주쳰즈의 문화학적 지역단위론 고찰- 탈오리엔탈리즘: 세계단위론적 접근 -

Abstract

Despite the constant efforts to create intellectual and ethical definitions and meanings, ‘area studies’ still have many conundrums to settle down as a pure academic category with global awareness. One of the primary obstacles is probably the ugly imperialistic nature of area studies, namely the suspicion of policy science that has been serving the hegemonic national interests of Europe and America. In this sense, this paper was planned to contrive the East Asian area view and its theoretical model, resisting the idea of the global division theory in the strong space represented by modern and contemporary Europe and America on the continuum of the global unit theory. In specific, it was attempted by examining the cultural typology of Zhu Qianzhi (1899~1972), a representative Chinese culturologist in the early 20th century, namely global culture type and geographical distribution. the ‘theory of three world cultures’ as the ‘great civilization – global unit’ composed by Zhu Qianzhi can settle down as a new method of area recognition for sustainable coexistence. Especially, this has significance as a ‘global unit of post-orientalism’ from the East Asian perspective that breaks away from the concept of imperialistic area division by the Western world or its imitation by Japan. Zhu Qianzhi put academic efforts to inquire the culturalistic global unit and ‘globality’ while witnessing and confronting the area composition of the Western imperialism and the biased pro-war area recognition of the Japanese imperialism. This boils down to the pluralist ‘theory of three world cultures’ including ‘religious cultural area – India’, ‘philosophical cultural area – China’ and ‘scientific cultural area – West.’ These three cultural areas are recognized as ‘space = area unit’ and ‘time = history’ in areas of dense population. In addition, they correspond to the geographical ranges in which groups of people sharing a common view of the world and value system reside. This series of ideas for ‘culturological unit’ offers valuable intellectual inspirations and coordinates to set the directivity of new area studies for long-term, peaceful coexistence of the human society.