Naming and Impropriety

For something that, according to some very serious philosophers, intimates the primal baptism that is the ἀρχή (beginning, principle) of language, proper names are a surprisingly slippery and contentious bunch. It was not too long ago when Dr. Elise Anderson pointed out the questionable transliteration in U.S. media of the name دىلنىگار ئىلھامجان Dilnigar Ilhamjan,…

The Cruelest Month

The news from Shanghai in the last month have been heartbreaking in many ways, made all the worse by the common knowledge that (and there's no denying it at this point) it is almost entirely a human-made catastrophe. It was the shattering of many illusions, to risk putting it lightly. Recently a "public account" on…

How to Spot a Connoisseur

I only learned this morning that Kanda Nobuo (1921–2003) was the hero behind the card catalogue (now appears to have been lost) for the Laufer Manchu Collection in the then-Far Eastern Library at the University of Chicago. Everything was done in the span of three days: he was in Chicago from May 16th to 20th,…

On Not Speaking Mongolian

In the spirit of a talk Ien Ang gave in 1992, I've had this nagging feeling that my dissatisfaction with my not knowing Classical Mongolian goes beyond that proportionate to a practical inconvenience. But staying closer to Beatrice Bartlett than Ien Ang for now, this is a post about the practical inconvenience, prompted by another…

(n.) A Creature Unfit for Musicking

One of the classic pieces in the qin 琴 repertoire is "Pu'an zhou" 普安咒, or the "Pu'an Mantra" which, as François Picard has shown, is a corrupted form of the “Siddhāṃ Chapters” (Xitan zhang 悉曇章) used to teach Sanskrit letters and syllables in medieval Central and East Asia. In a number of early modern qin…

Forging the Manchu Classic of Changes

I've been involved, in a collaborative effort with the wonderful people at the University of Chicago East Asian Library, in cataloguing a sizable collection of Manchu books that have been gathering dust for some time. Many of these books were acquired over a century ago by Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), the German sinologist who was among…