Context As Method

With China Studies increasingly becoming an international discipline now, American Scholarship on China Studies as the leader of the whole academia of China Studies overseas, which history and current situation are both attracting its own scholars and other researchers from the rest of the world. However, how to comb its history clearly among numerous scholars, plentiful works and various of concepts, terms and theories is a methodological problem that has confronted with our studies. We argue that the concept of "context" will play a crucial role in the process of resovling this problem, because the existence and development of any work, concept, term, paradigm, scholar and institution will not be understood without related context. The academic history studies will fall into a isolated, dispersed, and overgeneralizational status if we separated our studies from any concrete context. Regarding context as a method means we should adopt a historicism and universal relational viewpoint to research in a synchronic framwork or a diachronic framwork. This article plans to discuss three questions—how to understand colligatory concepts, the relationship between keywords and the history of academic development, whether theoretical influence authors' viewpoints—with methodological of contextualism, in order to better understand the history of American Scholarship on China Studies.This article is divided into six chapters, including introduction, four chapters of body paragraphs and conclusion.Chapter1, Introduction. First of all, we will discuss a problem that how to understand the history of American Scholarship on China Studies; and then talking over the methodological problem from the written perspective; Lastly, putting forward the key viewpoint that regarding context as method.Chapter2, What is New Qing History?. It is the first part of how to understand the colligatory concepts, which purpose is reminds researchers when we see "New Qing History" integrally and synchronicly as a paradigm or school, some differences of which often been ignored by this idea. Therefore, this chapter plans to restore this colligatory concept into its different primitive contexts, and then to compare them, in order to find the "New Qing History" is a weak classification of new historical trends.Chapter3, New Cultural History and American Chinse historiography Studies. It is the second part of how to understand the colligatory concepts. As a concept of Europen Studies, the combination of "New Cultural History" and American Scholarship on China Studies can be seen as a complex traveling, thus, this chapter will in turn put it into the context of European and American Studies and the context of American Scholarship on China Studies in order to understand its connotation better and clearly, and then analyze the idea of "New Cultural History" is how to be embobided in the concrete worksChapter4, From keywords to the history of academia. This chapter takes the two keywords of American Qing Studies:"Late Imperial China" and "Early Modern China" for example to disscuss the way to write the history of academia. Firstly, we will put this two terms into different contexts that they living in; and then for one thing to understand their relationship with other terms or paradigms that prior to them or after them in a diachronic framwork, for another, to comprehend the common features between them and other works at the same time in a synchronic framwork; Lastly, combining these two framworks, and then we can have enough sources to write the history of academic development.Chapter5, Annotation and the expression of the theoretical influence. This Chapter starts with its discussion from "annotation", and then synthetically judge whether the authors has been influenced by theories by putting these annotations separately into the intertextuality and intratextuality of different texts to compare and analyze them.Chapter6, Conclusion. This chapter summarizes all three questions talked above, and then discuss the significant of subjectivity of discipline in American Scholarship on China Studies.