TY - JOUR
T1 - Books without Borders
T2 - Pham Than Duat (1825-1885) and the Culture of Knowledge in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
AU - Baldanza, Kathlene
N1 - Funding Information:
This article was much improved by comments from Christopher Moore, John Phan, Jessamyn Abel, Maia Ramnath, Anatoly Detwyler, Nhung Tuyet Tran, On-cho Ng, Hoai Tran, and Nathan Vedal. Kwok-leong Tang led me to Cai Tinglan and served as my sounding board. The Institute for Arts and Humanities at Penn State and the American Council of Learned Societies Luce Postdoctoral Fellowship supported research for this project. I would like to especially thank the three anonymous readers who pushed me to strengthen and clarify my argument. The article is much stronger thanks to their insight.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
PY - 2018/8/1
Y1 - 2018/8/1
N2 - It is well-known that the educated elite of China, Vietnam, and other neighboring polities participated in a shared community of inquiry, but how did it work in practice? This article examines Pham Than Duat's 1856 Hung Hóa Gazetteer in order to discover the process by which knowledge was contested and produced within this broader culture of knowledge. Writing within the gazetteer genre, Pham Than Duat engaged with foundational classical Chinese texts, recent Vietnamese works, and the Qing-era kaozheng movement of evidentiary scholarship. That he took himself to be participating in a literary culture that transcended Vietnam is clear from an analysis of his textual citations, as is his confidence in rejecting, reconfiguring, or adding to a transregional culture of knowledge. Pham Than Duat and others like him were autonomous contributors to a community of inquiry that transgressed political boundaries. For Vietnamese scholars, this community was rooted in classical texts but centered in Vietnam.
AB - It is well-known that the educated elite of China, Vietnam, and other neighboring polities participated in a shared community of inquiry, but how did it work in practice? This article examines Pham Than Duat's 1856 Hung Hóa Gazetteer in order to discover the process by which knowledge was contested and produced within this broader culture of knowledge. Writing within the gazetteer genre, Pham Than Duat engaged with foundational classical Chinese texts, recent Vietnamese works, and the Qing-era kaozheng movement of evidentiary scholarship. That he took himself to be participating in a literary culture that transcended Vietnam is clear from an analysis of his textual citations, as is his confidence in rejecting, reconfiguring, or adding to a transregional culture of knowledge. Pham Than Duat and others like him were autonomous contributors to a community of inquiry that transgressed political boundaries. For Vietnamese scholars, this community was rooted in classical texts but centered in Vietnam.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85049309488&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85049309488&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0021911818000499
DO - 10.1017/S0021911818000499
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049309488
SN - 0021-9118
VL - 77
SP - 713
EP - 740
JO - Journal of Asian Studies
JF - Journal of Asian Studies
IS - 3
ER -