Changing Concepts of Religion from Traditional to Modern Chinese, 1890-1949

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The project applies an approach of historical semantics and investigates the semantic change of Chinese religion-related terminologies that has effected the present usage in discourses on religion or zongjiao. It takes as its point of departure the linguistic ambiguities and multilayeredness of verbal utterances whose meanings are constantly shifting due to their usage and which in the case of Chinese modern vocabulary on religion are formed on the one hand by the encounter with the West and adaptation of Western semantics and on the other hand by older layers of meaning of the plural Chinese history of religions.The subprojects examine keyterms in the semantic field of religion and aim to understand (1) to which degree – dependent on diverse usage contexts – modern religion-related vocabulary substitutes older terminologies or how much premodern vocabularies might have preserved contextual independance (resilience); (2) by which carriers (discoursive communities), channels of transfer and discursive events Western-coined vocabulary has entered the modern Chinese lexicon. The project examines therefore on the one hand processes of conceptual change and semantic approriations in the field of Chinese religious terminology and discourses. On the other hand it aims at understanding the role and change of religion-related vocabulary in interplay with processes and discourses of modernization in East Asia. Semantic analysis of concepts will therefore be combined with contextualizing discourse analysis.