Historical Embeddedness
A Postdoctoral Study
Processes of protecting the weak in East Asia can be related to historical precedence, such as indigenous traditions as well as to the appropriation of ideas, discourses and concepts from the West. This background study will, in a first step, systematically look into the question of how East Asian countries reacted to the pressure of modernization with regard to ideas and practices on philanthropy and protection. In China, for example, during the 1870s, the government had already prioritized the development of modernized armed forces over the traditional duty of famine relief, with the result that millions of people starved to death during the North-China famine (Edgerton-Tarpley 2008).
The reception and appropriation of Social Darwinist ideas (in East Asia often wrongly identified with “modernity” or “progress”), lead to far-reaching reconceptionalizations of the idea of society, and especially of the role which individuals in need of protection would play in it (Chen 2012).
The study will look into these problems by using original documents from the period in question. In a second step, the background study will analyze how traditional forms of charity and philanthropy were evaluated during this time, and to what extent they continued to play a role. The third part of the background study will be devoted to the emergence of new departures for protecting the weak, namely, the emergence of civil society organizations, as well as ideas of social welfare and individual rights received and appropriated from the West such as, for example, the minsei-iin system in Japan, which was moulded according to the German Elberfelder Modell (Thränhardt 1996).
The study will closely look into Japanese-Chinese interaction since the end of the nineteenth century, which was undoubtedly of considerable importance for spreading Social Darwinist ideas and concepts of progress and modernity in China, and also had an impact on newly emerging practices of protection and welfare. The background study will finally pay particular attention to the question of the possibility of the emergence of “hybridity”, i.e., the merger of traditional practices and ideas, and newly-appropriated concepts and institutions.
