Chinese Studies and the Issue of Fachprosa Research

Abstract

Not being a specialist in traditional Chinese medical literature, all I can contribute to a symposium on this subject are some general observations of someone concerned with Chinese studies in the field of intellectual history. It is fascinating how a discipline like “Chinese Studies,” which appeared quite homogeneous until not too long ago, has rapidly changed its face during the past decades, continuously adding new facets to its old and familiar structure. One of these new facets is the field of Chinese medicine, which seems particularly well suited to enrich the entire picture of Chinese traditional culture. A conference on this topic, in a Western environment and using a Western language, would have been hardly possible in earlier years — that it can be organized today means a great advancement in scholarship. But this very progress poses new problems which need our consideration. Basically, these problems center around the question of just where this newly developing field is located, and which common technical language it should use for communication and research. It is impossible, at this stage, even to properly define any of these issues, let alone solve them. There are, however, three aspects that emerge immediately as we approach these issues: first, the position of research on Chinese medicine in the basic framework of area studies and the so-called “disciplines”; second, Chinese medicine’s role in the “holistic” culture of pre-modern China; and third, the question of Chinese medicine as part of a comparative history of medicine and the difficulty of developing a common vocabulary. Hence, the title of this paper uses the term fachprosa in a rather metaphoric sense in that the issue of technical languages stands for the issue of newly emerging fields in Chinese studies in general.