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Colloquium: Life Configurations

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April, 2-4, 2012

Lujn, Buenos Aires, Argentina

UNSAM

The Conditions for a Comparison: Reflections at the Crossroads of Chinese andLatin American Studies1

Pablo Ariel BLITSTEIN (Argentina)

Collge de France

CEMECH Universidad Nacional de San Martn

The purpose of this article is to explore the conditions of possibility of establishing comparisons. Towhat extent a culture or a tradition determine the choice of the objects of study and the

development of different forms of reflection? On the basis of some reflections about a comparison

between Chinese and Latin American lettered traditions, I show that the possibility of a comparison

is linked to the configuration of relationships in which the subject is immersed: that is, instead of

taking culture as an aprioristic starting point for a comparison, I attempt to offer an answer from a

microanalitical, configurative and generative approach of the historians experience. This approach

will allow me to address how a historian determines his relation with other men from other times and

geographies: a relation that, far from being established under the terms of nations, cultures or

traditions, is generated in each local experience of appropriation of discourses and objects. It is

precisely in this work of appropriation (of which the comparison is just a way among others) where

the historian integrates past and present and shapes the future configurations of the appropriations

of the past.

Some time ago, when I was starting my Ph.D. on medieval Chinese men of letters, I read a classic

of Latin American cultural history, TheLettered City, by Angel Rama. I had heard about this book

some years earlier, at the University of Buenos Aires, when I was finishing my degree in classical

languages. Since I hadnt had time to read it until that moment I had already decided to devote

myself to Chinese history and I wanted to finish my degree and since at the beginning of my Ph.D.

research I needed inspiration, I felt that even though the book dealt with a very distant tradition, it

could give me some hints to enrich my reflections about the Chinese men of letters. I was surprised

to find out that Latin American men of letters were similar to Chinese ones, even more than I had

1 The original language of this paper is French. I want to thank the staff of the UNSAM

for this English translation.

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imagined! They shared an analogous devotion for writing, an analogous mixture of bureaucracy and

humanism, analogous representations of political power, analogous conflicts with power. And I was

even more surprised when I found out that Rama asserted in the 80s that the intellectual Latin

American tradition had its roots in the colonial man of letters(letrado), while in the same way Yu

Yingshi said in his bookThe shi and the Chinese Culture that the Chinese intellectual had its roots in

the man of letters (shi) of imperial times2.

A year later I was attending a seminar about global history organized by Laurent Berger and

Anne-Christine Trmon at the ENS-EHESS; later, I attended one of Serge Gruzinskis seminars at the

EHESS, devoted to the interactions between merchants coming from the Portuguese and Spanish

Empires and Chinese literati under Ming dynasty; and at the same time I discussed these ideas with an

Argentinian colleague, Ana Hosne specialist on the Society of Jesus who had made similar

considerations about the two lettered traditions. This association of ideas finally resulted in a research

project with the purpose of comparing the two literate traditions, both from the point of view of social

history and from the point of view of cultural and intellectual history. But new questions appeared.

Was it true that we had discovered two analogous traditions? Or was it simply an illusion? And

even if it was not an illusion, why were we comparing these two literate traditions? Finally, regarding

the contemporary Latin American intellectual, was I really an heir of the tradition of the colonial

Latin American letrado? Or was this idea an illusion too? It wasnt at all a question about Latin

American identity or Chinese alterity: it was about understanding which ways lead to a

comparison in social sciences, as well as the reasons why we want to use comparisons in the

framework of the production of historical knowledge. It is indeed on producing this knowledge that

the historian creates a link with the dead, in a specific time and place, and that he takes a decision

about the ways under which these dead will be judged in the future.

Ways of comparing

We could think of several ways of establishing a comparison. We could compare, for example, in the

framework of a classification of the phenomena in genres and species, as it is often done in social

2 I dont use man of letters as a translation ofletrado or shi. I use it here as an etic

category that refers to the mastery of reading and writing of these two different

historical characters.

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sciences. This classification is very useful when we want to identify the specificity of something: in

order to know what makes something unique or different, we compare it with other things which look

alike. This sort of comparison can also be established between a real object and an imaginary one: it is

the case of the judgment of possibility, which consists on producing a counterfactual hypothesis in

order to compare actual facts to possible ones and to identify the causes of the actual facts 3. The

object of this comparison could be the colonial man of letters, but it could also be a farmer, a trader,

or men of letters from different periods in Chinese history.

But there are other ways of comparing. We could use the comparison in order to identify in the

phenomena under study aspects which I havent thought of. For example, in the case of the mastery

of writing as a mark of status something shared both by the Chinese and Latin American men of

letters I can search in the studies about the Latin American men of letters ideas that, by analogy,

could give some ideas to better understand the Chinese men of letters. Since there is no human

phenomenon identical to another, analogies between ideas and, therefore, between the historical

realities conveyed in these ideas can help me deepen my reflections, even if the objects under study

are different. An anthropologist knows this problem very well when he goes to fieldwork: he

develops his reflections in a tradition of studies where the analyzed objects are always different from

his own. In this form of comparison, what takes the first place isnt the classification in genres and

species. Rather, it is the comparison between phenomena that for some reason turn out to be

analogous or not.

I could also mention other forms of comparison. In the seminar I attended some years

ago, Serge Gruzinski talked about Portuguese merchants who traveled to China at the beginning of

the XVI century, and who felt confused in front of a huge administrative apparatus they didnt

understand. At the opposite side of these Portuguese merchants, in his workThe Four Parts of the

World, Gruzinski analizes the case of Matteo Ricci, who, some decades after the Portuguese, had

fewer problems to understand the Chinese lettered elite. Anyway, the comparison between Portuguese

merchants and Chinese literati, or between Ricci and a man of letters like Li Zhi, is less the result of

an analogy in the scholars mind than a result of a practical problem of these persons in their social

experience. Why did they understand each other? To what extent did they understand each other? Or

what is it they didnt understand, and also to what extent they didnt? A comparison between the two

social worlds that were interacting in this encounter turns out to be unavoidable if we want to

understand the dimension of the problems of communication that these men might have faced. In this

case, the idea is to make a comparative history out of a connected history: two histories that were until

3See Weber, Max, Objektive Mglichkeit und adquate Verursachung in der historischen

Kausalbetrachtung , in Schriften zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tbingen: Mohr, 1988.

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that precise moment taking place far away from each other, and that converged in the encounter of

two persons in a specific place and time.

Finally, a last example of a way of making comparisons: the comparison made within the

framework of sociology or general history. It is the case, for example, of the sociology of Max Weber,

either his sociology of religions where he studies the compatibility of the dominant religious ethics

with the development of a rational bourgeois capitalism or his general sociology Economy and

Society where he attempts to build ideal types of social action, of domination, of bureaucracy and of

patrimonial bureaucracies (where we can include both the Latin American man of letters and the

Chinese man of letters), etc. Regarding our own research project about the men of letters, we

could have followed weberian general sociology: to settle a general category of the man of letters

built out of the common features shared by any historical figure whom we could consider a man of

letters and to look for the specificities in each particular case. But the problems inherent to Webers

approach are clear: we run the risk of distorting the phenomena under study, since nothing guarantees

that what in China was called shi is the same as a Latin American letrado. Instead of understanding

the historical persons placed in particular historical contexts, we run the risk of projecting an ideal

type on realities that do not coincide with it, and of fostering the illusion that a shi and a letrado are

one and the same thing.

It is clear that a comparison becomes unavoidable in the case of a connected history

such as Gruzinskis. But in the rest of the cases I mentioned, where the real historical connection cant

be found, the difficulties in making comparisons seem to be insurmountable. In the two first cases

the comparison by genres and species and the comparison by analogies, comparative history could

become arbitrary: after all, comparisons between two objects could just consist on the arbitrary

associations of the scholars mind. So if comparisons face these risks, should we avoid comparative

history when it is impossible to establish a historical connection? Do we have to suppose that we

cannot compare two heterogeneous phenomena?4Nevertheless, all the comparisons I mentioned have

not only been undertaken, but they have also been the beginning of a long tradition of comparative

history.

Connected history, comparative history

4This problem doesnt only belong to the comparative method. Each time we try to build any category,

we are forced to melt in this category realities that dont match with the definition. This is the reason why

the entire category is simply the instrument and not the end of an investigation, and so the scholar must

submit his own categories to a constant criticism; criticism which, ultimately, is simply the historicization

of these categories. When the criticism disappears, and the categories become the last aim of the

investigation, we are in the dark where all cats are grey.

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Lets think for while about the example of Webers sociology, that I propose to analyze here just

because it has been (and still is) a reference both for Latin American and Chinese historians. When

Weber started his project of a general sociology, he needed to build supporting points: his ideal types.

Today, those ideal types are part of a scientific tradition that has expanded all over the world, from

China to Latin America. When a historian wants to study the historical type that corresponds to the

category of patrimonial official5(it would be the case of the Chinese shi or of the Latin American

letrado), he usually applies to his research the ideal types that Weber defined almost a century ago, as

well as the particular cases covered by this category; on the other hand, when a scholar criticizes that

category, he usually analyses it to find in it discordant elements. But whether the objective is

submissive acceptance or radical criticism, the beginning is always the same: the historical

connections that Weber has defined with a category, assembling subtypes that are far away from each

other in space and time, such as the Russian chinovnichestvo, the French nobility of the robe or the

Chinese mandarins. The Weberian scholar or the scholar who criticises Weber both participate, then,

in the history of the development of the category patrimonial official, that is to say, in the history of

the intellectual connections which have made possible the existence of this ideal type. Maybe without

knowing it, submissive acceptation and radical criticism are both part of a connected history: the

history which connects the Chinese patrimonial official with the patrimonial officials from other

places and other times of universal history. In the writings of Weber, in these texts from the beginning

of the 20th Century, there is a real connection of phenomena taken out of the universal history

(phenomena linked to the patrimonial official), even if we think that this connection is wrong.

Arent the connections between a Matteo Ricci and a Li Zhi and the connections between different

sources in the mind of a sociologist of the beginning of the 20 th century both connections that take

place in a particular place and time in human history? Arent both connections an assemblage of

materials inherited from history literate education in the case of Ricci and Li Zhi, written sources in

the case of the imagination of a sociologist that are gathered by the experience of persons

5 As an example, we can mention Yu Yingshi o Yan Buke , who, not being weberian,make use of weberian categories. In his research about the philosophical breakthrough in preimperial

China, Yu Yingshi deals with problems that come from Webers sociology of religions in the way theywere formulated by Talcott Parsons. See, for instance, Yu Yingshi, Shi yu zhongguo wenhua (Shi and Chinese culture), Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003, pp. 19-25. Yan Buke uses theweberian category of patrimonial official for the history of Imperial China; see Yan Buke, Zhongguo

gudai guanjie zhidu yinlun (Discussions about the system of administrativehierarchies in ancient China), Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2010, pp. 65-66. For the case of LatinAmerica, a recent book by Rodrigo Ricupero proposes a study on patrimonialism in colonial Brasil. But

Sergio Buarque de Hollanda has already made a study on the patrimonial official in colonial Brasil. See

Rodrigo Ricupero, A formao da elite colonial. Brasil c. 1530 c. 1630, So Paulo: Alameda, 2009, pp.42-49; Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, Razes do Brasil, So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995 [1ra ed.1936], pp. 145-146.

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historically situated? Could Weber have even conceived his patrimonial official if he had not had

some kind of experience, mediated or not, with the traces this patrimonial official left in history?

The case of Webers categories is in fact the case of our language: it is not possible to

start a comparison from scratch, because all of our representations are built with the aid of language,

and every language has a history of its own. I shouldnt assume that there are no pre-existing

supporting points in my mind that allow me to establish a comparison. There is always something in

my head, there are always representations which precede the possibility of starting a comparison.

How would I be able to associate as my colleagues in our research project do Chinese and Latin

American literate traditions without at least having a notion of what I would recognize in one or in the

other? If we come back to what I have said at the beginning of this article, we will see that, in the first

place, I have simply followed a word, the French word lettr, a translation of the Chinese wordshi

(rather problematic, to tell the truth) and an equivalent but not always a true equivalent of the

Spanish word letrado. This is what has allowed me to establish a first connection: a word, a word

with a history associated to certain representations. Second connection: once I read The Lettered City,

I discovered the affinities between the Chinese men of letters and the Latin American men of

letters. With their differences, there were also aspects, ideas, similar cultures, which thanks to

analogy enabled me to notice these affinities. As a consequence, can we say that there is no

connection between the colonial Latin American letrado and the Chinese medieval shi? There

certainly is one connection: it is me, my colleagues, everyone who has established this connection.

Only when I have activated these two pieces of knowledge, when I have activated these two

representations really present in my mind, only then can I make a comparison between the two

lettered traditions. The elements to compare were already there, in my mind, and if they were there,

actually present in me, it is because a group of institutions from Buenos Aires to Beijing were already

connected in my person. Thus every comparative history implies a real connection: the connection

takes place in the person where all these forms of representation sociological categories, words or

analogies get together and are actualized. Institutional, political and social relationships make

divergent histories converge in one point, in one person, and that person is the result of the connection

of those relations. A comparative history always implies the possibility of a connected history: the

connected history of the representations which are gathered in the scholars mind on the basis of his

social experience.

The problem of alterity

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Some culturalist ideas lead us to think that the comparisons can only be established between national

or regional traditions: in our case, China and Latin America. But since the connections between

representations take place in the head of a historical person, the objects to compare dont necessarily

coincide with national or regional traditions: we can compare groups, institutions, characters or ideas,

and find maybe more analogies between a medieval Chinese man of letters and a Latin American

man of letters from colonial times than between the same Chinese man of letters and a Chinese

farmer from the same time, or between this man of letters and a Chinese nobleman of the Warring

States period, or even between the man of letters and a modern businessman that is to say,

between members of the same (hypothetical) tradition or culture. In fact, most of those

differences are not necessarily linked to the traditions and cultures; the differences can be

contiguous, can be contemporary, can even coexist in the same person.

We usually see that traditions or cultures (as well as nations and civilisations)

are dealt with in an exclusively typological way: traditions and cultures are typified according to

common features, and then the method of comparison is used to identify the differences and the

affinities between them. Thus China and Latin America would have more affinities because they are

peripheral regions or because they are members of the Third World, or they would be radically

different because they are members of two different cultures: the western culture and the

Chinese culture. But those typologies run the risk of essentializing traditions and cultures. If

we reduced differences and affinities to typologies, if we considered these typologies the pivot of a

comparison between China and Latin America, we would fail to acknowledge the multiple historical

connections between these two geographies, their interdependences, the internal discontinuities of

these typified traditions and cultures and, finally, the isomorphisms between the two. The use of

typological thought as the only way to establish a comparison risks to end in an essentialization of the

objects of those typologies.

To reduce cultures and traditions to typologies has another consequence: it leads to

consider that traditions and cultures determine the way their members understand the world.

According to this idea, the limits and the possibilities of certain uses of language by the members of

a culture are sometimes identified with a whole culture, so that they seem to be the basis of an

opposition between culturally determined we and they. Comparison is then conceived as a way

out from a specific culture to enter into another culture which is considered as foreign

meaning a substantial alterity. China would be a way out for a Latin American intellectuals

horizons of thought. But that which looks foreign is not necessarily an other, and the typical traits

conceptualized as culture are never homogeneous enough to be considered a cause in its own right

of a homogeneous world view. Cultures are not something perfectly coherent, without internal

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breaches, without conflicts, without discrepancies, perfectly homogeneous, as if they were macro-

individuals that determine the actions of men. The idea according to which cultures create

homogenous worldviews is the projection of an ideology that is inherent to the modern order of

Nation-States: the idea that nations have established their borders on the basis of insurmountable

cultural differences that determine the ways of understanding the world. However, cultures do not

coincide with the limits imposed by political borders or by geography. The word culture, in fact, is

just a way to refer to a series of social relations that go beyond those borders, that are unequal and that

have different meanings for the persons implied in those relations, within and beyond borders.

Besides, regarding the problem of alterity, nothing guarantees that the elements of a foreign

culture, even under a radically different appearance, are really different when one gets to know them

deeply: the Same is often found under the appearance of an Other. Even if the elements typified under

the word culture are considered as foreign or other, they cease to be foreign or other once I

have known and understood them. Once I have known something different, that something becomes

part of my representations: it is no longer an unknown, strange thing, but it is part of me. I have been

modified by this culture, or at least by certain elements of what I consider a culture: this culture

becomes a part of myself, because I establish a link with the configuration of relations that I

conceptualize as a culture. To say it in other words: when I know something, that something isnt

something foreign anymore, it is no longer an other, in the same way as, when I was at school,

math had ceased to be foreign or other to me.

Consequently, alterity, or rather the experience of alterity (since it is an experience), is generally

produced in the framework of ignorance. One can have the impression of alterity when one reads for

the first time a text in Chinese, but once one has learned this language, once Chinese is part of the

knowledge of a person, the experience of alterity with the language has finished. In my case, the

experience of alterity with medieval Chinese men of letters has disappeared; of course, there are

many things that I ignore, and many things that will remain hidden forever, but the idea of facing

something radically different doesnt exist any longer. On the contrary, when I wanted to read (maybe

looking for other sources of alterity) a text on the Latin American intellectuals, I realized that my

knowledge about these intellectuals was much poorer than my knowledge about the medieval Chinese

shi, and that these men of letters from my own tradition were more others than the men of

letters from distant China. After an experience with both, the impression of alterity that Latin

American and Chinese men of letters gave me in the beginning evolved into just an experience of

their specificity, and not of a radical other. A comparison that implies a radical difference between

traditions (as some culturalist discourses do about civilizations), that doesnt problematize the

elements of comparison of these traditions, that doesnt put into question the continuity of these

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traditions in other words, a comparison that considers a typified culture an a priori of world

views runs the risk of reifying cultures and traditions and of essentializing the experience of alterity. 6

Conclusion: How to appropriate comparison?

How should we compare? We shouldnt give a definitive answer to this question in order to settle a

definitive role for the methodology of comparison. Comparisons appear in different contexts and

according to different needs; they shouldnt precede the experience of knowledge itself. As a starting

point for any comparison, we should make a radical historicization of the person who makes the

comparison, that is to say, of ourselves: it is the historical person (I who think and have a history) who

is the source of any possible comparison. This is why a comparison should go hand in hand with the

historicization of its framework of application: a historicization of the words, categories and

discourses I use when comparing. I have picked these words, categories and discourses out of my

social experience, and so my knowledge activity (including eventual comparisons) is conditioned by

this experience. Besides, this historicization should be accompanied, as the anthropologists do, by a

historicization of the ecologies that have made me what I am as a person: that is to say, a history of

the conditions of possibility of my own representations. After all, every comparison is an

appropriation of two phenomena, near or distant, which are not necessarily contiguous and which

nevertheless converge in the mind of a historian. When a person compares different social worlds that

are far away from each other in time and space, these worlds converge in one single history without

losing their singularity: they converge in the experience itself singular of a person who makes the

comparison based on his experience. In other words: when a person makes a comparison, he does not

face different worlds that are alien to him, but faces a history in which he participates. By thinking

and acting, he keeps on producing that history. To compare is also to generate a link in the present: it

is not only a way of studying history, but also of producing it.

If universal history can be thought of as a whole, and not only as a history of nations,

it is because in the last centuries the experience of men has been enriched with elements coming from

different geographies and different social interactions. A historical reflection that doesnt take into

account this experience is doomed to fall into archaic paradigms. It is indeed in the intellectual

activity of each person where different social worlds converge, where national traditions disappear

6I am not suggesting a return to the ancient discourses about the universality of human nature and a

reduction of the differences between men to a common ground. I suggest that we should look at human

history as a unity of different located experiences and that we should avoid, at the same time, ready-made

typologies about cultural differences.

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and lose their meaning, where new historical connections are produced. In a world where the isolation

of the populations turns to be almost impossible, it is in the intellectual activity of each person, in the

heterogeneity of experience, where one can see the archaic character of culturalist representations of

alterity.

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