack of rhetoric and logical reasoning of Holy truth, knowledge based on dogmatic learning and faith in written maxims, moral education with a stress on self-improvement, subordinated position of natural and technical sciences – these characteristics let me came to the conclusion that in spite of many differences there were some very important points of contiguity in Chinese and Russian educational tradition that could be overcome by mutual efforts at the current stage of modernization.

Note: this is a preliminary version of the conference programme and is subject to changes.

Last update: July 17, 2010, 11:43 EET