Thursday, January 16, 2014

Cultural Fascism and White Vocabulary Policies in Major US publications

"The west cultivates the dangerous notion that “knowledge only exists if it’s the West that knows it”. The consequences are far-reaching."
"Expats among themselves:Unfortunately, their journalists and editors, all Western educated, seem to have little knowledge and interest in the Chinese tradition (they couldn't tell your author what rujia or a shengren was); they jet in the country from one English-language conference to another (they don't speak Chinese), and are mostly looking out for English-speaking compatriots or Chinese ABCs in China to help them fill their pages. That the Chinese people for the last three thousand years have all kinds of jiajiao, and xue (schools, practices, and teachings), and their own terms, categories, taxonomies, and archetypes of wisdom that the West might want to learn, understand, letting alone to know about seems to be beyond Science's mission to create a Chinese-free world of knowledge. As the historian Howard Zinn once remarked: "If something is omitted from history, people have no way of knowing that it is omitted." It is rather sad."
Read at Big Think: Cultural Fascism - Science Magazine: No shengren, please!

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