ABSTRACT
For the classical sociological theorisation of Chinese culture, we should perhaps turn less to Max Weber (1964) – than to Emile Durkheim, and Durkheim’s eminent student, Marcel Granet. Granet, a younger contemporary of Marcel Mauss, featured a notion of the emblem, similar to Durkeim’s totem, in his understanding of Chinese thought. Granet’s emblem is a tool for classification, in the sense of Durkheim and Mauss’s (1903) Primitive Classifications. Yet it diverges from these accounts in a way that Chinese culture, more generally, transgresses Durkheim’s concepts. First, the Chinese emblem, unlike Durkheim’s totem, straddles the sacred and profane. For us the relational is on this margin of sacred and profane. The individualism at the heart of the Western neoclassical subject is fundamentally connected with the dualist separation of sacred and profane. We see this in Weber’s Protestantism and in Enlightenment secular thought. This is not the case in China. Indeed the thematic of Talcott Parsons (1967) Structure of Social Action and of Weber’s (1988) Religionssoziologie was based on the contrast of transcendentalist Western, Judaeo-Christian tradition and the immanentist Daoism and Buddhism.
