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Discussants:
Nezar Alsayyad, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Ho Puay Peng, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Xiaodong Li , Tsinghua University, China
Xing Ruan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Chairs:
Huaqing Huang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Yushu Liang, Nanjing University, China
Hello everyone, I am Huaqing Huang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Today we're here for a special roundtable session on the Chinese edition of Nezar AlSayyad’s Traditions: ‘Real’, the Hyper and the Virtual in the Built Environment, translated by me and Dr. Yushu Liang, also my co-chair of this session. We are taking the publication of this book as a challenge, also as an opportunity, to refrain the concept of ‘tradition’ and its practice in the Chinese context.
Today, I will begin our session with this question: what do we talk about when we talk about tradition in China? In the English introduction of this book, Nezar also raised the question concerning the translation of ‘tradition’ in different languages, like in Chinese, in Arabic, and it has led to quite different meanings. In Chinese, the most widely used parallel word to tradition is ‘传统(chuan tong)’, which is itself a very complicated Chinese word. As Robert Redfield framed it as the ‘great tradition’ and the ‘little tradition’, in China we similarly have a couple of dichotomous spheres to depict the scenes surrounding this word.
First, we have the ‘classical tradition’, as we can see in the Foguang temple in Shanxi province built in 857, one of the oldest surviving wooden buildings in China. It refers to a system of high standard tenon-and-mortise architectonics, used only in important imperial palaces and Buddhist temples. Meanwhile, when we talk about architectonics, there exist much more diverse presentations in vernacular architecture, like the structural techniques hired in this wooden bridge, Tiandi bridge, in a mountain village in Fujian province, built in the 19th century. When we compared the ‘classical tradition’ versus the ‘vernacular tradition’, the former is in the core of Chinese history while the latter is in the periphery. However, they are both integral parts to the historic scene.
Second, we may talk about the ‘traditional tradition’ and ‘modern tradition’, as we see tradition in China as a constantly evolving scene. Here you can see two images of the same village, shot in very different time. The left one depicts a hidden secret settlement lost in history, shot by Professor RUAN Xing as he did field research in Guizhou province in 1993. The village is picturesque with the backdrop of high mountains of southwestern China. Meanwhile, the right one shows the same village 25 years later, when the village was chosen as a site for the National Gala of the Chinese New Year. It was broadcast to all the country in New Year’s Eve and made the village much more well-known. While in the more recent image of the village, it seems nothing has changed, but actually lots of things have changed. Instead of being a secluded site in 1993, it has been tailored specifically for the taste of modern tourists. This may remind us of what Nezar discusses in his book about the relation between tradition and tourism, as well as the dynamism of tradition.
The third perspective is about practice. When we talk about tradition in China, we may be concerned with the conservation and inheritance of tradition, as Professor HO Puay Peng’s excellent work in the rehabilitation of an old police station into a Green Hub in Hong Kong. This is only one approach. Also at the right image, we could see this project of Bridge School designed by Professor LI Xiaodong. It hired this modern but delicate gesture to conceive a gentle form as a dialogue with the famous Earth Castle in Fujian, a UNESCO World Heritage site. This question between the ‘inheritance of tradition’ and the ‘intervention of tradition’ points to our gesture towards tradition, as well as the continuation of the effect of tradition in the contemporary context.
At last, when we talk about tradition in China, we may refer to the ‘real tradition’, as the famous Mogao Caves. It provides us with embodied experience of a glorious distant past, but now is faced with increasing threats brought by over-development of tourism and climate change. Meanwhile, we are exploring emerging domains of experiencing the ‘virtual tradition’, as Professor Ho Puay Peng used VR technology to create the virtual experience of Mogao Caves. Through this practice, he is challenging the dichotomy between the reality and virtuality of the experience of tradition.
To add to this discussion, I might briefly translate some of the sentences from the two prologues, which are new for this Chinese edition. The first prologue is written by Professor CHANG Qing, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an influential scholar of heritage and practitioner of heritage conservation. As he said,
‘Prof. AlSayyad proposes that under the impact of the “cultural hegemony” and the “consumable tradition” brought about by globalization and urbanization, the “authenticity” of tradition, associated with specific regionality and sense of place, passed down from generation to generation as the source of identity and value, is currently going through a process of dissolving, transforming and ending. This judgment is undoubtedly a thought-provoking insight into the development of architecture.’
He also writes about categories of architectural tradition in China. He frames it as four categories,
‘first is the customs of construction and use, unconsciously manifested in the routine of the subject‘s thinking mode and behavior habits; second is the carrier of cultural symbols and identity, the “built heritage” formed through construction methods throughout the ages and protected by law; third is the revival of historic forms, commonly seen in modern buildings in historic style for nostalgia and cultural consumption; fourth is the representation of archetypal images, the inheritance and transformation of architectural cultural essence…’
As a practitioner, Professor CHANG is also intrigued by Nezar’s keypoint of the book that ‘a key question that frames this book is the interrogation of tradition as an essentially spatial project and process. ‘I think this is an important topic to further explore today.
In Professor RUAN Xing’s prologue, he wrote,
‘looking at the themes of previous conferences hosted by Prof. Alsayyad for over 30 years, we may observe two threads of gradually changing concepts: one is that tradition has moved from the “periphery” to the “center”, at the same time, traditional settlements have turned into a kind of globalized consumer society; second, the “real” nature of tradition has gradually become hyper-real and virtual, giving rise to the title of this book... It can be seen that the objects of Prof. Alsayyad’s academic journey has transformed from an “unchanging tradition” in the periphery to a constantly changing, complicated and creative tradition…’
And he also proposed how we could learn from this point. He offered a very interesting proposal from the context of Chinese culture.
“In the place of Prof. AlSayyad, we need to keep pace with the times. For the inheritance of Chinese tradition, we might as well try the method proposed by monk Nan Huai-Chin: The way of Confucius and Mencius is a food store, which you must visit every day; Taoism is a drug store, you visit it only when you are sick; Buddhism is a department store, you go shopping when you have money and leisure.”
Today, we propose three topics for this roundtable. We seek to bring forward how the interrogation of the notion of ‘tradition’ raised by Nezar’s book is going to provoke debates around its historical foundation, theoretical framework and practical implications in China, as well as Chinese diasporas overseas.
First, we will discuss about TRANSLATION: to translate the discourse of tradition within the Chinese theoretical context, and to reflect on its specificity considering its pivotal status, profound meanings and entangled contingencies.
Second, related to the theme of this conference, we will talk about RUPTURE: to reconsider the implications of tradition in the Chinese built environment by reflecting on the ruptures, challenges and opportunities it engenders. It further interrogates the norms around the key concepts in relation to tradition, such as modernity, vernacular, tourism, identity and nation-state, and etc.
At last, we deal with the theme of RESTRUCTURE, to reframe paradigms and approaches of practice around the spheres of tradition. Following the author’s interrogation of tradition ‘as an essentially spatial project and process’(p.9), we shall discuss solutions to those dilemmas in related spatial practices, including heritage conservation, urban renewal, rural revitalization, the virtualization of traditional environment, etc.
That’s all for my brief introduction of this roundtable. Now let us proceed to the initial responses and reflections by the three discussants. First let’s welcome Professor LI Xiaodong to share his insights from the perspective of a practicing architect.
When I look at the book and the topics that Nezar considers, it's almost like a journey for IASTE since it was started 35 years ago. It also coincides with my career and my academic concern. When I was doing my Ph.D., it was mainly the subjects that touch on the custom of tradition as well as the art history of Dunhuang. But when I started teaching in Hong Kong, I thought that I need to be localized. So I took up the study of vernacular architecture and the villages in Hong Kong. In two years, I attended my first IASTE conference in Tunis. I presented my study of traditional villages in Hong Kong. At that point of time, I mean to reflect on the title of Nezar’s book, I was more interested in form and space. I was more interested in the physical elements. I was more interested in understanding the structure of the village or the villagers. I was more interested in looking at the hierarchical relationship between different structures within the village. And obviously I was also looking at the social dimensions, the people living there, their tradition, their ritual and so on.
Slowly from that, the object-based study moved more towards the conceptual. And to think about what tradition is in terms of expression from the physical component. In that reading, I went to the same village that Professor RUAN took the picture in 1993. I was there in 1998. When I look at the objects and moving away from the objects, to consider the idea of tradition, I'm getting more and more in line with Nezar’s approach as hyper-condition, or hyper-tradition. How do we see tradition not as something static, not only as something constructed, not as a tradition that will tie us down to a period of time, but is evolving all the time? A tradition that is evolving not only with the time, but also with the social, cultural and geographical context of the time?
I began to look into the idea of tradition. From Hong Kong, I studied vernacular architecture in a lot of villages in China. I also invited the radio television of Hong Kong to make a television program of one village. At that time, I was looking at not just the form of the village. Because it was almost a dying village with nobody living there. I also tried to look at the symbolism of the village structure, and its relation to certain ritual. Quite coincidently, the second time I visited there with the TV crew, an opera troop from the neighboring county came to perform at the black dragon temple on an ancient stage to no audience. They were hired by someone who went to that temple particularly and pray. I suppose his prayer was answered. In order to thank the god, he invited this opera troop from another county to come and perform on that stage. He did not have to be there. It's a performance to no one. But we happened to be there. It was late in the evening. We need to rush back to another town, since there was no hotel in that particular village. To me, I remembered that episode very clearly, because I interviewed the lady, the main actress. She stayed at the temple for three days because she had to prepare to perform. She was nursing her baby, at the same time putting up makeup while I was talking to her. And there's one moment I could not talk to her, because she had to pray to the god before the performance. But I followed all that. I was just wondering, it was a traditional art form, it was a traditional opera, it was a traditional religious practice to return the blessing given by the god. But there was no need to have the audience because the village was deserted.
So what is tradition in that context? And how do you conceptualize that tradition? She was telling me in that part of the province, many villages were dying. In the past ten years, they went through a process of revival, trying to develop the villages for tourism. But all those attempts failed because they are not close to any major touristic resources. So, they were trying to revive the tradition, but forgotten about the social context, forgotten about the society that is living there, forgotten about the living tradition that goes on change and develop. I was interested in that and keep on looking. We stayed in the villages for many days at a time, with students participating in everything. I participated in a wedding ceremony, talking to a bride, participating in funeral services, talking to the Daoist priest conducting the ritual, talking to the elders of the village, looking to the village genealogy and so on. Then, we were trying to re-create the kind of social context so that tradition can be understood as a flux, as a movement through time, through space and through different conceptualization and many different imaginations.
Then, Huaqing mentioned the last IASTE where I was invited to give a keynote on ‘virtual tradition’, and that is also related to what Professor LI Xiaodong just talked about in terms of the perspective, in terms of the way of looking, I was interested in that as a form of cultural preservation. But my main question was, what tradition are we preserving and what are we presenting? What are we representing? And that representation and that presentation together may form a snapshot of tradition at that moment of time. And who made up that tradition? Is it the digitization of Dunhuang, the cave temples, or the digitization of the paintings, like Xiaodong did? Some of the paintings have been passed down from history to present day. Whether those traditions are related to us, and what is our lived experience and what is our conceptual experience of the tradition? All that relates not only the form of representation, the nature of presentation, but also the recipient of the presentation. I was interested in that. And it's probably very similar to what Nezar was thinking in terms of ‘virtual tradition’.
My take on this is that a lot of times we are presenting an aesthetic view of everything. Right? And I said, too many presentations there in this particular conference, and I found that perhaps there should be a way for us both to understand tradition as a snapshot in time, but also as a constant flux of changes. Change is inevitable. Change is the constant. And change is probably something that we should define and should be used to define tradition. In that sense, what the virtual or digital means would be something that is most handy and most appropriate for us to represent this flux in tradition. That's my reflection. Thank you.
Today I will talk a little bit about tradition and also about history and culture, based on how I define the term as identity in my design. We see things from different perspectives due to the different backgrounds of education and environments we grew up. I think all the architects knows this drawing by Frank Lloyd Wright, but very few people knows that Frank Lloyd Wright was the first western architect who used the bird's eye perspective to represent his work. Because in a western philosophy, there's a subject and there's an object. The subject of human being looks at the object through the eyes of human being from the eyesight in the normal level. So, perspective is very important to present reality. Yet on the other side of the world, in China, we don't differentiate what is subject and what is object. We see the world as a whole. Human being is part of the universe and part of the heaven, as we call it ‘tian ren he yi’. So, all the drawings in Chinese history were presented in bird’s eye view, and the perspectives are from the God. As such, we can see things beyond things. We see buildings beyond buildings, mountains beyond buildings. We see the system, and we see layers of things.
I have another example to explore, which would be more about cultural differences. This is a Chinese garden, in which we see pavilions, rocks, water, trees, we see all those elements. This is the Chinese character, ‘yuan’, or garden. The most important element in a Chinese garden is the corridor. You never see corridors in the Chinese garden as a straightforward presentation, but rather as a more elongated walkway. Because we need something to experience the garden dynamically. We will change the angles as we see different things. Yet on the other side of our country, Japan, they learned Chinese culture, but somehow in the garden design, they don't have the elongated corridors. It is more like we call it ‘ku shan-shui’, in which you sit there and watch the landscape in front of you. The reason behind this is that behind the Chinese garden, the landscape is represented by Mount Huangshan. Huangshan is like this. When you look at it from a far or close distance, they are different; in different seasons they are different; and from the morning to the afternoon, they changed all the time. So, to understand and to know the whole mountain, you need to walk through it, and experience it in a dynamic way. Yet, in Japan, mountains are represented by the Fuji Mountain, which is a volcano. Most of the mountains in Japan are volcanoes. They look the same from either far or close distance, and they don’t really need to walk through the mountain, to experience the mountain’s shape. So, that’s why the artificial world is somehow inspired by the natural landscape, and this actually results in the differences between two cultures.
So, we built our world differently, according to different lifestyle, different climatic conditions, different materials and so on, so forth. Yet, starting from the beginning of last century, we began to do things in a similar way because of industrializing, because of globalization. We started to build the building the same way. The architect is trying to fight back with personal style and personal identity. They attach their personal identity to designs to express themselves. And this, of course, in the last century, really enriched the architectural language. But yet, is this about the future? My argument is that we need a connection, a dialogue between what is architecture and what is the reality, what is history, what is culture and what is local conditions. We need to have a more efficient way of expressing architectural design, instead of a personal one.
40 years ago, when China started to open the door, the outside world was very colorful, yet China was a black-and-white, grey-colored society. So we tried to learn things from outside world. Yet we didn't know how and what. I. M. Pei gave us his solution. He designed the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing and to showcase what is his understanding about Chinese contemporary architecture. So, what we have here is actually a vernacular, a very recognizable, a picturesque demonstration of Chinese architecture. For this, we were actually disappointed in the very beginning, because, it looks like we were trying to escape through a post-modern way, which actually is a kind of looking back, looking back at the history about elements, the history of recognizable forms. But for the next twenty years, Chinese architects followed I. M. Pei’s way. Design has become a matter of choice instead of a matter of debate. Then we see buildings like this all over China. The common thing is that they are all recognizable forms.
So, this is my solution. I tried to play with the local material, the local climatic conditions and the lifestyle, and how they see things from their perspective. Yet my buildings also want to engage them with modern technology and modern understanding of things. So, I begin with a few examples of how I, in the very beginning, do buildings in the countryside. These are some examples. It's really about how contemporary lifestyle can be integrated with the traditional understanding of the world, of space, of sequences, of how things can be done together as a complete dialogue. It's about local materials. It's about how legendary stories can be translated into a contemporary thing. It’s all about engaging critical understanding of how environment and local community can be inspired to move forward.
Finally, I will use one example, a recent finished project in Shenzhen to explore how I understand about identity, about traditional thinking, and how contemporary ideas can be integrated into one piece of package to explain what is identity in this particular setting. This is a high school, with 100,000 square meters of floor area. The site is only about 20,000 square meters. The plot ratio is about five. Shenzhen is in the subtropical climatic region. So we need to solve a few problems. First is the high density. Second is about subtropical living. And the third is about the school. How these things can come together as one package? Looking at this image, you can see that we don't have space. We need to solve all the things in a three-dimensional way. How? First the running track is in the sky. The football is in the sky too. We have roof gardens. Everything is divided into units and embedded into the three-dimensional condition. From this section, you can see that it is really about how efficiency of the building is to get everything done in one package. With only 20,000 square meters of sitting area, we even manage to design a garden on the ground with 3,000 square meters. And we have vertical greeneries, which is the introduction of an ecological system of sun-shading device.
For me, creativity is important for an institution of education. No boundary or less boundary is important, so that students can be free. Mutational elements like this are introduced into the design so that we can have more varieties in terms of spatial relationships. It is really about interaction, about connection. A library is built on the bridge connecting the two teaching facilities, and could be reached from either side. In the running track, there is no decorations. Everything exposed is like an open book that the students can read and understand how the building is operated. And there's no physical wall to separate the school with the city. Actually, when walking along the street, you could feel this inviting spatial quality, and it is not locking up the way. This is all about space, but not about object.
As you can see, that is really about high density. It's about porosity. It's about sun shading. It’s about how you move around without a clear boundary. It’s all about how the campus can be integrated with the whole city.
Ruan Xing
What I can do today is to give you my own English translation of the prologue that I wrote for the Chinese publication. I will say a little bit about Nezar, and how I got to know you. I consider you as a colleague, although we have only met for a few times, once in Berkeley and probably once in Australia, in my old university in Sydney. But I consider you as a colleague because we seem to do things in parallel. My colleague, Professor Ronald Knapp, and I have been working on a book series titled ‘Spatial Habitus: Meaning and Making in Asia's architecture’, including traditional and vernacular architecture. We have been quiet observers of this tremendous organization, IASTE. This book series has been going on for more than 20 years now. We have published more than 15 titles with a good coverage. We invited you from early on as our board member, so you receive copies of these books. But you have been making waves through this tremendous organization around the world, and we have been producing monographs. Interesting parallel, and we never had such intersection.
Now is my understanding. When I attempted to situate your book in the Chinese context, I thought that was my obligation to do so in order for the Chinese readers to understand where it comes from. My guess is that all of you sitting in this room are able to read Nezar's book, the original English version, but not all of you are able to read the Chinese translation. And translation is a strange thing. To take the concept of tradition as an example, whether or not tradition as you mean is what we understand in China? The answer is uncertain. I don't want to be too abstract before I get into the details of what I was going to say. Let me give you one example. When we talk about calligraphy, as Simon Leys reminded us, you understand that we Chinese are very proud of Chinese calligraphy. But in fact, we are talking about two totally different things. Calligraphy in western tradition or in Indo-European tradition actually means the embellishment of writing, your handwriting, or the design of a typology. But in China there's no such thing called ‘calligraphy’. Calligraphy, or ‘shufa’, if I have to translate, roughly is the law of writing. But the Chinese concept of law is different from that of your law. So, we talk about rule and law, not exactly the same thing. That is just the first part. Law of writing in China is not just longhand; it is a way of living; it is also about writing a book and etc. So, for too long, when you consider ‘calligraphy’ of Chinese tradition, your starting point and the Chinese starting point are far apart.
Concerning IASTE, my sense is that the starting point of this tremendous organization based in Berkeley somehow had something to do with the spirit of the place. UC Berkeley is well-known for this kind of position, which may come from the periphery, or the marginalized position. So as academics coming from the minority group, making waves and making attempts to legitimize something that is different from the mainstream, I suppose that was somewhat important. Correct me Nezar, if I am making wrong guess. That is what I think fascinating, because this particular trajectory in western intellectual history, the recent history, is well known to all of you. In this context, consider myself as one of you. Once upon a time they were the kindred spirits or pupils of Edward Said and his “orientalism”. But look, orientalism, as Said himself declared, is a profession or a career. This position has been to some extent quite accepted and maybe taken for granted by many of us. Because we do, as academics or some of us who are lucky enough, like you, Nezar, to become public intellectuals, see ourselves as someone who has the obligation to do something like that, to legitimate a marginalized position and make it as part or equal part of the mainstream. If we look at the themes of this tremendous organization of the past years, we can see this trajectory which I just described. But somehow, when this very charged term, ‘political correctness’, was raised by both the extreme right and also those from the so-called the ‘left camp’, I think the self-reflection may enable us to rethink this taken-for-granted trajectory.
When this particular conference happened in 2000 in Italy, the question or the theme of this conference was: is there an ‘end of tradition’? As we know, it obviously has paraphrased Francis Fukuyama’s famous book. I think he jumped on that a little too early. Covid has basically completely dashed his hope. History has not ended. But the whole concept of the ‘ending of tradition’ follows very much this taken-for-granted tradition in the West, that history is progressive, and that history is linear. The sharp contrast to that particular understanding of time and space is that, the Chinese, for a very long time, never saw history as a progression. Fukuyama’s book, of course, would be regarded as something that is ridiculously passé in the Chinese context.
So, about the Chinese tradition, if I have to add a little bit of context to Nezar’s rite of passage, which I think is a wonderful one: when Professor Ho emphasized several times of this influx, is that tradition itself in China for a long time was very much in the center. And it was never marginalized until the 19th century. The reason why I say that is because if you see the 19th century as this important turning point, for example the Opium War, if the tradition was always regarded as the central theme of a culture, then what did that mean? What exactly was tradition in the Chinese mind?
Along with that, was a long tradition of interpretation rather than the production of new knowledge. And that is something, in classical times, which happened to coincide with the classical times in the West, held dear when Confucius was still alive, that was 500 BCE. Confucius’ job was a very simple one. He knew it clearly that it was not his job to invent any new knowledge. But it was important for him to give a proper interpretation of the fine tradition, which he thought had been lost. So he spent all his time working on classical literature, and trying to give people a good explanation of that fine tradition before his time. He knew that his effort would be ineffectual. He tried very hard to have impact on real politics. But throughout his life, he only managed to hold a not-so-important position as a court minister for a very short period of time. If we use today's expression, Confucius was an utter failure; he did not have a successful career at all. But he managed to have excellent students. And he ran a consulting service to teach the aristocrats how to undertake ceremonies. But he did one important thing. Let me use this wonderful analogy from the end of the 19th century. Chinese scholar Gu Hongming, who grew up in the West and then made huge efforts to turn himself into a Chinese man, described the true meaning of Confucius work: Confucius basically produced the working drawings of the essential elements of Chinese tradition. And Confucius knew, the edifice already collapsed. Whether or not this edifice has been rebuilt ever since, I think it is debatable. After Confucius, for a few thousand years, whether or not the Chinese tradition was unchanged, static, or it was, in fact, constantly changing?
I think if we look at the understanding of what we have gained, the tremendous work from Nezar, Professor Ho, and many of the colleagues here, that is, to see a constantly changing culture as tradition, or to use the name of the tradition to legitimize what is good, what is new. And then to see that there is something dynamic. I think if I paraphrase this famous title of the book edited by Eric Hobsbawn, The Invention of Tradition, we seem to think, yes, we have reached the conclusion, which is the discipline of history. But I was really quite struck by an analogy used by a very fine Belgian sinologist, Pierre Ryckmans, who was at the same time a Renaissance man and knew every aspect of western culture. He said, after having searched his entire life, for, according to him, this seductive nature of Chinese culture, he thought the best way to describe this strange relationship between the static nature of Chinese tradition, and the constant changing nature of Chinese tradition, maybe is to look at how the waterfall is represented in Chinese poetry or Chinese painting: it is static when it's viewed in distance, but is constantly changing when you move close.
Nezar AlSayyad
In the first place, thank you both very much for translating the book. And thank you for the amazing commentaries. When one finds oneself in a situation like this, one cannot help but feel both humbled and honored at the same time. I have had many of my books translated to several languages. But this is actually the first time that anyone who translated any of my books decided to discuss it with me, and, in fact, to allow me the opportunity to learn how the book was understood in the context of this very specific culture. Yes, I have a lot of things to say, and I really love both of your commentaries very much, and some of my response will actually require me to reflect a bit on history. You're absolutely right. You're reading not only of the book, but of me and of my relationship to Berkeley, and IASTE’s relationship to Berkeley. So I'll take a bit about that.
I'll start by saying that I recognize that tradition is actually very different everywhere. In fact, part of the reason that I got interested in writing this book is that the term itself has no equivalent. I'm multilingual. I know three languages, I speak them, and I can read them. The word “tradition” does not exist in what I would recall my mother tongue, Arabic. It has no exact equivalent. The only equivalent terms in this case are either heritage or custom. So the concept itself, as it exists in different languages, there is a fundamental difference. You already know that because you translated the book, there is a difference even between the meaning of the term in the Romanic languages and in the Germanic languages. And then once you add Hindi, Chinese and Arabic, you enter a different realm altogether. So what I have always been after is the meaning of tradition, or the practices of tradition, not the word or the concept of tradition as it has emerged in the western context. Language, in a sense, determines what we say. I love your example of ‘calligraphy’ because it is a complete challenge to the notion of tradition as it actually exists in western culture. This notion that it's a law.
And in a sense, if I were to go back and reflect on the origin of the association, and even on the first conference, of course, we engaged in an attempt to legitimate this discourse. When I went to Berkeley in 1985, the first conference I ever attended was the conference of the Society of Architectural Historians. I had to present the paper about early cities of the Arabs as they actually moved west and conquered a very substantial part of north Africa. Because I was actually presenting material for which there is only written and archaeological evidence, but no buildings, I had to give a talk without slides, in the Society of Architectural Historians, which had never happened before. I was still a Ph.D. student in Berkeley. The chair of my session was panicked about my presentation. I think the conference was in Pittsburgh, so he went to the university and pulled a few slides, which were totally unrelated to my talk, but they were about Islamic architecture, and he said, why don't you just use a few of these slides? I said no, because I felt it was not relevant. He was an old member of the SAH, so he went around telling people add the conference about this young guy who is breaking all traditions of the association and who is likely to make a big fool of himself by presenting a paper without slides in SAH.
I actually got scared, yet I still decided to stand my ground, because I'm talking about how cities that no longer exist and from the 8th and 9th century, for which the only evidence was textual and I felt completely justified. So I did what architectural historians do. I turned off the light, and I had this very little light on the podium, and I told them, look, you have a very specific tradition, which is we use slides. I am breaking this tradition. So now we just have to focus on the little light of the podium and use the darkness to imagine the images that could accompany my words. That day I got the first ovation of my career.
I mentioned this story because I think that at times, it becomes very important to actually challenge some of the existing conventions when one is to engage with these kinds of subjects. The spirit of the place, absolutely. Berkeley in the 80s was a very revolutionary place, though. A lot of what had happened in the 60s, continued all the way into the 80s. Yes, it died completely in the 90s. By the beginning of the century, Berkeley became a neoliberal institution. And I saw this change. But I'll just give you an example. I started teaching in 1986 at Berkeley. Many of my students, many American students, were very interested in the vernacular, and Mui Ho, my colleague from Berkeley here, she was also teaching a course on Chinese vernacular architecture. They had no outlet, there was no place to present. In 1986, I decided to attend the Vernacular Architecture Forum, which was a group of people like IASTE who got together and older than IASTE for a couple of years, except that I discovered everybody there is talking about small towns in America. And there was not a single presentation out of 60-70 that dealt with anything outside the United States. That's, in a sense, how IASTE was born. It was born out of the concern of not only me, but others to try to legitimate this discourse within the academy itself. That's why our first conference, which was very successful, had 400 people. We've never had a conference of that size since then. That was 1988. And it had people as different as Spiro Kostof from art history, Henry Glassie from anthropology, Amos Rapoport from architecture, Paul Oliver, who actually is a folklorist who initially came from the field of music. His initial study was in music, but he moved from studying music folklore to studying folkloric buildings.
I wanted to reflect a bit on that, because I think, yes, that the origin of some of these activities, in a sense, is relevant even until today. My attempt was to put some of these issues at the core of the discourse. You used the terms that were absolutely correct, the core and the periphery. And for me, I felt that what I managed to do in Berkeley educationally and institutionally, was to bring the periphery to the core, because Berkeley was definitely the core back then. Just as an example, I wanted to do a dissertation, as I just said, on the 7th, 8th and 9th century in the Arab world, looking at cities like Kufa, Basra, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. I looked around and discovered if I want to see these original manuscripts, I have to go to Iraq and Syria and Egypt. But I went to Berkeley and there I found all of these manuscripts. Yes, in copies, but it was there. It's a particular form of colonial domination that found its way to the academy. I surrender to that condition, to my own advantage.
I also want to reflect a bit about your statement regarding The End of Tradition specifically because it came out of the very important conference held in 2000. I think the book that came out of it was published in 2001. There were 6 books that were published before it at the end of the 20th century that became very important, all of which had the “end” in the title. There was actually the first one, which actually happened even earlier, a book by Daniel Bell, who is a very conservative writer, called ‘The End of Ideology’. And then that was followed by “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama and Kanechi Omae’s “The End of the Nation State” . So I decided to organize this very specific conference along the same line and engage with the theme of the end of tradition. It was an attempt to engage and not necessarily a response to all of these books. Globalization was being celebrated by all. it was so looked upon positively, it would liberate everybody. At that time, the internet was also the new liberatory space, nobody knew that two decades later Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter, and big tech was going to control the public discourse. So I actually pursued the ideas of the end of tradition as a specific discourse but with a big question mark ‘?’. In fact, I had a fight with my British editor who said that the question mark cannot be placed on the title of book but I prevailed.
So this is what I meant by ‘the end of tradition’? I still believe in that and that's one of the things I'd like to discuss with you, particularly in the Chinese context. I never advocated nor believed that traditions can end although some will always change and possibly disappear overtime. What I advocated and believed at that time is that authenticity can no longer be the prime definer of tradition, in a sense, there are lots of other aspects to tradition, some of which I believe may become more important than authenticity. Over the years, my own definition of tradition had been informed by the many conferences that IASTE organized and by the works of many of my colleagues as well. I define tradition as a dynamic project, a dynamic project that always attempts to define and redefine the past for the purposes of the present within a particular political context and for particular ends.
You have to remember that no people, no society ever called themselves traditional until the modern was invented. So, in a sense, the dualistic component of it is what I found very problematic. You cited the book which was very important for me intellectually, ‘the Invention of Tradition’, which was edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger, and the other book by Benedict Anderson, ‘Imagined Communities’, which many of my students here, former students from Berkeley, both studied in the first semester with me. Both of these books laid the foundation outside of our field to be able to understand what it means to deal with something that was generated by a particular history. When we examine it carefully, we discover that it's actually invented, that it may not necessarily have a particular origin. So there are certain practices that emerge at a given moment in time, and over time, they acquire legitimacy independent of their origin.
From this perspective, I was trying here to come up with a definition of tradition that applies to all aspects of material culture, so as to put architecture under it. It's not necessarily to say, oh, this is about traditional architecture. No, this is about the process of what Janet Abu-Lughod actually called in the second conference in 1990, ‘traditioning’, the process of making a practice traditional’. I say dynamic because it never is the same. I'm fascinated by some of the examples you gave, and I would love to hear more about it. You suggested that history is progressive and linear in western tradition, but in China, you said it's not so does that mean we are sitting here in an East versus West divide? Or can we actually engage in this discussion in a manner that operationalizes the concept of tradition in a way that we can all, independent of the different cultures that we come from, could actually understand?
I want to end this small intervention with the example that exists in so many different cultures, and many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with it because I found it in a few different languages. It's about different material objects. One of them is the example of the inherited family shovel. What does the shovel have? It has a handle made of wood. It has a head that at one point in time was made of stone. And the two pieces were in the past connected with or attached by rope. After 100 years, the head decayed. They had to replace it with something, so actually replaced it with an it with an iron head. After a little while, the rope attaching it frayed so they replaced it with a nail and finally the wood handle itself rotted and the family replaced it with a piece of oak. All of the elements that constitute this object are no longer the same, they were new and replaced in different times. Yet that shovel was still called the ‘family shovel’, because it has been passed down from one generation to another. So, even with all of the elements changed, it was still a traditional object for all of them.
For me there are three components here of this tradition. The idea of transmission, and that is fundamental. The idea of a cultural meaning that is attached to this particular object and the idea that is being transmitted. And the third is the value that happens with the passage of time, which is its authenticity. That's the only part that, at least where I stand as a scholar today, I don't necessarily give value to. I give value to the fact that the components, the three components still exist, even though they have fundamentally changed in terms of what they are. For me, that is what makes them traditional. It's not that the three objects themselves that make this particular piece of material culture the thing that goes back to 300 years are each authentic, it is that the process the brought them together is imbued with value. I'll end here so that we can start the discussion.
What do you think the section of that book, aside from the beautiful intellectual critique that both of you provided, would people care in China? No, seriously, another question that I absolutely also had for you. I structured the book along the lines that you may actually even consider Western. But you have to tell me about that. I want to know to what extent, for example, my themes, modernity, vernacular, nation state, colonialism, authenticity, are relevant in the Chinese context. If one was to write a book about tradition as it applies to the built environment in a context of another country, what would the subtitles of these books be?
Well, you have asked me quite a few questions. You want me to come back to say how the book would be received by readers in China. And my sense is that this beautiful book, very well translated by these two young colleagues of mine, is not going to be a bestseller in China, I'm afraid. (Nezar: It's okay. It's not the bestseller anywhere anyway.) However, what I can assure you is that my colleagues will read it in China, mainly because tradition has always been the centrality. The reason why at the end of my prologue, I said, the attempt to legitimize a marginalized concept or position, such as tradition, is something that we take for granted from western point of view. I say “we” because I switch my position. I use English and have a dialogue with you. But in China this question is probably redundant, because tradition is always taken seriously. And if you care about what is happening in that country, you may always hear this kind of rhetoric such as, “revitalization of the great tradition”. So as long as you have that word in your title, you're going to have a few readers.
And the second part of your question, again, a fascinating one: am I setting up a dichotomy between the West and the East? And if we could reach some sort of common ground, to see a marginalized, or not so marginalized traditions, as something that is constantly changing and dynamic, so, we're on the same page. What is the problem with that? I think we typically believe that we have to be careful with a lot of stereotypes, because when we say the West and the East in our academic tradition, we feel uncomfortable, for this is a gross generalization. We don't do in academic world in such a fashion. But if you think it twice, often there is some truth in stereotypes. If you say, okay, it's debatable, that the concept of history in Indo-European tradition is linear and in progression, of course you can debate about that. And same applies to the Chinese concept, the cyclical concept of time. But because they are stereotypes, they are deeply rooted in people's, not so much consciousness, rather the substructure of consciousness. So, when they go about their day-to-day life, it is always there, because they are stereotypes. I don't think we should take it lightly, even from the academic point of view.
Now we return to the concept, and the state of understanding that we have reached for now. I think it is a wonderful moment of understanding about the constant change and even the non-physical environments. Then they shape our consciousness and may even change our view of the world. That may have impact on the understanding like the cyberspace. On that particularly aspect, when we think we have made some fascinating realization in the western cultural context, it is useful at this point to reflect upon the Chinese tradition of ‘cyberspace’. It may seem strange to say that Chinese had ‘cyberspace’ 2000 years ago or even 5000 years ago. And you may be surprised because the emphasis on the physical built world in western tradition, something that is solid, you can touch, you can feel and you can lean on it, whereas in the Chinese architectural tradition that has not been very important at all. Even a long time ago, the Chinese understood that the only hope for immortality, lies not in stone and mortar, but in literature.
Let me give you an interesting example: recently I wrote a long essay to commemorate my old friend, Yi-Fu Tuan, who passed away in August in Wisconsin. Yi-Fu was someone I regard highly, mainly because he had this ability to describe architectural space and the way in which people are influenced upon in the first instance by perception. And there is some luck, touch, feel, smell could be magically elevated to understanding. His description of Gothic cathedral is a classic example. He described in English beautifully: say, in the 13th century, two people from different ranks of society walked into a Gothic cathedral. One would be impacted upon, overwhelmed by senses, by the smell of the burning candles, music from the organ, and the cold feeling of the moist sandstone, and, the warmth of the timber bench…and then, this heavenly light filtering through rose windows from above. The social hierarchy at this moment would be dissolved. Someone from the lowly class and someone from the aristocracy would be equal.
So that kind of magical transformation from senses to understanding would be very much contributed by this physical environment. But in Chinese consciousness and understanding, when you describe a beautiful bridge under moonlight, or when you describe a courtyard house, the size of house, the shape of it, the location of it, even the color of the scenes would be quite irrelevant. The power of literature, in my view, is as powerful as our cyberspace or virtual reality. So I could strike an argument to say it existed a long time ago. From this point of view, when you look at the change of aesthetics and tradition, it is no longer general to ask whether or not the so-called East or East-Asian cultures as represented by China, (not much Japan, as Japan does not share the Confucian tradition, it is a very different culture; it just happens to be in East Asia) and the West, whether or not we can have a dialogue, or whether or not this dichotomy is false. And I suggest we should look at whether or not the particular topic of conversation has become a problem for you. So if we look at the fascinating, again gross summary of Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy and western philosophy, by Liang Shuming, a great Chinese scholar in the earlier part of the 20th century, he said: the Indians realized the problems much too earlier, so they lived to die, and the Chinese wanted to prolong their life, but the western idea of life had been a progressive one. If you have not reached that point, the problem raised by the Indians is too early for you. So, whether or not we can hold a dialogue, I do not know…that depends on whether or not we share the same problem.
I think I just want to take up on ‘the end of tradition’. To me, I feel that the question is so rhetorical. But really, if you look at, pointed out about history, about whether it is linear or cyclical, whether it is Eastern or Western worldview, obviously, there is a lot in there. But in a way, tradition as we conceptualize it, run and live it. Whether tradition will end? I mean, if we continue to either live or conceptualize or invent or reconstruct, it will never end. So, in a way as we look at tradition as a second goal, that is something that will never end.
The other aspect that I was wondering is the translation of the title of the book, where you use ‘traditions’ in a plural form. But in Chinese, it is hard to translate plurality. Therefore, the translated title has no plurality in it. I feel that probably is something we need to consider. Right? In a sense that a lot of times when we talk about Chinese tradition, we are talking about this 5000 years of tradition, we are talking about the singularly constructed tradition, rather than multiplicity and plurality of traditions that we find in China or elsewhere. If you look at traditions in the plural way, then obviously you will go on and on, right? And we will have our IASTE conferences forever and ever.
The idea is that in many other languages, which I actually deal with in the introductory chapter, tradition is always plural. It does not exist as singular. That you say traditions cannot be plural in Chinese is very interesting. It is always a plural concept in most other languages and culture.
For me, Nezar’s book accompanied me throughout my career as a Ph.D. candidate, and it became an important tool for me to analyze my field research in Inner Mongolia. I even titled my thesis with the Chinese word ‘chuan tong/tradition’, and even the ‘real’ and ‘hyper’ in the subtitle. But my advisor gave me the opposite opinion. So I have this question for Prof. Ruan as well. You are conducting educational and practicing projects in both westerner and Chinese context. What do you think is the real context of ‘chuan tong’? When we talk about tradition, what we are really talking about?
They ask about why we put in the title ‘the Chinese context?’ What is the Chinese context? It also concerns with the linguistic context in the Chinese world. But the more important things are the customs, the habits, and the cultural context of the Chinese world, and how they see tradition. For me, the most valuable point from the book is to take a plural and dynamic view towards tradition. That relates to what the audience asked about the everyday tradition. That is very important and provocative as well for what is going on in China now. Actually, in the past 30 years, tradition was kind of put to the side in the prevalent agenda of urbanization, but in the recent years, it has been brought back to the central stage. Thus, the starting point of my bringing Nezar’s book to the Chinese context, is for both academics and practitioners to shift from overly emphasizing on the symbolized tradition, to constructing a more inclusive, shared, embodied tradition that is related to everyone, to everyday life.
I think on the one hand, it is, as I reiterated several times this afternoon, no problem for us to reach this realization to understand tradition as constantly changing and dynamic. And hence, it could be invented. I think even today, it's refreshing to see what the British have invented in their royal ceremonies.
But in my humble opinion, it is not enough to have this grand agreement. I think it is probably more useful to look into nuances. And the nuances are very different. So, let us return to a very fine Chinese tradition, or if you like the intellectual tradition, of “shu er bu zuo” (interpret rather than invent). Why did Confucius stick to it some 2500 years ago? Based on my two cents, my guess is that it is because of the very long tradition, Chinese history has become a big collection of both treasures and rubbish. But on the treasure side, you do have many choices. It is the obligation of some very smart people, instead of investing your limited lifetime to invent something new, it would be more beneficial to focus on these treasures, to interpret the fine qualities of them, so that their life can be prolonged.
That's why at the end of my introduction to your book, I have paraphrased Nan Huaijing’s advices when it comes to Chinese tradition. Generally speaking, there are three major streams. One is Confucianism, the other one is Taoism, and the third one is Buddhism. The advice from this very wise man is: Confucianism is a food store. You just have to go there every day. You need it for survival. Taoism is a drugstore, when you are sick, you go there to look for something. There was this wonderful Chinese writer in the early 20th century, Lin Yutan, who suggested that every successful Chinese is a Confucian, but when one becomes a failure in life, one becomes a Taoist. When you're sick, you go to a drugstore. For Buddhism, it is just an interesting department store. When you have leisure and money, you will visit it from time to time. So whether or not inventing the tradition is a big thing in China? Probably not, simply because making choices seems to be more important.
Finally. I think Professor Ruan Xing mentioned about translation being very difficult. So I always write in English because I cannot expressed in Chinese adequately even though I know Chinese well. But to me, it is important to understand both the value in translation and the value in the ‘traditions’ that you brought up. You are talking about how much this book will sell. I'm adding the value in the book and in that translation effort. It's really valuable to see, and to discuss different forces to offer for the Chinese audience to think about their own, to reflect on their own. And that is your value, rather than you're just putting something up out there. It's very difficult to translate the word ‘tradition’. So it is a way for us. I hope in your introduction you can relate to that, and then just see how difficult it is to translate what tradition is into Chinese. And in that sense, you can reflect on how we see tradition and how we see maybe translation.
Finally, I'm not concerned whether it's cyclical or linear as for me, this is an old argument. I always talk about histories. The books that I actually published are pure urban histories. And finally in answer to your question that you struggled with translating the ‘real’, the hyper and the virtual concepts of the book, I find this fascinating as the same happened when the book was translated into Arabic. They did not find the equivalents, not only to the main title. So in fact, maybe what we should do in the future is to have a conference about ‘the translation of tradition’.
This roundtable was held in IASTE 2022 Singapore at National University of Singapore.
The modified English version has been published in the conference journal: Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Volume 34, 2023(01): 63-76.