Confucianism and “Confucianism”

Abstract The modern encounter with Confucianism, both in China and the West, has been shaped by the legacies of Western missionary and imperialist contacts with Chinese culture. In order to extricate the meanings of “Confucius,” “Confucian,” and “Confucianism” from their original colonialist frameworks, attention must be paid to both emic (cultural insiders’) and etic (cultural outsiders’) perspectives on these cultural phenomena, including the scholastic, ritual, textual, and political dimensions of the Confucian tradition as well as the costs and benefits of approaching Confucianism as both a cultural system and as a cultural repertoire. The essay argues that understanding Confucianism as a cultural repertoire—a toolkit of images, institutions, practices, and texts that may be used to situate an audience within a given story and effect changes in both the mindset of that audience and the audience’s world itself—is the most effective way to see how Confucianism’s performative and narrative power is at work in the world.