One of the most common questions that have been asked from the ranks of postcolonial theorists has to do with the uses and limits of Western theoretical apparatuses when the object of study is a non-Occidental society. In this paper, Miranda Brown asks herself said question and complicates it with the analysis of the ideas of a non-Western intellectual from the seventeenth century. Upon careful reading of Brown’s contribution, there are several questions that one can ask in turn, which is precisely what I am going to do for the rest of this paper.

For those of us who come from Latin America, the idea that First World—forgive me for using such an unfashionable jargon—intellectuals are supposed to produce theory about Latin America, has always gone hand in hand with its correlate: Latin Americans are not supposed to produce knowledge. That is to say, Latin American intellectuals are part of the object of study of Western scholars and, therefore, are not capable of producing theory themselves. Of course, this is, as we all know, completely false. However, a significant number of people in US-based universities, trained in the area studies paradigm, behave as if they have not realize such a conceptualization is a distortion of reality.

For all its fame as a liberating paradigm, postcolonial theory has shown, at least in the work of some of its most renowned practitioners, an undeniable conformism with some of the preconceptions the West has about the rest of the non-European world (the one that used to be called the “third world”). This is why some of Brown’s questions are so relevant: are non-Western authors from the past dead? Is there theory outside the West? Are non-Western theories from the past useful for our present global world? The answer she is inclined to offer is: no, they are not dead and there is theory production outside the West—theory production that can be used today for the renewal of social thought theory.

Another article appearing on this issue, Thomas Trautmann’s work on languages and nations, could be used as an example that illustrates and inspires the kind of quest Brown is proposing: it suggests that Indian lore inscribed in Sanskrit was instrumental for the development of Western comparative philology, therefore showing how the non-West has had an impact on the West. We will return to this case later, but let us now go to the author Brown chooses to study in her article.

Gu Yanwu, a philologist who also had some ideas about governance and politics, appears in Brown’s article under a very interesting light: she presents his ideas in contrast to Max Weber’s. This move is not only interesting and stimulating, but also productive, for it shows us that the Weberian tendency to view administrative matters in terms of efficiency is not the only possible, not even the most reasonable, one. Gu was more concerned about the welfare of the people than about the efficiency of the administrators. However, I have to admit that some of his ideas about how to achieve this goal are, frankly, a little disturbing. For example, his belief in the virtues of self-interest and what he termed alignment looks at times like a dangerous proposal. Brown herself points at the risks of having the interests of both central government officials and local elites coincide: collusion was very likely to occur—and it did occur, according to some of the sources consulted by her.

What is surprising is Brown’s argument in support of the value of Gu’s ideas. After accepting that corruption and collusion were promoted by the system Gu espoused, she states the following: “Though collusion was inevitable, there are reasons to think that the Han system actually encouraged the imperial administrator to promote the social welfare of the entire community. Our sources indicate initiatives to construct bridges, irrigation ducts, temples, and roads” (Brown 2011: 56). In the same page, a few lines below, she adds: “other evidence suggests that the Han system . . . was robust enough to ferret out blatant examples of local collusion” (Brown 2011: 57). This is somewhat puzzling: the author seems to be condoning collusion as long as some public works are undertaken in exchange. This is somewhat alarming, to say the least, for those of us, Latin Americans, who have been exposed to all sorts of populisms that, in spite of their corrupted and sometimes dictatorial nature, did actually construct bridges and roads. All this looks like the old adage: the ends justify the means.

There are several ways to look at Gu’s ideas about government and empire administration. One is that chosen by Brown: to criticize Weber’s notion of efficiency while falling into the trap of another form of pragmatism—the one that does not seem to care about how things get done as long as they get done. Another possibility is to try to view Gu’s ideas from a perspective that allows for a little more critical distance—that is to say, a perspective that would prevent us from assessing Gu’s ideas against his own standards. What I am trying to say is that to measure the success or viability of Gu’s ideas about empire just by seeing whether the application of them generated the kind of results he expected or not, without questioning the goals he pursued with said ideas, can only lead us to political and ethical confusion.

I am sure that Brown is not endorsing Gu’s absurdly elitist, blatantly conservative ideas about administration and government, but in her haste to present the strengths of her author’s thinking, she gets carried away by a certain form of pragmatism that has proven to be dangerous (and sometimes lethal) for societies all over the world. In my opinion, if we are going to treat, as Brown explicitly suggests (Brown 2011: 47–49), Gu as we treat Weber, then we have to apply to his ideas the same standards we apply to the latter’s. One way of doing this is to ask ourselves the question Brown poses: “can Gu and other Chinese theorists of empire be of use for understanding societies of which they were empirically ignorant?” (60). Her answer is yes and I am not here to disagree with her assessment. However, I do believe that the question can also be reframed in other terms: can Gu’s ideas be considered of certain universal value? That is to say: can they be of help to understand or measure the achievements of other societies outside China? Maybe the answer would still be yes, but I would like to offer a couple of concerns. In order to voice them, I will need to go back to the relationship between central and peripheral intellectual production.

In the last paragraphs of Brown’s article, she engages Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ideas about the universality of Western social sciences, about their capacity to provide the critical resources to transcend their own limitations (Brown 2011: 61–62). In his framework, Europe gives the peripheral subjects an abstract and universal framework to understand non-European societies, as well as a hermeneutical tradition that concerns itself with the different ways of being human (Brown 2011: 61–62). Fair enough, she says, but what if we tried to go beyond just doing Western history? What if we incorporated other ideas coming from all over the world, from non-Western and non-modern traditions, in order not to limit our intellectual endeavors to an exclusively European script?

This is a very serious and respectable project. As a matter of fact, a number of Latin American thinkers and scholars have proposed something like that for a long time. One of them, Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel, has talked about the possibility of undertaking an understanding of modernity as a process to which all the actors involved contributed in significant ways. This is a project that opposes the most prevalent ideas about modernity, which present it as an exclusively European creation. Dussel avers that perhaps it would be better to speak of a Transmodernity in order to make room for conceptions that refuse to view the whole phenomenon as a European product. Such a Transmodernity would be the end product of the different contributions by the diverse actors that were part of the historical processes that led us to the point we usually call modernity.

Walter Mignolo, another Argentinean, who has followed in Dussel’s footsteps, in his contribution to what he himself calls the decolonial paradigm, offers a reconceptualization of modernity as a phenomenon that is unthinkable without the colonial enterprise of European expansion in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. The world we live in now is a consequence of this dual nature of modernity: the emancipatory, progressive side of it, together with the colonial, oppressive enterprise (what he calls the darker side of the Renaissance) that gave origin to the world we live in—that is why he speaks of modernity/coloniality instead of modernity.

Yet Mignolo’s contribution to the deconstruction of modernity as a concept does not stop there: it also proposes a form of knowing that he calls border gnosis, which is based on the experiences and the ontos of those (the victims of the colonial encounter) who were forced to adapt to the project of modernity, but who refused to stop being completely what they were before the colonial clash. This type of understanding is based on a series of worldviews and on a number of vital strategies that are still not only alive amidst modernity, but that also constitute it. Those ideas and experiences of the others of Europe should be not only acknowledged but also used for the understanding of both the past and the present. Among those included in the category “others of Europe” one can find the indigenous dwellers of the Americas.

This is probably a good time to go back to Trautmann’s work on the importance of Sanskrit studies for the development of an undoubtedly Western intellectual enterprise such as comparative philology. Although this is a commendable and necessary gesture towards a non-Western culture, it seems to me that it is less likely to happen if the societies we are talking about are those that developed in the Americas—the cultural currency and prestige of Amerindian societies is not even close to those granted to, or enjoyed by, other non-Western—say, Asian—societies. This is not to question the line of work exemplified by Trautmann’s article—which is, by the way, an excellent piece of scholarship and a brilliant critique of Eurocentrism. I am just only trying to point out that even among those who believe non-Western traditions are valid and useful today, there is a tendency to favor certain traditions over others. However, although most historians of the Americas are not very interested in the life and deeds of indigenous peoples before the arrival of the Europeans, the contribution of those peoples to what we understand as modernity today is something worth our investigative efforts. This is why I celebrate the decision made by the collective behind the journal Fragments to include the Americas (and its first inhabitants) in its definition of the ancient. In this way, indigenous pasts are given a new, unexpected but welcome place where to be considered, investigated, and valued.

Let us now go back to Brown’s Gu and his supposed contributions to not only the provincialization of Europe but also to the expansion of horizons of what today is predominantly a European-oriented view of the social sciences. It is clear to me that whatever the accuracy of his assumptions about the relationship between the Han system of recruitment (which used reputational mechanisms) and welfare, his aim and his means are, undoubtedly, conservative and backwards—even in comparison to those of his contemporaries in China. This case study should remind one that when one talks about the contributions of non-Western peoples from the past one needs to be careful not to be carried away by enthusiasm about the usefulness of those contributions: in some cases, the alternatives proposed by local thinkers are much worse or much more difficult to endorse from our current perspective than the ones proposed by the West. What I am trying to say is that local knowledge is not preferable just because it is local, nor difference is preferable or better just because it is different: we need to be critical of local theoretical developments too, no matter how different from Western models they might be.

Work Cited

Brown, Miranda. 2011. “Returning the Gaze: An Experiment in Reviving Gu Yanwu (1613–1682),” Fragments 1 (2011): 41–77.