 2016 - 2017 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0687-2455-01 | Other Ways of Freedom: An Analysis between Cultures and Times | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
Other Ways of Freedom: An Analysis between Cultures and Times
According to the Western liberal tradition, agency is one’s ability to act with autonomy and freedom. Relying on feminist and poststructuralist critiques of this notion of agency, and drawing on writings in Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, and the Study of Religion, this course will delineate modes of agency that are culturally and historically specific to early China. Confucian texts will be read as locating moral and political agency not in the ability to resist, or to re-appropriate, social norms, but as dependent on reiteration of such norms and on strict adherence to them. Instead of a modernist ethics that perceives the body as a disruption and a threat to one’s ability to act rationally, bodily practices – Confucian, Daoist and others, ritualized and non-ritualized - will be shown to play a central role in constituting early Chinese subjects, the relations between them, and their relation to the world. And in place of the isolated, bounded, individual of Western Liberalism, we will find at the center of all early Chinese traditions of thought an individual that is relationally constituted. Special consideration will be given to characterizing aspects of agency - and its lack - in the lives of pre-modern Chinese women. Studies of women’s agency in non-Western societies will help us expand the range of activities which can be seen as expressing agency. Thus, agency will shift from being defined as resisting relations of authority, to an ability to act which conditions of subordination enable and create.
According to the Western liberal tradition, agency is one’s ability to act with autonomy and freedom. Relying on feminist and poststructuralist critiques of this notion of agency, and drawing on writings in Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, and the Study of Religion, this course will delineate modes of agency that are culturally and historically specific to early China. Confucian texts will be read as locating moral and political agency not in the ability to resist, or to re-appropriate, social norms, but as dependent on reiteration of such norms and on strict adherence to them. Instead of a modernist ethics that perceives the body as a disruption and a threat to one’s ability to act rationally, bodily practices – Confucian, Daoist and others, ritualized and non-ritualized - will be shown to play a central role in constituting early Chinese subjects, the relations between them, and their relation to the world. And in place of the isolated, bounded, individual of Western Liberalism, we will find at the center of all early Chinese traditions of thought an individual that is relationally constituted. Special consideration will be given to characterizing aspects of agency - and its lack - in the lives of pre-modern Chinese women. Studies of women’s agency in non-Western societies will help us expand the range of activities which can be seen as expressing agency. Thus, agency will shift from being defined as resisting relations of authority, to an ability to act which conditions of subordination enable and create.