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Protecting the Weak in East Asia

This book investigates public claims for the protection of weak

groups and interests in Japan and China from the nineteenth century
to the present day. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it engages
with ongoing global debates relevant to both Western and non-
Western societies whilst also providing a historically informed
analysis of contemporary issues.
Using case studies on disaster victims, employee well-being,
cultural heritage and animal welfare, this book analytically
distinguishes between framing, mobilisation and institutionalisation
processes. It examines these processes at the intersections of
international and domestic spheres and, in doing so, demonstrates
how drives for protection are formulated, contested and played out
in practice. Ultimately, however, this book argues that claims for
protection do not necessarily translate into effective measures, but
may in fact entail ambiguous or negative outcomes for the protected
“weak”.
Protecting the Weak in East Asia makes a significant contribution
to the empirical and theoretical research into the transformation of
East Asian societies. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars
of Asian history, Asian culture and society and East Asian Studies
more broadly.

Iwo Amelung is Professor of Chinese Studies at Goethe University

Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Moritz Bälz holds the Chair of Japanese Law and its Cultural
Foundations at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Heike Holbig is Professor of Political Science at Goethe University
in Frankfurt am Main and senior research fellow at the German
Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, Germany.

Matthias Schumann is a postdoctoral research fellow at the

International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate,
Freedom and Prognostication” at the University of Erlangen-
Nürnberg, Germany.

Cornelia Storz is Professor of Economic Institutions, Innovation

and East Asian Development at Goethe University Frankfurt am
Main, Germany.

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Protecting the Weak in East
Asia
Framing, Mobilisation and Institutionalisation

Edited by Iwo Amelung, Moritz Bӓlz, Heike Holbig, Matthias

Schumann and Cornelia Storz
First published 2018
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Names: Amelung, Iwo, editor.
Title: Protecting the weak in East Asia: framing, mobilisation and
institutionalisation/edited by Iwo Amelung [and four others].
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series:
Routledge contemporary Asia series; 64 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007951 | ISBN 9780815368229 (hardback) | ISBN
9781351255554 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social science)—East Asia. | Marginality, Social
East Asia. | Public welfare—East Asia. | East Asia—Social conditions. |
East Asia—Social policy.
Classification: LCC HN720.5.Z9 P677 2018 | DDC 320.01/1095—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007951

ISBN: 978-0-8153-6822-9 (hbk)

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Contents

List of figures and tables

List of contributors
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Note on transcription

1 Introduction
IWO AMELUNG, MORITZ BÄLZ, HEIKE HOLBIG, ELISA HÖRHAGER, MATTHIAS
SCHUMANN AND CORNELIA STORZ

PART I
Historical and conceptual background studies

2 Protecting the weak or weeding out the unfit? Disaster

relief, animal protection and the changing evaluation of
social Darwinism in Japan and China
MATTHIAS SCHUMANN

3 Processes of appropriation: welfare and cultural heritage

in East Asia
IWO AMELUNG

4 Shifting relations between state and social actors:

ambiguous strategies of protecting the weak in Japan and
China
HEIKE HOLBIG AND MORITZ BÄLZ
5 Theories on institutional change: an application to the
dynamics of “protecting the weak”
CORNELIA STORZ AND HEIKE HOLBIG

PART II
Comparative studies of empirical cases in contemporary
Japan and China

6 From natural hazard to man-made disaster: the protection

of disaster victims in China and Japan
ELISA HÖRHAGER AND JULIUS WEITZDÖRFER

7 Employee well-being in China and Japan: a media content

analysis
MARKUS HECKEL, STEFAN HÜPPE-MOON AND NA ZOU

8 Animal protection in China and Japan: the ambiguous

status of companion animals in rapidly changing societies
KAZUSHIGE DOI AND JEAN-BAPTISTE PETTIER

9 Protecting the weak? Tracing UNESCO’s influence on

Intangible Cultural Heritage regimes in Japan and China
CHRISTINA MAAGS AND IOAN TRIFU

PART III
Conclusions

10 Weak vs. strong: ambiguities of protection

IWO AMELUNG, MORITZ BÄLZ, HEIKE HOLBIG, MATTHIAS SCHUMANN AND CORNELIA
STORZ

Index
Figures and tables

Figures

7.1 Frequency of news reports on migrant workers in the People’s

Daily in China and regular employees in the Asahi Shimbun in
Japan (1995–2014)
7.2 Frequency of news reports on the hukou / huji reform within the
news coverage of migrant workers in the People’s Daily in China
and on work-life balance within the news coverage of regular
workers in the Asahi Shimbun in Japan (1995–2014)

Table

4.1 Four ideal-type modes of state-society relations

Contributors

Iwo Amelung is Professor of Chinese Studies at Goethe University

Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His main research interest is
Chinese history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, with a special focus on the history of science.

Moritz Bälz holds the Chair of Japanese Law and its Cultural
Foundations at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
He is co-editor of the Journal of Japanese Law (J.Japan.L) and
has published widely on topics of Japanese and comparative law.

Kazushige Doi is a former research fellow at Goethe University

Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and an Associate Professor at the
University of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan. His research interests
lie in the mechanisms and manners of conflict resolution and
stabilisation in criminal cases as well as the institutionalisation of
animal welfare in Japan.

Markus Heckel works as a research assistant at the Chair for the

Study of Economic Institutions, Innovation and East Asian
Development at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
His research interests focus on labour economics, employee well-
being, economic policy and central banking, and he has been
supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Heike Holbig is Professor of Political Science with a focus on

Chinese and East Asian-area studies at Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and a senior research fellow at the
 GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg,
Germany. Her research interests centre on Chinese politics, state-
society relations, and regime legitimacy as well as comparative
research on authoritarianism.

Elisa Hörhager is currently working for the German Federal Foreign

Service at the Embassy in Beijing, China. From 2014 to 2016, she
was a research fellow in the interdisciplinary project “Protecting
the Weak” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her
research focus lies on risk, theories of social justice and disasters,
in addition to the analysis of current Chinese foreign and
domestic policy.

Stefan Hüppe-Moon is a research fellow on the research project

“Protecting the Weak” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main,
Germany. He is working on employee well-being and social
justice in China. His forthcoming dissertation is concerned with
meritocratic Confucianism as a branch within contemporary
Confucian political philosophy.

Christina Maags is a former research fellow and doctoral student

at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and she is
now working as a Lecturer in Chinese Politics at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK.
She completed her Ph.D. on the topic of the “Intangible Cultural
Heritage Inheritors System” in the People’s Republic of China.
Her other areas of research include Chinese cultural policy and
diplomacy as well as social policy.

Jean-Baptiste Pettier is a postdoctoral fellow at the Free

University of Berlin, Germany. A specialist of the anthropology of
emotions, his research focuses on issues of morality, ethics and
love and their relationships with politics and economics, with a
regional focus on China. He is currently developing new projects
linked to the consumption of endangered animal species in
China.
Matthias Schumann is working as a postdoctoral research fellow
at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities
“Fate, Freedom and Prognostication” at the University of
Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Previously, he served as the
scientific co-ordinator of the project “Protecting the Weak” at
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research
deals with the religious history of late Imperial and Republican
China.

Cornelia Storz is Professor of Economic Institutions, Innovation

and East Asian Development at Goethe University Frankfurt am
Main, Germany. Her research examines how innovation is
affected by different organisational and institutional contexts and
has been published in leading innovation and business journals,
including guest editorships of Research Policy and the Socio
Economic Review.

Ioan Trifu is a postdoctoral research fellow at Goethe University

Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Political
Science from both the University of Lyon (France) and Tohoku
University (Japan) in 2013. His doctoral dissertation focused on
the post-war evolution of Japanese local politics. Currently, he is
investigating the protection of cultural heritage in Japan.

Julius Weitzdörfer is a teaching member of the Faculty of Law,

University of Cambridge, UK, and a Charles & Katharine Darwin
Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. While he teaches
environmental law at Cambridge, his work covers dynamic fields
of Japanese law, including criminal trials, disaster response and
the regulation of risk.

Na Zou is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair for the Study of Economic

Institutions, Innovation and East Asian Development at Goethe
University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research interests
include labour markets and innovation, migration and social
networks, and micro-econometrics.
Acknowledgements

Over the years that it took to complete this volume, we have

accumulated numerous debts. First of all, this book would not have
been possible without the generous support by the Volkswagen
Foundation, issued within its research initiative “Key Issues for
Research and Society” for the research project “Protecting the Weak
– Entangled Processes of Framing, Mobilisation and
Institutionalisation in East Asia”, from 2014 to 2017 (AZ 87 382).
Financial and institutional support has also come from the Goethe
University Frankfurt am Main, the Association of Friends and
Supporters of the Goethe University and the Interdisciplinary Centre
for East Asian Studies (IZO), where our research team has been
working across four departments and two campuses.
Like all intellectual endeavours, our research project emerged
from inspiring debates, in this case with long-time colleagues at
Goethe University and beyond. Stefan Gosepath, Joachim Kurtz,
Michael Lackner, Hans-Jürgen Puhle and Reinhard H. Schmidt have
accompanied the project from the beginning and provided support at
crucial times. As the research project developed, we benefited from
useful exchanges with Bruno Amable, David Chiavacci, Sabine
Lennkh, Ken’ichi Mishima, Sighard Neckel, Shalini Randeria, Gunther
Teubner and Wei Xiangdong as well as other participants in our
international conferences and workshops in Frankfurt am Main
(January 2015 and June 2017) and at Lingnan University in Hong
Kong (October 2016). We are also very grateful that during their
empirical research, our project members profited from the insights
and careful guidance of colleagues in China, Japan and elsewhere.
Hitoshi Aoki, Stefan Gruber, Moe Honjo, Saori Kawazoe, Peter Li,
Paul Littlefair, Tsutomu Nakano, Liu Zhaohui, Peng Zhaorong, Song
Wei, Su Rongyu, Su Yiyi, Tomoyuki Shimanuki, Ryo Kambayashi and
Xu Bin deserve special mention here.
Another expression of gratitude is due to our research assistants
Daniel Ehnes, Paul Grabowski, Pin-Jhen Lin, Chen Mei, Elisabeth
Kretschmer, Bengt Schwemann and Miriam Steinke, who were all of
invaluable help for our research and the completion of this volume,
as well as to Chris Engert in Florence for his circumspect copy-
editing work. We are also grateful for the criticism and advice that
we received from the anonymous reviewer who read initial drafts of
some of the chapters of this book. Finally, our research would not
have been possible without the help of our long-time administrative
project co-ordinator, Christiane Münscher, who oversaw the whole
research process, provided for a smooth management in the
background and reminded us of each next step in this long journey
with both patience and vigour.
Iwo Amelung, Moritz Bälz, Heike Holbig, Matthias Schumann and Cornelia Storz
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Abbreviations

ACA Agency for Cultural Affairs

ACFTU All-China Federation of Trade Unions
ASRLDV Act on Support for Reconstructing the Livelihoods of
Disater Victims
CASS Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CEFP Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy
CEO Chief Executive Officer
DPJ Democratic Party of Japan
GATT General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs
GMD Guomindang
GONGO Government-Organised Non-Governmental Organisation
HRM Human Resources Management
ICH Intangible Cultural Heritage
ICP Intangible Cultural Property
ILO International Labour Organization
ISO International Organization for Standardization
IT Information Technology
JFBA Japan Federation of Bar Associations
JNES Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organisation
JPY Japanese Yen
LDP Liberal Democratic Party of Japan
MAFF Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
MOC Ministry of Culture
NDA Nuclear Damages Act
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NISA Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency
NPO Non-Profit Organisation
PRC People’s Republic of China
RIWSC Research Institute for Women and Careers
TEPCO Tokyo Electric Power Company
TTIP Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization
US United States of America
WLB Work-Life Balance
WWI World War I
WWII World War II
YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association
Note on transcription

Except for names that are better known under alternative spellings
such as Sun Yat-sen, we use the Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin
Orthography throughout the volume to transcribe Chinese words. For
Japanese, we have used the revised Hepburn system of
romanisation.
1
Introduction

Iwo Amelung, Moritz Bälz, Heike Holbig, Elisa

Hörhager, Matthias Schumann and Cornelia Storz

Shifting discourses of protecting “the weak”

Currently, we can perceive a shift in the public debates in both the

West and in East Asia about which groups or interests in society
deserve to be protected through special institutional measures, and,
from a broader view, why and how. Actors, ranging from activists
and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to state agencies and
international organisations, are striving to protect such diverse
interests as animal welfare, cultural heritage, the preservation of the
environment, or free Internet access, often framing their political
claims as “rights” (Singer, 1975; Irina, 2011; Brown, 2013). These
debates seem to be motivated by a growing awareness of weak
groups and interests present within society and are often justified by
claims that “the weak” should be protected in the name of a
common good (Gemeinwohl) which is both contested and re-
negotiated in the process. New conceptualisations of the common
good are based upon the assumption that “the weak” should be
protected through collective strategies and institutional solutions.
Signs of this shift can be found, for example, in the recent Euro-
American debates about happiness and well-being, new forms of
“soft paternalism” and new public ethics of “caring” (Kirchgässner,
2017; Schubert, 2012; Sayer, 2007). Moreover, while the common
good used to be the quintessential prerogative of the modern nation
state, it is a concept that has increasingly been challenged by
transnational dynamics, most visibly in the prevalence of comparable
debates in East Asia.
In contemporary East Asian societies, the shifting discourses of
“protecting the weak” have gained in prominence since the late
1990s, and particularly since the turn of the century. While there are
significant variations in the dynamics of the related discourses, we
have seen strong mobilisation and institutionalisation effects in
various areas within a remarkably short period of time. Illuminating
examples include the efforts in Japan, China and other East Asian
countries to protect the victims of natural disasters. After the
Wenchuan Earthquake in China in 2008, a wide array not only of
NGOs, so-called government-organised non-governmental
organisations (GONGOs), but also of individual civil actors engaged
in the relief efforts and called for support for the victims. Similar
dynamics took place after the 2011 triple disaster of Fukushima in
Japan. Moreover, in both countries, we can see efforts to improve
the well-being of employees. While, in China, discussions focus on
the social condition of migrant workers, the Japanese debate
revolves around the working situation of Japanese white-collar
workers and their difficulties in attaining a “work-life balance”. These
developments have important socio-political, economic, legal and
cultural implications. Public discourses about the protection of weak
groups and interests may mobilise domestic civil society to link up
with transnational NGOs, may challenge the nation state’s claims to
political legitimacy by contesting established interpretations of the
common good, may promote new legislation and may trigger longer-
term shifts in cultural norms and social values.
These discourses about weak groups and interests are not only
linked to global debates, but are also framed by real, imagined or
(re-) invented traditions in the respective societies. Thus, recent
prominent campaigns for animal protection (within the larger
environmental protection movement) in East Asia invoke an “Asian”
tradition of animal welfare which serves not only to mobilise citizens
but also to claim superiority in a global context. Cultural heritage is
another vital example in this regard. Both Japan and China have
been at the forefront of pushing for the acknowledgement and
popularisation of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”, which was
positioned against an alleged Western emphasis on materiality that
did not resonate with cultural practices in East Asia. Processes
surrounding the protection of groups and interests such as disaster
victims, employee well-being, animal welfare and cultural heritage all
point to the complex processes of appropriation which lie at the
heart of the global construction of “alternative modernities”
(Ashcroft, 2009).
Japan and China have been seen as two poles of a specific
relationship of modernisation historically formed with the “West”
(Therborn, 2003). Both shared the impetus towards reactive
modernisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Japan, however, was perceived by other East Asian societies,
particularly by Chinese élites, as the most Westernised society in
Asia while also being viewed critically for its growing imperialist
ambitions. As such, Japan was seen as both a role model and a
competitor in the race to modernity. These ambiguous perceptions
have created dissonances, tensions and ruptures in the construction
of alternative modernities in East Asia, some of which are still subtly
evoked in contemporary debates. More concretely, many new terms
and institutions entered East Asia through the prism of Japan (see
Chapter 3), which bound China more closely to its formerly “small”
neighbour than ever before. Official Chinese missions to study
Japan’s “successful” modernisation and large numbers of foreign
exchange students further linked the historical experiences of both
countries. It is against this historical background that we consider
investigating the entangled trajectories of the constructions of
modernity in Japan and China since the late nineteenth century to
be particularly fruitful. The institutionally diverging developments of
Japan and China after WWII add to the comparative value of such
an investigation. Despite oft-repeated assumptions of a shared
“Confucian civilisation”, Japan and China have adopted widely
differing models, one conditioned by the post-war US-occupation,
the other by Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism, which continue to
shape the social and political realities of each country. As these
models are both divergent but still informed by their specific
historical trajectories and by the East Asian context, the two
countries are particularly suitable for a study of the changes in the
formulation of the common good and the protection of the weak. As
we will argue, their trajectories question the assumption of a global
convergence of societal models and point to the agency of local
actors and the contingency of modernisation processes. We have
chosen the four cases of disaster victims, employee well-being,
animal welfare and cultural heritage to illustrate this.

Protecting “the weak”: transfer, agency and

appropriation

At first glance, the emergence of calls to protect weak groups and

interests in East Asia seems to reflect a global diffusion of the
concepts and rights discourses produced by international
organisations, transnational NGOs, Western academic discourse and
of post-growth and post-materialist values (Inglehart and Welzel,
2005), a trend enforced by the recent global financial crisis and the
growing empirical evidence regarding the social and ecological costs
of economic growth. If we look at the specific calls to protect the
weak in East Asia more closely, however, the idea of a linear
diffusion or “trickling down” of globalised discourses to the
peripheries does not hold. What we can observe in the societies
under study are processes of selective reception, translation,
appropriation, and negotiation in which “modern” Western
interpretations of specific concepts are combined with re-inventions
of cultural traditions, as well as of religious and other elements
which are claimed to be indigenous. Moreover, these processes are
not unidirectional. Instead, East Asian actors themselves are vocal
voices globally and thereby shape the discourses about weak groups
and interests also in Western societies.
Scholars focusing on ideas such as “entangled modernities”,
“shared histories” and “histoire croisée” (Werner and Zimmermann,
2002) have emphasised the centrality of processes of cultural
transfer and included central concepts and practices of modernity
within their purview. Already in 1994, Edward Said made his famous
claim that “[t]he history of all cultures is the history of cultural
borrowing” and pointed out that “[c]ulture is never just a matter of
ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and
creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences and
interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures” (Said, 1994,
217). This statement mirrored approaches of transfer history which
have gained in prominence in European historical studies from the
1980s – at the time still focusing, in the main, on the nation state
(Espagne and Werner, 1985) – and were further developed to
accommodate non-nation state entities more flexibly. The
assumption of the universality of cultural borrowing also found its
way back into sociology, especially in the work of Shalini Randeria,
who stressed the “two-way” nature of transfers and who developed
from this her concept of entangled modernities and shared histories
(Randeria, 1999). Together with Sebastian Conrad, she argues that
various cultures shared a number of central modern experiences due
to the increasing circulation of goods, practices, and ideas (Conrad
and Randeria, 2002, 9–49). Here, we can also re-connect to post-
colonial studies and Arjun Appadurai’s concept of global cultural
flows, which he sees embodied in five different scapes (Appadurai,
1996, 33). Of particular importance for the protection of the weak
are ideoscapes, which, according to Appadurai, are “composed of
elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain
of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights,
sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy”
(Appadurai, 1996, 36). The above approaches open ways of
conceptualising the keywords of modernity beyond static notions of
origin and authenticity; instead, once concepts are transferred (or
have “travelled” in the sense of Said’s “travelling theories”) to other
locations, they are seen as embodying a positively understood
“hybridity”.1 These approaches build on the acknowledgement of
global connections put forth by the theorists of world polity theory or
World Society (Meyer et al., 1997; Stichweh, 2000; Meyer, 2005)
while overcoming the convergent and rather mechanical
assumptions underlying these models.
The contingency which marks the production of “hybrid”
ideoscapes in different parts of the world results from the actors that
shape the processes of cultural transfer which lie at the heart of
entangled modernities. Already in his influential programme of
“multiple modernities”, Shmuel Eisenstadt re-instated the importance
of agency in processes of modernisation. Eisenstadt explicitly states
that:
ongoing reconstructions of multiple institutional and ideological patterns are carried
forward by specific social actors in close connection with social, political, and intellectual
activists, and also by social movements pursuing different programs of modernity,
holding very different views on what makes societies modern.
(Eisenstadt, 2000, 2)

As recent research has stressed, actors often forward their attempts

at re-constructing “institutional and ideological patterns” by
appropriating models, practices, and ideas from both the global and
the local level. We therefore prefer the concept of “cultural
appropriation”2 to assumptions of diffusion or convergence as
implied in modernisation theory and related agendas.
The concept of “cultural appropriation” has been employed most
prominently in post-colonial studies to analyse both how a dominant
culture (imperialist, colonialist) appropriates practices, concepts and
objects seen as belonging to a dominated culture (Spurr, 1993), and
the use of appropriation by a dominated culture to resist this
domination (Hart, 1997). Appropriation has a “fundamentally active
nature”, which is already manifest in the Latin etymology of the
word, which literally means “to make one’s own” (Ashley and Plesch,
2002, 3). Appropriation highlights the agency of local actors in
processes of cultural transfer and the development of entangled
modernities more generally. People may modify or re-conceptualise
globalised concepts, practices or institutions to adapt them to their
own needs and thereby assign them new meaning. Due to its focus
on the involved actors, “appropriation” allows processes as different
as adoption, modification and rejection to be explained equally well.
Even the emergence of new traditions – this is the “invention of
traditions” in the sense of Eric Hobsbawm (1983) – can be regarded
as the result of appropriation (Hahn, 2011, 197–198). Recently, the
concept has been applied to new areas and subjects beyond the
colonial and post-colonial context. Anthropologists such as Hans
Peter Hahn have stressed that “cultural appropriation”, as a concept,
offers the opportunity to depart from the pure description of
phenomena of circulation towards a “deeper understanding of
meaningful local action in the context of globalization” (Hahn, 2008,
195).
Looking at the appropriation of concepts and texts, it is clear that
translation plays an important role (Sanders, 2006, 10), especially
with regard to East Asia. The appropriation of practices and ideas
related to the protection of weak interests from the middle of the
nineteenth century is unthinkable without newly coined terms and
their stabilisation. None of the terms which Appadurai links to the
Enlightenment worldview had its equivalent in East Asia prior to the
late nineteenth century, and it was precisely the processes of
negotiation and re-negotiation, which were related to the solution of
terminological issues, which constituted a vital part of the process of
appropriation.
Another important aspect for this volume is that appropriation can
be applied to understand the emergence and the development of
formal institutions, such as laws or relief programmes. Scholars have
questioned the early optimism about the possibility of “legal
transplants” first proposed by Alan Watson in 1974, and have
pointed to the importance of social and cultural practice within legal
systems (Legrand, 1997). Gunther Teubner has similarly questioned
the metaphor of transplantation by arguing that law is closely bound
to social sub-systems and different legal traditions. If a legal concept
is transferred to another social or cultural context, it will serve as a
“legal irritant”. It is not just the transferred concept itself that will be
re-constructed in the transfer process, the receiving legal system will
also undergo fundamental change (Teubner, 1998). Differences in
cultural and social context are of special importance once institutions
are caught up in global entanglements. The most notorious case of
legal transfer would be the imposition of a legal system on a
colonially dominated country (Miller, 2003). The second widely
discussed instance is the voluntary adoption of legal systems from
outside sources, Japan and China during the late nineteenth and the
early twentieth century being good examples (Ng, 2014). These
adoptions were conditioned by the wish to remove judicial
extraterritoriality and regain sovereignty. Sally Engle Merry has
related such processes to the concept of cultural appropriation and
remarks on the basis of her case study of nineteenth-century
Hawaii:
Law can be theorized as consisting of local, regional, national, and global systems of
rules and procedures, each bearing upon the ordering of local social relations in a
particular way. Resistance, collaboration, cooperation, and appropriation define the
shape of interactions between cultural practices and forms of legal processes.
(Merry, 1998, 603)

Concretely, as she points out, Hawaiian chiefs appropriated Anglo-

American law in order to “civilize” their country, but re-configured
certain aspects and completely left out elements that did not fit their
own categories of meaning. Appropriation can thus also be
“resistant” (Merry, 1998). The role of appropriation within legal
transfer suggests that neither “convergence” nor “divergence” are
suitable descriptions of the complex processes that play out at the
local level.
Finally, one of the advantages of the concept of “appropriation” is
its emphasis on the diachronic nature of related processes.3 Our
volume shows that the appropriation of, for example, the concept of
rights in Japan and China was linked to both local, cultural and social
factors, as well as to external stimuli which resulted in complex and
diverging patterns. Up to now, research has not been able to come
up with a consistent understanding of how such diachronic
processes of appropriation are structured. In our volume, we pay
particular attention to the long-term trajectories of appropriation in
order to understand which factors shape the appropriation of global
discourses over time. It might be the case that concepts which were
appropriated at first were later rejected. On the other hand,
concepts, practices and institutions may also be so thoroughly
incorporated that they are “re-exported” later on, a phenomenon
which Peter Burke calls “circularity”, a metaphor which also usefully
highlights the multi-directional character of cultural entanglements
(Burke, 2009, 96–99). Japan and China, with their diverging political
and social developments after WWII, are very promising cases for
such a diachronic investigation.
In general, appropriation is a useful concept which can be applied
to all spheres of cultural entanglements which mark the history of
East Asia, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, and
is also flexible enough to be combined with the relational
understanding of “the weak” that we advance in this volume.

Definitions, concepts and methodological

approaches to “protecting the weak”

We use the notion of “protecting the weak” to refer to public claims

for the collective protection of human groups and interests that are
inter-subjectively constructed as “weak”. We posit that these calls for
protection are made en lieu of “the weak” by (domestic and
international) social and state actors, who, by making these calls in
the name of a common good, simultaneously claim the power to
define “the weak”, to represent them and to demand their
strengthening. The common good is similarly being contested and
negotiated in this process. Who and what is “weak” and how to
define the “common good” in a given society are thus not known a
priori, but are, instead, the result of an open-ended dynamic of
public contestation and justification of the need for protection, a
process entailing shifts in social and politico-institutional power
constellations (cf. Tarrow, 2011). This epistemological approach
leads us to several methodological choices:
Firstly, we focus on the social construction of values and do not
pre-define the object under investigation. Instead, we take the fact
that “weakness” is constructed through social processes involving
numerous actors seriously. How the label of weakness is interpreted,
who or what is deserving of protection, who is responsible for
protection etc., are all questions which are debated in society.
Secondly, we focus on processes. The protection of weak groups
involves shifting relations between the state and social actors, which
are articulated in processes of framing, mobilisation and
institutionalisation (see more below). These processes are entangled
and can occur either simultaneously or consecutively. There are
feedback loops between these processes, and various groups of
actors are involved. The processes are not just temporal, but also
spatial, with values and institutions being appropriated among
different societies. It is important to note that this approach can
entail incremental or radical institutional change which may be either
beneficial or harmful to the protected weak groups and interests
(see Chapter 5).
And thirdly, we take not only weak groups, but also weak interests
into account. We have chosen the four cases of disaster victims,
employee well-being, animal welfare and cultural heritage in order to
highlight the existence of different types of weakness. On the one
hand, protection can be aimed at groups of people. In this case, the
“receivers” of protection may participate in calls for their protection
or even demand the resources required to protect themselves. On
the other hand, cultural heritage and animals can be considered as
the interests of human claims for protection, interests which cannot
make their voices heard by themselves.4 To allow for a comparative
approach to these two types of weakness, we focus on the
processes surrounding the calls for protection that are negotiated
between state and social actors (see below).
 The methodological choices outlined above have implications also
for the choice of terminology. There are certainly alternative terms
to that of “the weak”. Authors refer to disadvantaged, marginalised
or vulnerable groups in order to discuss issues of distribution, social
justice, or social movements. Used more commonly as a noun,
“vulnerability” is perhaps the most developed of these terms, as it
has become a central concept of the multidisciplinary approach of
“vulnerability science”. Uniting economists, geographers, sociologists
and many more, the term is used to analyse how certain factors
affect the distribution of risks and losses.5 Often in connection with
its counterpart, “resilience”, vulnerability refers to economic,
demographic, social, and other factors which have an impact upon
the fate of individuals grouped together, particularly those who face
crises or disasters. However, the fact that we have chosen to use the
concept “weak”, is, instead, meant to highlight the innovative
aspects in our epistemological approach in studying the processes of
social contestation around the need for protection, including claims
on behalf of weak groups and interests. This is in contrast to the
concept of “vulnerability”, which almost artificially “creates” groups
through indicators of certain pre-defined factors. Thus, referring to
“the weak” does not avoid the messy process of social contestation,
but instead acknowledges its relevance in discourses which frame
claims and interests, as well as the mobilisation around such claims
and their institutionalisation. Interlingual and interdisciplinary
accuracy is afforded through the presentation of “the weak” not as a
mere term, but as a concept. This means that the concept “weak” is
based upon a methodological approach which both structures and
orders cognitive processes (Busse, 1987, 70).
In the way in which it is employed in this volume, “weak” is meant
to emphasise certain dimensions which are absent from or less
explicit in the literature on vulnerability. Seen as a state of being,
weakness is an inherently relative concept. It implies a comparison
of the weak state-of-being to that of a strong state-of-being (Pettier,
2016). This can be a temporal comparison of the change in the state
of a single group, or a comparison between groups. Weakness is
constituted through strategies of justification for why certain groups
or interests should receive protection. Furthermore, the concept
“weak” implies the fluid nature of a dynamic process. Seen at the
societal level, both the weak and the strong are involved in a far-
from-static process of contestation in which they can even switch
sides. From within society, subjective and inherent weakness
depends on one’s vantage-point. Importantly, the weak or strong
qualities of actors can shift during the very processes of protection
which we analyse in our case studies. This conforms to what Iris
Marion Young describes as a “relational conceptualisation”, in which
“what makes a group a group is less some set of attributes its
members share than the relations in which they stand to others”
(Young, 2000, 90). It thus puts two or more actors, groups or
interests in relation to each other, based upon a perceived
asymmetry of power. Much more than vulnerability, which points to
an undefined external environment, it takes into account the inter-
subjective and directional nature of claims and calls for protection.
This allows us to highlight the relational and inter-subjective nature
of weakness and to acknowledge that the distribution of power is
one of the key issues at the heart of protection efforts. Identifying a
group or interest as “weak” in the context of social mobilisation for
its protection may be oriented towards the redistribution of power in
society.
Therefore, weakness allows for a holistic (i.e., comprehensive)
approach which covers, potentially, all groups and interests whose
status is disputed. It is also holistic in the sense that individuals,
groups and interests can all be identified as weak, thus recognising
that weakness can lie not in the groups or interests themselves, but
instead in the resources and capacities that are at their disposal.
This allows for multiple agents and levels of mobilisation to be taken
into account, ranging from weak groups themselves, spokespeople
and facilitators, and oppositional forces through to institutions. It is
further a concept that can be embedded in the initiatives of actors to
fight for their empowerment. Empowerment is a social process that
“helps people gain control over their own lives” and depends upon
the ideas that power can change and that it can expand (Page and
Czuba, 1999). By (self-) identifying them(selves) as weak, people
may put forth claims for their (own) protection. Public ascriptions of
weakness, however, do not always lead to empowerment or at least
accommodation. They may also lead to further marginalisation or
even provoke a range of government techniques of social control
that seek to maintain the state’s hegemony in defining and
managing the protection of weak groups and interests – a
phenomenon which we have called protectification (see below and
Chapter 4).
Leaving room for the subjectivity and normativity of the actors
themselves to be taken into account, this concept broadens the
observer’s viewpoint and allows the emotions and tensions involved
in societal claims for protection to be taken seriously. Structures of
power and weakness can lead to emotional outcomes in the relations
between members of a society (Goodwin et al., 2009). Our concept
acknowledges the strong mobilising function of perceiving a group or
an interest as “weak”. Civic actors may point out the objective
necessity of protecting certain groups or interests in the name of the
common good, but may actually be motivated by an emotional need
to act. The opposite can also be true when protection is framed in
very emotional terms but is actually grounded in rational
calculations. Emotions complement interests, in that they are not a
purely rationalistic concept and can provide alternative reasons for
the emergence and endurance of the mobilisation for protection.
Including an analysis of emotions takes into account the subjectivity
of actors in their justification of the need to protect without including
such a normative justification in our approach itself.
Finally, by advancing our concept of protection processes based
upon “the weak”, our project creates space for a conceptual and
disciplinary openness necessitated by our interdisciplinary, non-
normative approach. In this way, the inherent ambiguity and social
connotations of the term “weak” become important strengths. In
addition, the dynamic way in which we understand “the weak”
leaves room to investigate the different steps which we have
identified with the processes of protecting the weak: framing,
mobilisation and institutionalisation.
Processes of protection: framing, mobilisation,
institutionalisation

To provide a consistent approach to cover the various case studies

and compare them systematically across Japan and China, we will
analyse processes of protecting the weak in the three steps of
framing, mobilisation and institutionalisation; also, we will consider
potential feedback processes.
Framing: David Snow et al. define frames as “‘schemata of
interpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify,
and label’ occurrences within their life space and the world at large.
By rendering events or occurrences meaningful, frames function to
organize experience and guide action, whether individual or
collective” (Snow et al., 1986, 464; cf. Goffman, 1974). In
accordance with this widely used approach, we understand the
formulation and elaboration of calls to protect the weak as framing
processes which aim to achieve social mobilisation. Our analytical
focus will be on how the appropriations of the ideas and the
concepts of Western modernity are combined with symbolic
resources such as indigenous traditions, religions, national myths
etc. which are re-invented in order to increase the social resonance
of calls to protect the weak.
Mobilisation: Framing processes have been conceptualised as the
symbolic driving force of social mobilisation (Snow and Benford,
1988; Tarrow, 2011). The contributions to this volume make use of
framing theory as developed in the context of social movement
theory. As elaborated above, public debates about protecting the
weak involve a plurality of social actors, which often, tend to follow
an outside-in logic, for example, when calls to protect the weak
originate from international organisations or conventions, from shifts
in global economic discourse, transnational civil society, or activist
networks. Once appropriated domestically, they may lead to the
mobilisation of domestic civic actors. Likewise, and often in
combination with outside-in processes, social mobilisation might
follow a domestic bottom-up logic, i.e., when mobilisation moves
from the local grassroots up to regional and central levels. As public
contestations about protecting the weak typically entail shifts in
social and political power constellations, the methodological
challenge here will be to identify and approach the relevant social
actors.
However, mobilisation is not merely limited to the social sphere,
but may also occur in a top-down logic, that is, as mobilisation by
the state. What is at stake when new calls to protect the weak in the
name of the common good emerge is the state’s claimed prerogative
to define and pursue the common good or the common interest, a
claim that is central to the political legitimacy of modern nation
states (Beetham, 1991). A working hypothesis of this project is thus
that outside-in and/or bottom-up calls to protect the weak may
challenge the state’s claim to legitimacy and lead to reactive
framing6 and top-down mobilisation strategies on the part of the
state, which, in turn, result in public contestation of dominant
justifications of who has the power to define, represent and protect
“the weak”.7 Ideal-typically, four modes of state-society relations can
be distinguished to capture state actors’ dealing with social
mobilisation processes (see Chapter 4):

Empowerment: The proponents of the protection of weak

groups or interests may be empowered and allowed a broader
scope of action if the state not only accepts re-definitions of the
common good to include new social calls for protecting the
weak, but also grants civic actors an institutionalised mandate in
independently protecting the weak.
Accommodation: New calls for protection may be
accommodated when the state invites and facilitates civic actors
to assist in protecting the weak groups or interests in selected
fields while retaining the sole authority to define who or what is
“weak” and whether to accept related re-formulations of the
common good.
Protectification: Alternatively, the state may try to pre-empt the
empowerment of the proponents of “the weak” by monopolising
 the protection of the latter. This mode of “protectification”8
entails the acknowledgement of new social calls for protecting
the weak in the name of the common good and the granting of
some form of material and/or symbolic support while aiming at
the prevention of further mobilisation.
Marginalisation: States may strive to ban public articulations of
calls to protect the weak altogether if these calls are perceived
to subvert the state’s definition of the common good. Here, the
state claims not only the hegemony to define who and what is
“weak”, but also the monopoly to protect it.

Institutionalisation: Depending on the outcome of these public

contests, public calls to protect weak groups and interests may
result, empirically, in the adoption of international conventions, new
laws and regulations, the re-distribution of public funds, subsidies,
tax reductions, charity networks, holidays, “awareness” campaigns
etc. From the perspective of the various disciplines combined in this
volume, protection may focus on a number of concrete
manifestations and developments. The forms of institutionalised
protection which will be analysed in this volume encompass, among
others, compensatory re-distribution, the creation of domestically
enforceable legal entitlements and more or less binding international
legal regimes and symbolic politics, including those forms with an
emphasis on participation and empowerment.
Feedback processes between institutionalisation and framing:
When weak groups or interests win the right to institutional
protection, these institutions may be complied with – or not. In the
latter case, they neither have an effect on the protection of the
common good, nor do they affect the framing processes on their
protection. In the former case, they affect framing processes as they
become internalised, leading to a reinforcement of the newly formed
institutions of protection or to further institutional change in the
longer run (see also Chapter 5).
Using this three-step approach of framing, mobilisation and
institutionalisation, the empirical contribution of this volume will be
based upon the four pairs of comparative case studies mentioned
above, which promise to be of particular empirical relevance and
theoretical significance for our topic:

disaster victims;
employee well-being;
animal welfare; and
cultural heritage.

We selected this diverse sample of cases according to two criteria.

Firstly, we included not only “weak” human groups, as in the case of
disaster victims and employee well-being, but also “weak” abstract
interests, such as cultural heritage and animal welfare. Weak human
groups might speak for themselves, while weak abstract interests
cannot. While this is evident for the case of cultural heritage,
animals present a particularly interesting borderline case. They
cannot argue for their interests but need others to represent them.
However, the discourse on animal protection is, in part, framed as a
“rights discourse” in analogy to subjective rights of humans. Yet, in
general, it is our hypothesis that processes of protection of both
human groups and non-human interests show important similarities.
Based upon our conceptualisation above, we assume that, in both
spheres, calls for protecting the weak are made en lieu of these
“weak” groups and interests by social and state actors who, by
claiming the power to define and represent them, constitute
themselves as the relevant agents of these processes of framing,
mobilisation and institutionalisation. Secondly, in order to draw
general conclusions from a necessarily limited number of case
studies, we included both groups and interests in which a high level
of institutionalised protection has already been achieved (such as
cultural heritage, especially in Japan) as well as those in which the
institutionalisation process is in an early stage (such as animal
protection, especially in China). As explained above, it is not our
intention to make a normative claim of our own about who or what
should be protected and to what extent. Otherwise, we might have
chosen environmental issues in China, single mothers in Japan and
so on. Rather, we aim at understanding how and why state and
social actors argue and mobilise in favour of protection for certain
groups and interests and whether and, if so, how this results in
institutions of protection.
We are fully aware that examining the same group or interest in
both Japan and China may sometimes mean that we are looking at
very different things. For example, taking into account the different
levels of socio-economic development in the two countries, the
discourse on employee well-being in Japan focuses on issues that
are different from the discourses on the fate of migrant workers in
China. Yet, we believe that this in no way diminishes the value of
such a comparison. Rather, while the interplay between social and
state actors is embedded in different political power constellations in
democratic Japan and in authoritarian China, we believe that a
comparative analysis of the underlying processes of framing,
mobilisation and institutionalisation can yield important findings with
regard to the construction of alternative modernities in both
countries.

The structure of the volume

By analytically distinguishing between framing, mobilisation and

institutionalisation processes and by examining these processes at
the intersections of international and domestic spheres, the book
aims to trace the fluid constructions of modernity in Japan and China
in their making.
To do so, the first part will establish the historical, cultural, socio-
political, legal and economic foundations for analysing these
processes. In Chapter 2, Matthias Schumann discusses the changing
evaluation of social Darwinism in Japan and China in relation to the
fields of disaster relief and animal protection from the late
nineteenth century. He shows that the reception of social Darwinism
was intimately connected to contemporary discussions about culture,
civilisation and nation-building, which led to differing responses in
the two countries. Especially in the case of China, social actors
appropriated global concepts and discourses which were used to
critique the logic of social Darwinian struggle. In Chapter 3, Iwo
Amelung looks at processes of appropriation – a key term in this
volume – in relation to an emerging welfare sector in both Japan and
China since the late nineteenth century, as well the establishment of
a legal framework for the protection of cultural heritage. Both
Japanese and Chinese actors appropriated global concepts of welfare
to assert their international position while linking these concepts to
their respective countries’ rich tradition of charity and philanthropy.
Cultural heritage similarly emerged as a main stay of a modern
nation state. In both countries, however, the related terms and
institutions developed along different trajectories. In particular,
Chinese laws for the protection of cultural heritage can be
interpreted as resistant appropriation. Early on, these laws aimed at
fending off foreign spoliation of Chinese cultural artefacts, which
over time were increasingly considered as being indispensable for
the emergence of a national identity. In Chapter 4, Heike Holbig and
Moritz Bälz analyse the shifting relations between the state and
society in Japan and China. Developing the four-fold set of ideal-type
modes of state-society relations outlined above (empowerment,
accommodation, protectification, marginalisation), the chapter
analyses the changing legal and political environments and
compares the dynamics of interaction between state and civic actors
in Japan and China over the past seven decades. While state-society
relations in both societies have been diverging greatly since World
War II, both share, it is argued, a joint heritage of the nation-state’s
claim of normative primacy in protecting the weak, a claim which
has continued to reproduce itself in contemporary times. In Chapter
5, Cornelia Storz and Heike Holbig look at theories of institutional
change from the perspective of the protection of the weak. They
discuss different factors, both exogenous and endogenous, which
might trigger institutional change. In particular, they highlight the
importance of agency in institutional change and the often
unintended results of these changes in relation to the protection of
weak groups and interests.
 The second part brings together systematic comparisons between
the four empirical cases mentioned above, which aim to understand
better the specificities of contemporary state-society relations as well
as the key stages and junctures in the empirical trajectories of the
emerging claims for the protection of the weak. The authors lay
special emphasis on spelling out the entangled processes of framing,
mobilisation and institutionalisation. In Chapter 6, Elisa Hörhager
and Julius Weitzdörfer look at the recent cases of the earthquake in
Wenchuan in 2008 and the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami
and Nuclear Meltdown of Fukushima in March 2011. They pay
particular attention to the framing of both disasters as either man-
made or natural, which carries significant social and political
implications. Both governments made use of this distinction to deny
responsibility and to influence mobilisation processes among the
victims. The distinction between man-made and natural disasters
also had a significant influence on the emerging institutionalisation
processes. The Chinese government acknowledged only those
institutional changes, including the involvement of NGOs, which did
not question the attribution of the disaster to natural causes.
In Chapter 7, Markus Heckel, Stefan Hüppe-Moon and Na Zou use
media-content analysis to look at the discussion of employee well-
being in Japan and China. They focus on two specific policies: the
reform of the household registration system (hukou) with its focus
on migrant workers in China and work-life balance policies for
regular employees in Japan. Their findings suggest that, in both
cases, the well-being of the employees is emphasised while the
discussion is also linked to other topics that go beyond the issue of
well-being, for example, the consumer power of migrant workers in
the case of China, and the link of overwork to the demographic
problem in that of Japan.
In Chapter 8, Kazushige Doi and Jean-Baptiste Pettier examine the
transformation of the perception and place of “companion animals”
in recent decades in Japan and China. The authors trace the
processes and actors involved in changing the prevalent
understanding of cruelty towards “companion animals” such as dogs
and cats, which led to increased public mobilisation in the name of
these species’ welfare. They emphasise the importance of rapid
urbanisation and the influence of the international context in
apprehending the present social status of companion animals and
the differing institutional developments in both countries.
Finally, in Chapter 9, Christina Maags and Ioan Trifu examine how
UNESCO may have provided the state and society with new
opportunities to use the notion of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”
(ICH) in order to call for the protection of traditional culture. In
particular, they comparatively retrace the emerging dynamics of the
framing, mobilisation and institutionalisation processes behind the
protection of one “classical”, one minority-related, and one culinary
ICH practice in Japan and China. Their analysis shows that, while
UNESCO has provided new opportunities to reframe existing notions
of traditional culture to mobilise support and establish new
institutions for ICH protection, it has failed to break the élitist
conception of intangible heritage in both countries. The influence of
the UNESCO in both Japan and China is restricted, as the ICH
concept is appropriated for the interests of the previously existing
socio-political actors and institutional frameworks.
The conclusion summarises the analytical results of the four
selected cases for protecting the weak in contemporary Japan and
China, and compares the empirical trajectories of framing,
mobilisation and institutionalisation processes. It further discusses
the ramifications of the empirical findings with respect to the
ongoing debates about the travelling of theories and concepts. It
does so by investigating the dynamic entanglements between
specific calls to protect the weak and the shifting conceptualisations
of the common good taking place in East Asia, thereby enhancing
our understanding of the production of non-Western modernities and
their impact on Western modernity.
The major findings of the volume include that: (a) in Japan and
China, domestic state-society relations have been substantially
transformed by interactions between international and local levels;
(b) public contestations about “weak” groups and interests have
provided new spaces for civic activism while in both countries state
actors’ engagement with social mobilisation processes mostly
stopped short from a sustained empowerment of civic actors; (c) at
the same time, we can observe the ambiguous effects of protecting
the weak, resulting either from unintended side-effects of the social
classifications of “weak” groups and interests or from the intended
strategies of “protectification” employed by state actors who strive to
pre-empt the further self-empowerment of social actors; and (d) the
trajectories of protecting the weak in Japan and China suggest
common patterns in the production of alternative modernities with
potential repercussions for the international discourse. Overall, we
find that, while the discursive dichotomy of the “West versus the
rest” has been slowly dissolving in some areas, it tends to be
reproduced by non-Western societies themselves in others.

Notes
1 “Hybridity” originally referred to biological phenomena but has, in recent years, been
widely applied in cultural studies, most famously by Homi K. Bhaba, who understood
hybridity as a “passage between fixed identifications” in reference to people’s multiple
identities resulting from an ongoing colonial experience (Bhaba, 1994, 4). More
generally, hybridity has come to be seen as a common outcome of cultural exchanges,
referring to “boundary-crossing experiences and styles” or “combinations of cultural
and/or institutional forms” (Pieterse, 2001, 221–222). As such, the appropriation of new
knowledge and practices often result in hybrid phenomena which reflect contextually
specific entanglements and do not accord to a fixed set of Western models. However, if
analysed more closely, the concept of hybridity still seems to assign primacy and purity
to Western/European modernity (Randeria, 2006, 100). Only other modernities appear
as being hybrid. An even more serious defect of “hybridity” is that it appears attractive
as a metaphor but is not particular strong in respect to analytical procedures. In
particular, it is difficult to conceptualise agency within processes of hybridisation.
2 As a concept, appropriation originally related to the forceful and illegal appropriation of
an object not belonging to oneself. Besides property of another, this, in a broader sense,
could be styles, practices or patterns of art, texts, music etc. In cultural anthropology,
this idea of forceful appropriation can, in many cases, be related to a distinct
asymmetric power relationship: the dominant culture forcefully employs something
rightfully belonging to the “dominated” (in most cases indigenous) cultures for its own
purposes and goals (Ashley and Plesch, 2002, 3–4).
3 There are, of course, instances of “instant appropriation” which occur when a hitherto
unknown object (or concept) enters into a new environment and is invested with
completely new functions. The often quoted example for this is the Coca-Cola bottle
 thrown out of the window of an aeroplane and found by indigenous people in the film
The Gods must be Crazy. In the film, its meaning and functions do not have anything in
common with what we normally associate a coke bottle with (Sponsler, 2002, 18). This
means that the agency of the appropriators is unusually high (with disastrous
consequences in the film).
4 Some scholars do apply the concept of “agency” also to non-human animals and cultural
heritage. However, as we focus on claims for protection and the social debates and
processes resulting from them, we primarily consider “human agency”. On the question
of agency, see also Chapter 6.
5 On the origins of vulnerability science see, for example, Cutter (2003).
6 As Johnston and Noakes (2005), Anderson (2006), Bondes and Heep (2012) and others
have demonstrated, framing theory can, and should, be applied not only to bottom-up
but also to top-down mobilisation processes.
7 With this partial focus on the (nation) state, we do not intend to refresh old
essentialisms about “the strong state” in East Asia. Instead, this focus is, firstly, due to
its implications for states’ legitimacy claims, as just described, and, secondly, due to the
close association between concepts of modernity and the concept of the nation state
(cf., Beck et al., 2003; Beck and Lau, 2005).
8 We deliberately coin this unfamiliar neologism to emphasise a pro-active top-down
mechanism aiming to transform the subjects of social mobilisation into objects of state
protection.

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does not appear sufficiently attractive for me to give myself so much
trouble, for I repeat quite frankly that for me it can only be trouble.”
I protested that, in that case, he must not dream of it. This
summary end to the discussion did not seem to be to his liking.
“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly.
“There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person
who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a
taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz,
succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out
for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort,
because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like
to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he
was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know
something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”
“I would not for anything in the world, Sir, be a cause of anxiety to
you,” I said to him, “but so far as I am concerned you may be sure
that everything which comes to me from you will be a very great
pleasure to me. I am deeply touched that you should be so kind as to
take notice of me in this way and try to help me.”
Greatly to my surprise, it was almost with effusion that he thanked
me for this speech, slipping his arm through mine with that
intermittent familiarity which had already struck me at Balbec, and
was in such contrast to the coldness of his tone.
“With the want of consideration common at your age,” he told me,
“you are liable to say things at times which would open an
unbridgeable gulf between us. What you have said just now, on the
other hand, is exactly the sort of thing that touches me, and makes
me want to do a great deal for you.”
As he walked arm in arm with me and uttered these words, which,
albeit tinged with contempt, were so affectionate, M. de Charlus now
fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity which had struck me
the first morning, when I saw him outside the casino at Balbec, and
indeed many years before that, through the pink hawthorns, standing
beside Mme. Swann, whom I supposed then to be his mistress, in
the park at Tansonville; now let it stray around him and examine the
cabs which at this time of the day were passing in considerable
numbers on the way to their stables, looking so determinedly at them
that several stopped, the drivers supposing that he wished to engage
them. But M. de Charlus immediately dismissed them.
“They’re not what I want,” he explained to me, “it’s all a question of
the colour of their lamps, and the direction they’re going in. I hope,
Sir,” he went on, “that you will not in any way misinterpret the purely
disinterested and charitable nature of the proposal which I am going
to make to you.”
I was struck by the similarity of his diction to Swann’s, closer now
than at Balbec.
“You have enough intelligence, I suppose, not to imagine that it is
from want of society, from any fear of solitude and boredom that I
have recourse to you. I do not, as a rule, care to talk about myself,
but you may possibly have heard—it was alluded to in a leading
article in The Times, which made a considerable impression—that
the Emperor of Austria, who has always honoured me with his
friendship, and is good enough to insist on keeping up terms of
cousinship with me, declared the other day in an interview which was
made public that if the Comte de Chambord had had by his side a
man as thoroughly conversant with the undercurrents of European
politics as myself he would be King of France to-day. I have often
thought, sir, that there was in me, thanks not to my own humble
talents but to circumstances which you may one day have occasion
to learn, a sort of secret record of incalculable value, of which I have
not felt myself at liberty to make use, personally, but which would be
a priceless acquisition to a young man to whom I would hand over in
a few months what it has taken me more than thirty years to collect,
what I am perhaps alone in possessing. I do not speak of the
intellectual enjoyment which you would find in learning certain
secrets which a Michelet of our day would give years of his life to
know, and in the light of which certain events would assume for him
an entirely different aspect. And I do not speak only of events that
have already occurred, but of the chain of circumstances.” (This was
a favourite expression with M. de Charlus, and often, when he used
it, he joined his hands as if in prayer, but with his fingers stiffened, as
though to illustrate by their complexity the said circumstances, which
he did not specify, and the chain that linked them.) “I could give you
an explanation that no one has dreamed of, not only of the past but
of the future.” M. de Charlus broke off to question me about Bloch,
whom he had heard discussed, though without appearing to be
listening, in his aunt’s drawing-room. And with that ironical accent he
so skilfully detached what he was saying that he seemed to be
thinking of something else altogether, and to be speaking
mechanically, simply out of politeness. He asked if my friend was
young, good looking and so forth. Bloch, if he had heard him, would
have been more puzzled even than with M. de Norpois, but for very
different reasons, to know whether M. de Charlus was for or against
Dreyfus. “It is not a bad idea, if you wish to learn about life,” went on
M. de Charlus when he had finished questioning me, “to include
among your friends an occasional foreigner.” I replied that Bloch was
French. “Indeed,” said M. de Charlus, “I took him to be a Jew.” His
assertion of this incompatibility made me suppose that M. de Charlus
was more anti-Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. He protested,
however, against the charge of treason levelled against Dreyfus. But
his protest took this form: “I understand the newspapers to say that
Dreyfus has committed a crime against his country—so I
understand, I pay no attention to the newspapers, I read them as I
wash my hands, without finding that it is worth my while to take any
interest in what I am doing. In any case, the crime is non-existent,
your friend’s compatriot would have committed a crime if he had
betrayed Judaea, but what has he to do with France?” I pointed out
that if there should be a war the Jews would be mobilised just as
much as anyone else. “Perhaps so, and I am not sure that it would
not be an imprudence. If we bring over Senegalese and Malagasies,
I hardly suppose that their hearts will be in the task of defending
France, which is only natural. Your Dreyfus might rather be convicted
of a breach of the laws of hospitality. But we need not discuss that.
Perhaps you could ask your friend to allow me to be present at some
great festival in the Temple, at a circumcision, with Jewish chants.
He might perhaps take a hall, and give me some biblical
entertainment, as the young ladies of Saint-Cyr performed scenes
taken from the Psalms by Racine, to amuse Louis XIV. You might
even arrange parties to give us a good laugh. For instance a battle
between your friend and his father, in which he would smite him as
David smote Goliath. That would make quite an amusing farce. He
might even, while he was about it, deal some stout blows at his hag
(or, as my old nurse would say, his ‘haggart’) of a mother. That would
be an excellent show, and would not be unpleasing to us, eh, my
young friend, since we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-
European creature would be giving a well-earned punishment to an
old camel.” As he poured out this terrible, almost insane language,
M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it ached. I reminded myself of
all that his family had told me of his wonderful kindness to this old
nurse, whose Molieresque vocabulary he had just quoted, and
thought to myself that the connexions, hitherto, I felt, little studied,
between goodness and wickedness in the same heart, various as
they might be, would be an interesting subject for research.
I warned him that, anyhow, Mme. Bloch no longer existed, while as
for M. Bloch, I questioned to what extent he would enjoy a sport
which might easily result in his being blinded. M. de Charlus seemed
annoyed. “That,” he said, “is a woman who made a great mistake in
dying. As for blinding him, surely the Synagogue is blind, it does not
perceive the truth of the Gospel. In any case, think, at this moment,
when all these unhappy Jews are trembling before the stupid fury of
the Christians, what an honour it would be for him to see a man like
myself condescend to be amused by their sports.” At this point I
caught sight of M. Bloch senior, who was coming towards us,
probably on his way to meet his son. He did not see us, but I offered
to introduce him to M. de Charlus. I had no conception of the torrent
of rage which my words were to let loose. “Introduce him to me! But
you must have singularly little idea of social values! People do not
get to know me as easily as that. In the present instance, the
awkwardness would be twofold, on account of the youth of the
introducer and the unworthiness of the person introduced. At the
most, if I am ever permitted to enjoy the Asiatic spectacle which I
suggested to you, I might address to the horrible creature a few
words indicative of generous feeling. But on condition that he allows
himself to be thoroughly thrashed by his son, I might go so far as to
express my satisfaction.” As it happened, M. Bloch paid no attention
to us. He was occupied in greeting Mme. Sazerat with a series of
sweeping bows, which were very favourably received. I was
surprised at this, for in the old days at Combray she had been
indignant at my parents having young Bloch in the house, so anti-
semitic was she then. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind,
had, a few days before this, wafted M. Bloch to her feet. My father’s
friend had found Mme. Sazerat charming and was particularly
gratified by the anti-semitism of the lady, which he regarded as a
proof of the sincerity of her faith and the soundness of her
Dreyfusard opinions, and also as enhancing the value of the call
which she had authorised him to pay her. He had not even been
offended when she had said to him stolidly: “M. Drumont has the
impudence to put the Revisionists in the same bag as the
Protestants and the Jews. A delightful promiscuity!” “Bernard,” he
had said with pride, on reaching home, to M. Nissim Bernard, “you
know, she has that prejudice!” But M. Nissim Bernard had said
nothing, only raising his eyes to heaven in an angelic gaze.
Saddened by the misfortunes of the Jews, remembering his old
friendships with Christians, grown mannered and precious with
increasing years, for reasons which the reader will learn in due
course, he had now the air of a pre-Raphaelite ghost on to which
hair had been incongruously grafted, like threads in the heart of an
opal. “All this Dreyfus business,” went on the Baron, still clasping me
by the arm, “has only one drawback. It destroys society (I do not say
polite society; society has long ceased to deserve that laudatory
epithet) by the influx of Mr. and Mrs. Camels and Camelries and
Camelyards, astonishing creatures whom I find even in the houses
of my own cousins, because they belong to the Patrie Française, or
the Anti-Jewish, or some such league, as if a political opinion entitled
one to any social qualification.” This frivolity in M. de Charlus brought
out his family likeness to the Duchesse de Guermantes. I remarked
to him on the resemblance. As he appeared to think that I did not
know her, I reminded him of the evening at the Opera when he had
seemed to be trying to avoid me. He assured me with such
insistence that he had never even seen me there that I should have
begun to believe him, if presently a trifling incident had not led me to
think that M. de Charlus, in his excessive pride perhaps, did not care
to be seen with me.
“Let us return to yourself,” he said, “and my plans for you. There
exists among certain men, sir, a freemasonry of which I cannot now
say more than that it numbers in its ranks four of the reigning
sovereigns of Europe. Now, the courtiers of one of these are trying to
cure him of his fancy. That is a very serious matter, and may bring us
to war. Yes, sir, that is a fact. You remember the story of the man
who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle. It
was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as he ceased
to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies which we
must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that
are more serious. A cousin of mine had trouble with his stomach; he
could not digest anything. The most learned specialists on the
stomach treated him, with no effect. I took him to a certain doctor
(another highly interesting man, by the way, of whom I could tell you
a great deal). He guessed at once that the trouble was nervousness;
he persuaded his patient, ordered him to eat whatever he liked quite
boldly and assured him that his digestion would stand it. But my
cousin had nephritis also. What the stomach can digest perfectly well
the kidneys cease, after a time, to eliminate, and my cousin, instead
of living to a good old age with an imaginary disease of the stomach
which obliged him to keep to a diet, died at forty with his stomach
cured but his kidneys ruined. Given a very considerable advantage
over people of your age, for all one knows, you will perhaps become
what some eminent man of the past might have been if a good angel
had revealed to him, in the midst of a humanity that knew nothing of
them, the secrets of steam and electricity. Do not be foolish, do not
refuse from discretion. Understand that, if I do you a great service, I
expect my reward from you to be no less great. It is many years now
since people in society ceased to interest me. I have but one passion
left, to seek to redeem the mistakes of my life by conferring the
benefit of my knowledge on a soul that is still virgin and capable of
being inflamed by virtue. I have had great sorrows, sir, of which I
may tell you perhaps some day; I have lost my wife, who was the
loveliest, the noblest, the most perfect creature that one could dream
of seeing. I have young relatives who are not—I do not say worthy,
but who are not capable of accepting the moral heritage of which I
have been speaking. For all I know, you may be he into whose
hands it is to pass, he whose life I shall be able to direct and to raise
to so lofty a plane. My own would gain in return. Perhaps in teaching
you the great secrets of diplomacy I might recover a taste for them
myself, and begin at last to do things of real interest in which you
would have an equal share. But before I can tell I must see you
often, very often, every day.”
I was thinking of taking advantage of this unexpected kindness on
M. de Charlus’s part to ask him whether he could not arrange for me
to meet his sister-in-law when, suddenly, I felt my arm violently
jerked, as though by an electric shock. It was M. de Charlus who had
hurriedly withdrawn his arm from mine. Although as he talked he had
allowed his eyes to wander in all directions he had only just caught
sight of M. d’Argencourt, who was coming towards us from a side
street. On seeing us, M. d’Argencourt appeared worried, cast at me
a look of distrust, almost that look intended for a creature of another
race than one’s own with which Mme. de Guermantes had quizzed
Bloch, and tried to avoid us. But one would have said that M. de
Charlus was determined to shew him that he was not at all anxious
not to be seen by him, for he called to him, simply to tell him
something that was of no importance. And fearing perhaps that M.
d’Argencourt had not recognised me, M. de Charlus informed him
that I was a great friend of Mme. de Villeparisis, of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, of Robert de Saint-Loup, and that he himself, Charlus,
was an old friend of my grandmother, and glad to be able to shew
her grandson a little of the affection that he felt for her. Nevertheless
I observed that M. d’Argencourt, albeit I had barely been introduced
to him at Mme. de Villeparisis’s, and M. de Charlus had now spoken
to him at great length about my family, was distinctly colder to me
than he had been in the afternoon; and for a long time he shewed
the same aloofness whenever we met. He watched me now with a
curiosity in which there was no sign of friendliness, and seemed
even to have to overcome an instinctive repulsion when, on leaving
us, after a moment’s hesitation, he held out a hand to me which he
at once withdrew.
“I am sorry about that,” said M. de Charlus. “That fellow
Argencourt, well born but ill bred, more than feeble as a diplomat, an
impossible husband, always running after women like a person in a
play, is one of those men who are incapable of understanding but
perfectly capable of destroying the things in life that are really great. I
hope that our friendship will be one of them, if it is ever to be formed,
and I hope also that you will honour me by keeping it—as I shall—
well clear of the heels of any of those donkeys who, from idleness or
clumsiness or deliberate wickedness trample upon what would seem
to have been made to endure. Unfortunately, that is the mould in
which most of the men one meets have been cast.”
“The Duchesse de Guermantes seems to be very clever. We were
talking this afternoon about the possibility of war. It appears that she
is specially well informed on that subject.”
“She is nothing of the sort,” replied M. de Charlus tartly. “Women,
and most men, for that matter, understand nothing of what I was
going to tell you. My sister-in-law is a charming woman who
imagines that we are still living in the days of Balzac’s novels, when
women had an influence on politics. Going to her house could at
present have only a bad effect on you, as for that matter going
anywhere. That was one of the very things I was just going to tell you
when that fool interrupted me. The first sacrifice that you must make
for me—I shall claim them from you in proportion to the gifts I bestow
on you—is to give up going into society. It distressed me this
afternoon to see you at that idiotic tea-party. You may remind me that
I was there myself, but for me it was not a social gathering, it was
simply a family visit. Later on, when you have established your
position, if it amuses you to step down for a little into that sort of
thing, it may, perhaps, do no harm. And then, I need not point out
how invaluable I can be to you. The ‘Open Sesame’ to the
Guermantes house and any others that it is worth while throwing
open the doors of to you, rests with me. I shall be the judge, and
intend to remain master of the situation.”
I thought I would take advantage of what M. de Charlus had said
about my call on Mme. de Villeparisis to try to find out what position
exactly she occupied in society, but the question took another form
on my lips than I had intended, and I asked him instead what the
Villeparisis family was.
“That is absolutely as though you had asked me what the Nobody
family was,” replied M. de Charlus. “My aunt married, for love, a M.
Thirion, who was extremely rich, for that matter, and whose sisters
had married surprisingly well; and from that day onwards he called
himself Marquis de Villeparisis. It did no harm to anyone, at the most
a little to himself, and very little! What his reason was I cannot tell; I
suppose he was actually a ‘Monsieur de Villeparisis’, a gentleman
born at Villeparisis, which as you know is the name of a little place
outside Paris. My aunt tried to make out that there was such a
Marquisate in the family, she wanted to put things on a proper
footing; I can’t tell you why. When one takes a name to which one
has no right it is better not to copy the regular forms.”
Mme. de Villeparisis being merely Mme. Thirion completed the fall
which had begun in my estimation of her when I had seen the
composite nature of her party. I felt it to be unfair that a woman
whose title and name were of quite recent origin should be able thus
to impose upon her contemporaries, with the prospect of similarly
imposing upon posterity, by virtue of her friendships with royal
personages. Now that she had become once again what I had
supposed her to be in my childhood, a person who had nothing
aristocratic about her, these distinguished kinsfolk who gathered
round her seemed to remain alien to her. She did not cease to be
charming to us all. I went occasionally to see her and she sent me
little presents from time to time. But I had never any impression that
she belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and if I had wanted
any information about it she would have been one of the last people
to whom I should have applied.
“At present,” went on M. de Charlus, “by going into society, you will
only damage your position, warp your intellect and character. Also,
you must be particularly careful in choosing your friends. Keep
mistresses, if your family have no objection, that doesn’t concern
me, indeed I can only advise it, you young rascal, young rascal who
will soon have to start shaving,” he rallied me, passing his fingers
over my chin. “But the choice of your men friends is more important.
Eight out of ten young men are little scoundrels, little wretches
capable of doing you an injury which you will never be able to repair.
Wait, now, my nephew Saint-Loup is quite a suitable companion for
you, at a pinch. As far as your future is concerned, he can be of no
possible use to you, but for that I am sufficient. And really, when all’s
said and done, as a person to go about with, at times when you have
had enough of me, he does not seem to present any serious
drawback that I know of. At any rate he is a man, not one of those
effeminate creatures one sees so many of nowadays, who look like
little renters, and at any moment may bring their innocent victims to
the gallows.” I did not know the meaning of this slang word “renter”;
anyone who had known it would have been as greatly surprised by
his use of it as myself. People in society always like talking slang,
and people against whom certain things may be hinted like to shew
that they are not afraid to mention them. A proof of innocence in their
eyes. But they have lost their sense of proportion, they are no longer
capable of realising the point at which a certain pleasantry will
become too technical, too shocking, will be a proof rather of
corruption than of simplicity. “He is not like the rest of them; he has
nice manners; he is really serious.”
I could not help smiling at this epithet “serious”, to which the
intonation that M. de Charlus gave to it seemed to impart the sense
of “virtuous”, of “steady”, as one says of a little shop-girl that she is
“serious”. At this moment a cab passed, zigzagging along the street;
a young cabman, who had deserted his box, was driving it from
inside, where he lay sprawling upon the cushions, apparently half
drunk. M. de Charlus instantly stopped him. The driver began to
argue:
“Which way are you going?”
“Yours.” This surprised me, for M. de Charlus had already refused
several cabs with similarly coloured lamps.
“Well, I don’t want to get up on the box. D’you mind if I stay down
here?”
“No; but you must put down the hood. Well, think over my
proposal,” said M. de Charlus, preparing to leave me, “I give you a
few days to consider my offer; write to me. I repeat, I shall need to
see you every day, and to receive from you guarantees of loyalty, of
discretion which, for that matter, you do appear, I must say, to
furnish. But in the course of my life I have been so often taken in by
appearances that I never wish to trust them again. Damn it, it’s the
least you can expect that before giving up a treasure I should know
into what hands it is going to pass. Very well, bear in mind what I’m
offering you; you are like Hercules (though, unfortunately for
yourself, you do not appear to me to have quite his muscular
development) at the parting of the ways. Try not to have to regret all
your life not having chosen the way that leads to virtue. Hallo!” he
turned to the cabman, “haven’t you put the hood down? I’ll do it
myself. I think, too, I’ld better drive, seeing the state you appear to
be in.”
He jumped in beside the cabman, took the reins, and the horse
trotted off.
As for myself, no sooner had I turned in at our gate than I found
the pendant to the conversation which I had heard exchanged that
afternoon between Bloch and M. de Norpois, but in another form,
brief, inverted and cruel. This was a dispute between our butler, who
believed in Dreyfus, and the Guermantes’, who was an anti-
Dreyfusard. The truths and counter-truths which came in conflict
above ground, among the intellectuals of the rival Leagues, the
Patrie Française and the Droits de l’Homme, were fast spreading
downwards into the subsoil of popular opinion. M. Reinach was
manipulating, by appeals to sentiment, people whom he had never
seen, while for himself the Dreyfus case simply presented itself to his
reason as an incontrovertible theory which he proved in the sequel
by the most astonishing victory for rational policy (a victory against
France, according to some) that the world has ever seen. In two
years he replaced a Billot by a Clemenceau Ministry, revolutionised
public opinion from top to bottom, took Picquart from his prison to
install him, ungrateful, in the Ministry of War. Perhaps this rationalist
manipulator of crowds was himself the puppet of his ancestry. When
we find that the systems of philosophy which contain the most truths
were dictated to their authors, in the last analysis, by reasons of
sentiment, how are we to suppose that in a simple affair of politics
like the Dreyfus case reasons of this order may not, unknown to the
reasoner, have controlled his reason. Bloch believed himself to have
been led by a logical sequence to choose Dreyfusism, yet he knew
that his nose, skin and hair had been imposed on him by his race.
Doubtless the reason enjoys more freedom; yet it obeys certain laws
which it has not prescribed for itself. The case of the Guermantes’
butler and our own was peculiar. The waves of the two currents of
Dreyfusism and anti-Dreyfusism which now divided France from end
to end were, on the whole, silent, but the occasional echoes which
they emitted were sincere. When you heard anyone in the middle of
a conversation which was being deliberately kept off the Case
announce furtively some piece of political news, generally false, but
always with a hopefulness of its truth, you could induce from the
nature of his predictions where his heart lay. Thus there came into
conflict on certain points, on one side a timid apostolate, on the other
a righteous indignation. The two butlers whom I heard arguing as I
came in furnished an exception to the rule. Ours let it be understood
that Dreyfus was guilty, the Guermantes’ butler that he was innocent.
This was done not to conceal their personal convictions, but from
cunning, and in the keenness of their rivalry. Our butler, being
uncertain whether the fresh trial would be ordered, wished
beforehand, in the event of failure, to deprive the Duke’s butler of the
joy of seeing a just cause vanquished. The Duke’s butler thought
that, in the event of a refusal, ours would be more indignant at the
detention on the Devil’s Isle of an innocent man. The porter looked
on. I had the impression that it was not he who was the cause of
dissension in the Guermantes household.
I went upstairs, and found my grandmother not so well. For some
time past, without knowing exactly what was wrong, she had been
complaining of her health. It is in moments of illness that we are
compelled to recognise that we live not alone but chained to a
creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no
knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourself
understood: our body. Say that we met a brigand by the way; we
might yet convince him by an appeal to his personal interest, if not to
our own plight. But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing before
an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the
sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find
ourself condemned to live. My grandmother’s attacks passed, often
enough, unnoticed by the attention which she kept always diverted to
ourselves. When the pain was severe, in the hope of curing it, she
would try in vain to understand what the trouble was. If the morbid
phenomena of which her body was the theatre remained obscure
and beyond the reach of her mind, they were clear and intelligible to
certain creatures belonging to the same natural kingdom as
themselves, creatures to which the human mind has learned
gradually to have recourse in order to understand what the body is
saying to it, as when a foreigner accosts us we try to find some one
belonging to his country who will act as interpreter. These can talk to
our body, and tell us if its anger is serious or will soon be appeased.
Cottard, whom we had called in to see my grandmother, and who
had infuriated us by asking with a dry smile, the moment we told him
that she was ill: “Ill? You’re sure it’s not what they call a diplomatic
illness?” He tried to soothe his patient’s restlessness by a milk diet.
But incessant bowls of milk soup gave her no relief, because my
grandmother sprinkled them liberally with salt (the toxic effects of
which were as yet, Widal not having made his discoveries,
unknown). For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and
contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon
the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying
on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few
years’ time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of
folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this
mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many
truths. Cottard had told us to take her temperature. A thermometer
was fetched. Throughout almost all its length it was clear of mercury.
Scarcely could one make out, crouching at the foot of the tube, in its
little cell, the silver salamander. It seemed dead. The glass reed was
slipped into my grandmother’s mouth. We had no need to leave it
there for long; the little sorceress had not been slow in casting her
horoscope. We found her motionless, perched half-way up her tower,
and declining to move, shewing us with precision the figure that we
had asked of her, a figure with which all the most careful examination
that my grandmother’s mind could have devoted to herself would
have been incapable of furnishing her; 101 degrees. For the first
time we felt some anxiety. We shook the thermometer well, to erase
the ominous line, as though we were able thus to reduce the
patient’s fever simultaneously with the figure shewn on the scale.
Alas, it was only too clear that the little sibyl, unreasoning as she
was, had not pronounced judgment arbitrarily, for the next day,
scarcely had the thermometer been inserted between my
grandmother’s lips when almost at once, as though with a single
bound, exulting in her certainty and in her intuition of a fact that to us
was imperceptible, the little prophetess had come to a halt at the
same point, in an implacable immobility, and pointed once again to
that figure 101 with the tip of her gleaming wand. Nothing more did
she tell us; in vain might we long, seek, pray, she was deaf to our
entreaties; it seemed as though this were her final utterance, a
warning and a menace. Then, in an attempt to constrain her to
modify her response, we had recourse to another creature of the
same kingdom, but more potent, which is not content with
questioning the body but can command it, a febrifuge of the same
order as the modern aspirin, which had not then come into use. We
had not shaken the thermometer down below 99.5, and hoped that it
would not have to rise from there. We made my grandmother
swallow this drug and then replaced the thermometer in her mouth.
Like an implacable warder to whom one presents a permit signed by
a higher authority whose protecting influence one has sought, and
who, finding it to be in order, replies: “Very well; I have nothing to
say; if it’s like that you may pass,” this time the watcher in the tower
did not move. But sullenly she seemed to be saying: “What use will
that be to you? Since you are friends with quinine, she may give me
the order not to go up, once, ten times, twenty times. And then she
will grow tired of telling me, I know her; get along with you. This
won’t last for ever. And then you’ll be a lot better off.” Thereupon my
grandmother felt the presence within her of a creature which knew
the human body better than herself, the presence of a contemporary
of the races that have vanished from the earth, the presence of
earth’s first inhabitant—long anterior to the creation of thinking man
—she felt that aeonial ally who was sounding her, a little roughly
even, in the head, the heart, the elbow; he found out the weak
places, organized everything for the prehistoric combat which began
at once to be fought. In a moment a trampled Python, the fever, was
vanquished by the potent chemical substance to which my
grandmother, across the series of kingdoms, reaching out beyond all
animal and vegetable life, would fain have been able to give thanks.
And she remained moved by this glimpse which she had caught,
through the mists of so many centuries, of a climate anterior to the
creation even of plants. Meanwhile the thermometer, like a Weird
Sister momentarily vanquished by some more ancient god, held
motionless her silver spindle. Alas! other inferior creatures which
man has trained to the chase of the mysterious quarry which he
cannot pursue within the pathless forest of himself, reported cruelly
to us every day a certain quantity of albumen, not large, but constant
enough for it also to appear to bear relation to some persistent
malady which we could not detect. Bergotte had shocked that
scrupulous instinct in me which made me subordinate my intellect
when he spoke to me of Dr. du Boulbon as of a physician who would
not bore me, who would discover methods of treatment which,
however strange they might appear, would adapt themselves to the
singularity of my mind. But ideas transform themselves in us, they
overcome the resistance with which we at first meet them, and feed
upon rich intellectual reserves which we did not know to have been
prepared for them. So, as happens whenever anything we have
heard said about some one whom we do not know has had the
faculty of awakening in us the idea of great talent, of a sort of genius,
in my inmost mind I gave Dr. du Boulbon the benefit of that unlimited
confidence which he inspires in us who with an eye more penetrating
than other men’s perceives the truth. I knew indeed that he was
more of a specialist in nervous diseases, the man to whom Charcot
before his death had predicted that he would reign supreme in
neurology and psychiatry. “Ah! I don’t know about that. It’s quite
possible,” put in Françoise, who was in the room, and heard
Charcot’s name, as she heard du Boulbon’s, for the first time. But
this in no way prevented her from saying “It’s possible.” Her
“possibles”, her “perhapses”, her “I don’t knows” were peculiarly
irritating at such a moment. One wanted to say to her: “Naturally you
didn’t know, since you haven’t the faintest idea of what we are talking
about, how can you even say whether it’s possible or not; you know
nothing about it. Anyhow, you can’t say now that you don’t know
what Charcot said to du Boulbon. You do know because we have
just told you, and your ‘perhapses’ and ‘possibles’ don’t come in,
because it’s a fact.”
In spite of this more special competence in cerebral and nervous
matters, as I knew that du Boulbon was a great physician, a superior
man, of a profound and inventive intellect, I begged my mother to
send for him, and the hope that, by a clear perception of the malady,
he might perhaps cure it, carried the day finally over the fear that we
had of (if we called in a specialist) alarming my grandmother. What
decided my mother was the fact that, encouraged unconsciously by
Cottard, my grandmother no longer went out of doors, and scarcely
rose from her bed. In vain might she answer us in the words of Mme.
de Sévigné’s letter on Mme. de la Fayette: “Everyone said she was
mad not to wish to go out. I said to these persons, so headstrong in
their judgment: ‘Mme. de la Fayette is not mad!’ and I stuck to that. It
has taken her death to prove that she was quite right not to go out.”
Du Boulbon when he came decided against—if not Mme. de
Sévigné, whom we did not quote to him—my grandmother, at any
rate. Instead of sounding her chest, fixing on her steadily his
wonderful eyes, in which there was perhaps the illusion that he was
making a profound scrutiny of his patient, or the desire to give her
that illusion, which seemed spontaneous but must be mechanically
produced, or else not to let her see that he was thinking of
something quite different, or simply to obtain the mastery over her,
he began talking about Bergotte.
“I should think so, indeed, he’s magnificent, you are quite right to
admire him. But which of his books do you prefer? Indeed! Well,
perhaps that is the best after all. In any case it is the best composed
of his novels. Claire is quite charming in it; of his male characters
which appeals to you most?”
I supposed at first that he was making her talk like this about
literature because he himself found medicine boring, perhaps also to
display his breadth of mind and even, with a more therapeutic aim, to
restore confidence to his patient, to shew her that he was not
alarmed, to take her mind from the state of her health. But
afterwards I realised that, being distinguished particularly as an
alienist and by his work on the brain, he had been seeking to
ascertain by these questions whether my grandmother’s memory
was in good order. As though reluctantly he began to inquire about
her past life, fixing a stern and sombre eye on her. Then suddenly,
as though catching sight of the truth and determined to reach it at all
costs, with a preliminary rubbing of his hands, which he seemed to
have some difficulty in wiping dry of the final hesitations which he
himself might feel and of all the objections which we might have
raised, looking down at my grandmother with a lucid eye, boldly and
as though he were at last upon solid ground, punctuating his words
in a quiet, impressive tone, every inflexion of which bore the mark of
intellect, he began. (His voice, for that matter, throughout this visit
remained what it naturally was, caressing. And under his bushy
brows his ironical eyes were full of kindness.)
“You will be quite well, Madame, on the day—when it comes, and
it rests entirely with you whether it comes to-day—on which you
realise that there is nothing wrong with you, and resume your
ordinary life. You tell me that you have not been taking your food, not
going out?”
“But, sir, I have a temperature.”
He laid a finger on her wrist.
“Not just now, at any rate. Besides, what an excuse! Don’t you
know that we keep out in the open air and overfeed tuberculous
patients with temperatures of 102?”
“But I have a little albumen as well.”
“You ought not to know anything about that. You have what I have
had occasion to call ‘mental albumen’. We have all of us had, when
we have not been very well, little albuminous phases which our
doctor has done his best to make permanent by calling our attention
to them. For one disorder that doctors cure with drugs (as I am told
that they do occasionally succeed in doing) they produce a dozen
others in healthy subjects by inoculating them with that pathogenic
agent a thousand times more virulent than all the microbes in the
world, the idea that one is ill. A belief of that sort, which has a
disturbing effect on any temperament, acts with special force on
neurotic people. Tell them that a shut window is open behind heir
back, they will begin to sneeze; make them believe that you have put
magnesia in their soup, they will be seized with colic; that their coffee
is stronger than usual, they will not sleep a wink all night. Do you
imagine, Madame, that I needed to do any more than look into your
eyes, listen to the way in which you express yourself, look, if I may
say so, at this lady, your daughter, and at your grandson, who takes
so much after you, to learn what was the matter with you?” “Your
grandmother might perhaps go and sit, if the Doctor allows it, in
some quiet path in the Champs-Elysées, near that laurel shrubbery
where you used to play when you were little,” said my mother to me,
thus indirectly consulting Dr. du Boulbon, her voice for that reason
assuming a tone of timid deference which it would not have had if
she had been addressing me alone. The Doctor turned to my
grandmother and, being apparently as well-read in literature as in
science, adjured her as follows: “Go to the Champs-Elysées,
Madame, to the laurel shrubbery which your grandson loves. The
laurel you will find health-giving. It purifies. After he had exterminated
the serpent Python, it was with a bough of laurel in his hand that
Apollo made his entry into Delphi. He sought thus to guard himself
from the deadly germs of the venomous monster. So you see that
the laurel is the most ancient, the most venerable and, I will add—
what is of therapeutic as well as of prophylactic value—the most
beautiful of antiseptics.”
Inasmuch as a great part of what doctors know is taught them by
the sick, they are easily led to believe that this knowledge which
patients exhibit is common to them all, and they pride themselves on
taking the patient of the moment by surprise with some remark
picked up at a previous bedside. Thus it was with the superior smile
of a Parisian who, in conversation with a peasant, might hope to
surprise him by using suddenly a word of the local dialect that Dr. du
Boulbon said to my grandmother: “Probably a windy night will make
you sleep when the strongest soporifics would have no effect.” “On
the contrary, Sir, when the wind blows I can never sleep at all.” But
doctors are touchy people. “Ach!” muttered du Boulbon, knitting his
brows, as if some one had trodden on his toe, or as if my
grandmother’s sleeplessness on stormy nights were a personal
insult to himself. He had not, however, an undue opinion of himself,
and since, in his character as a “superior” person, he felt himself
bound not to put any faith in medicine, he quickly recovered his
philosophic serenity.
My mother, in her passionate longing for reassurance from
Bergotte’s friend, added in support of his verdict that a first cousin of
my grandmother, who suffered from a nervous complaint, had lain for
seven years cloistered in her bedroom at Combray, without leaving
her bed more than once or twice a week.
 “You see, Madame, I didn’t know that, and yet I could have told
you.”
“But, Sir, I am not in the least like her; on the contrary, my doctor
complains that he cannot get me to stay in bed,” said my
grandmother, whether because she was a little annoyed by the
doctor’s theories, or was anxious to submit to him any objections that
might be raised to them, in the hope that he would refute these and
that, after he had gone, she would no longer find any doubt lurking in
her own mind as to the accuracy of his encouraging diagnosis.
“Why, naturally, Madame, you cannot have all the forms of—if
you’ll excuse my saying so—mania at once; you have others, but not
that particular one. Yesterday I visited a home for neurasthenics. In
the garden, I saw a man standing on a seat, motionless as a fakir,
his neck bent in a position which must have been highly
uncomfortable. On my asking him what he was doing there, he
replied, without turning his head, or moving a muscle: ‘You see,
Doctor, I am extremely rheumatic and catch cold very easily; I have
just been taking a lot of exercise, and while I was getting hot, like a
fool, my neck was touching my flannels. If I move it away from my
flannels now before letting myself cool down, I am certain to get a
stiff neck, and possibly bronchitis.’ Which he would, in fact, have
done. ‘You’re a fine specimen of neurasthenia, that’s what you are,’ I
told him. And do you know what argument he advanced to prove that
I was mistaken? It was this; that while all the other patients in the
place had a mania for testing their weight, so much so that the
weighing machine had to be padlocked so that they should not
spend the whole day on it, he had to be lifted on to it bodily, so little
did he care to be weighed. He prided himself on not sharing the
mania of the others without thinking that he had also one of his own,
and that it was this which saved him from the other. You must not be
offended by the comparison, Madame, for the man who dared not
turn his neck for fear of catching a chill is the greatest poet of our
day. That poor maniac is the most lofty intellect that I know. Submit
to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable
family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we know
have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have
founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world
be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what
they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine
music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not
know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness,
tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of
death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have
felt, Madame,” he added with a smile at my grandmother, “for
confess now, when I came into the room, you were not feeling very
confident. You thought that you were ill; dangerously ill, perhaps.
Heaven only knows what the disease was of which you thought you
had detected the symptoms. And you were not mistaken; they were
there. Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no
illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce lifelike
imitations of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the sicknesses of
pregnancy, the broken rhythm of the cardiac, the feverishness of the
consumptive. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail
to deceive the patient? No, no; you mustn’t think I’m making fun of
your sufferings. I should not undertake to heal them unless I
understood them thoroughly. And, well, they say there’s no good
confession unless it’s mutual. I have told you that without nervous
trouble there can be no great artist. What is more,” he added, raising
a solemn forefinger, “there can be no great scientist either. I will go
farther, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble,
he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to
treat nervous troubles. In nervous pathology a doctor who doesn’t
say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured, just as a critic is a
poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who
has retired from practice. I, Madame, I do not, like you, fancy myself
to be suffering from albuminuria, I have not your nervous fear of
food, nor of fresh air, but I can never go to sleep without getting out
of bed at least twenty times to see if my door is shut. And in that
home where I found the poet yesterday who would not move his
neck, I had gone to secure a room, for—this is between ourselves—I
spend my holidays there looking after myself when I have increased
my own trouble by wearing myself out in the attempt to cure other
people.”