Berliner China-Hefte/Chinese History and Society 46 (2015), pp. 105–126 Jean-Yves Heurtebise Archeology of European and French Sinology: An Inquiry into Cultural Hybridity* Human life is a process of constant hybridization: genetic hybridization, social hy- bridization, ethnical hybridization, and linguistic hybridization. Genes, classes, people, and words flow in all directions, meet in every location and cross-breed on every occasion. However, if hybridization is the fact of human life, this fact has always generated an intense sentiment of fear and, consequently, a desire to pre- vent and forbid or, at least, to isolate and purify the manifold mixtures of hybrids. This desire to split and compartmentalize people and cultures found some “scien- tific” support in the methodology of classical 19 th century anthropology, influenced by the rise of nationalism 1 and the biased paradigm of Volksgeist. 2 The Humboldtian paradigm of Volksgeist 3 has framed, in many ways, the episte- mological practice of classical anthropology devoted to the isolation of specific characters of distinct populations. However, since the seminal work of Frederik Barth (1969) and the postcolonial critique of Homi Bhabha 4 , contemporary an- thropology has moved in a completely different direction 5 : from an anthropology of specificity, unity and homogeneity to an anthropology of transfer, exchange, and hybridization (Heurtebise 2013). Unfortunately, this new anthropological paradigm has not yet reached the domain of sinology. 6 Indeed, it somewhat contradicts the * The research leading to the following results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement n° 317 767 – LIBEAC, Coordinated by Université d’Aix-Marseille. 1 “The shift in emphasis from ‘culture’ as cultivation to culture as the basic assumptions and guiding as- pirations of an entire collectivity – a whole people, a folk, a nation – probably occurred only in the nineteenth century, under the prompting of an intensifying nationalism. Then each people, with its cha- racteristic culture, came to be understood as possessing a mode of perceiving and conceptualizing the world all of its own.” (Wolf 1999: 29) 2 “Even in the case of the pre-Nazi notion of Volksgeist, the aim behind the concept is to conceive of so- cial identity in terms of what people are instead of in terms of what they do. Even here, the concept is accompanied by more or less overt depreciation of both individual autonomy and collective democratic self-determination.” (Schmid 2009: 182) 3 “Humboldt believed that the national character of a people driven by its inner forces, or Volksgeist, de- termined and was manifested in a variety of cultural aspects, including its customs and morals. Most important, however, Nationalcharakter decisively affected the language of each individual ‘tribe’ (Völ- kerstämme), which was the direct product of its ‘spiritual peculiarity’ (Geisteseigenthümlichkeit): ‘Lan- guage is the external representation of the genius of peoples.’” (Bunzl 1996: 32) 4 “The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cul- tural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” (Bhabha 1994: 3) 5 “Anthropologists mostly stress that cultures, the object of their science, cannot be clearly demarcated [...]. Our challenge then is to […] offer the concept of bordering as a starting point for answering this question.” (Linde-Laursen 2010: 1 f.) 6 “[I]t still seems habitual for many, including many scholars, to think in crude conceptual blocks like East and West, the Oriental and the Occidental, as though these were incommensurate or fundamentally different entities.” (Zhang 2007: x)