ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the history-word-by-word approach to intellectual history in general and to epistemic changes in collective civilizational consciousness in particular. It contributes to linguistic anthropology by providing a theoretical framework for the historical study of the emergence of civilizational consciousness through historical linguistic studies of the lexicalization of the key semantic building blocks (or molecules) of early modern European concepts of ‘civilization.’ A definition of collective consciousness that links language to society is proposed; collective civilizational consciousness emerged with the coining of the words used to articulate it. This new approach is used to analyze and map the semantic structures of the different modern Western concepts of ‘civilization’ that have been used in colloquial language, as well as in theoretical frameworks, since they first emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Chapter 1 goes beyond previous studies of the historical emergence of the English word civilization by incorporating new data and systematizing the conceptual analysis of the various concepts of ‘civilization.’ Finally, by tracing the coining of the word civilization in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe, the chapter innovates by providing the metalanguage necessary to analyze the emergence of civilizational consciousness in pre-Qín texts.
