Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth into a lineage of New England clergy - seven generations stretching back to the Puritan migration - has long offered food for thought to biographers and historians. To his earliest interpreters, genealogy itself had explanatory value: James Elliot Cabot could claim that Emerson received from his father “the blood of several lines of 'painful preachers.'”Recent scholars have returned to the family not as a blood influence so much as a cultural, psychological, and textual field around Emerson's written work. Most important, his writing itself includes a scrutiny of family heritage. As Emerson commented in 1841, after eight pages of journalizing on his aunt, brothers, and ancestry, “I doubt if the interior & spiritual history of New England could be truelier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of M.[ary] M.[oody] E.[merson] & the boys, mainly Charles” (JMN 7: 446). The memoir that he proposes here never took full shape, but occasional addresses before and after 1841 drew from the well of family memory, as even more deeply did the ongoing, six-decade record of thought in his journal.

Liberation theology - an umbrella term embracing a number of particular movements, including African, black, feminist, and womanist theologies - is self-consciously contextual. While having certain characteristics in common, specific liberation theologies need to be understood in terms of their particular contexts. In this chapter attention is first given to the broad and inclusive tenets of Latin American liberation theology. The second part explores some of the challenges facing liberation theologians in the wider context defined by the post-cold war period; in particular, the situation of the poor in the changing contexts of debate. Specific attention is given to the changing South African context within which the present writer is located.

There is, of course, no one prevailing context in any particular Latin American country or in South Africa. Divisions of class, race, gender and choice continue to ferment the liberation theology debate, and each of these is, in turn, profoundly affected by the changes that have taken place in different regional contexts since the 1960s. The Medellín and Puebla conferences of 1968 and 1979 gave formative expression to Latin American liberation theology, which formed part of the revolutionary milieu that swept South and Central America during this time. In Europe 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring. In North America the 1960s were the time of the Black Power movement. In South Africa, Black theology and liberation theology were born in the late 1960s, reaching their highwater mark with the publication of the Kairos Document in 1985, while Black theology regained a sense of prominence in the debate at more or less the same time. The divide between the forces of resistance and liberation, throughout this period, was crisp, clear and relatively uncomplicated.

The northern frontier of China has long been recognized as something more than a simple line separating natural zones, political entities, or ethnic groups. This frontier has been represented as the birthplace of independent cultures and the habitat of peoples whose lifestyle, economic activities, social customs, and religious beliefs became, from the Bronze Age onward, gradually but increasingly distant from the civilization of the Central Plain. This distinct cultural region, often called the “Northern Zone” of China, comprises the interlocking desert, steppe, and forest regions from Heilong jiang and Jilin in the east to Xinjiang in the west. The frontier between China and the north has also been envisaged as a bundle of routes and avenues of communications through which peoples, ideas, goods, and faiths flowed incessantly between West and East. In economic terms, it provided the Chinese with a source of foreign goods as well as a market for domestic production.

The process by which the northern frontier acquired these qualifications was a long one. While its complexities cannot be captured in a single image, the Great Wall – this symbolic and material line that came into existence as a unified system of fortifications with the establishment of the Qin empire in 221 B.C. – can be seen as the culmination of a long process of cultural differentiation that embraces several aspects.

In their general introduction to the first volume of the Cambridge History of China (The Ch’in and Han Empires), John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett, general editors of the series, explained why, when they were planning the series in the 1960s, they had felt obliged to start their coverage with the first empires, omitting earlier developments. After noting the transformation brought about by archaeological discoveries, they wrote:

However, by the time that first volume was published (1986), some twenty years after Fairbank and Twitchett had initiated the Cambridge History of China project, the “flood of new information” that they mentioned had already revitalized the study of ancient China. A large number of scholars, both in East Asia and in the West, had been drawn to consider the new archaeological evidence and, in its light, to reconsider China’s traditional written record and many of the historiographical assumptions based there on. In the light of these developments in the field, and with the active encouragement of Denis Twitchett, Cambridge University Press determined to repair the omission, the result being the present Cambridge History of Ancient China.

Readers of this book may wonder whether its subject-matter is merely a phase of modern political theology at a time when a critical Marxism, unfettered by the rigidities of its Eastern European manifestations, pervaded the social teaching of late twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, only to be snuffed out by a determined reaction from a more traditionalist papacy. That would be a superficial assessment. We are dealing with a movement whose high point as the topic of discussion on the agenda at every theological conference may now have passed, but whose influence, in a multitude of ways, direct and indirect, is as strong as ever. The issues which concern liberation theologians today are more inclusive and extend to questions of race, gender, popular religion, and, more recently, the environment, and have taken root in other situations and religions apart from Christianity. So when the leaders of Roman Catholicism can proclaim that liberation theology is dead, sentiments echoed by some who hitherto have been exponents of liberation theology, they miss the enormous impact that this way of setting about the theological task continues to have in many parts of the world, not least in the citadels of Catholicism itself: 'the fundamental tenets of liberation theology had - almost surreptitiously - been broadly accepted in many parts of the Catholic church'. So, having flourished in the Third World many of the fundamental tenets of liberation theology are firmly established in the First World, sometimes in institutions of higher education, more often in the life of the Church at the grassroots, in popular education and among groups working for justice and peace. In thinking of it as a mere epiphenomenon of the radical social movements of the sixties and seventies, we miss the extent of its impact.

Medellín and the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council

It was from a situation of dependence on Europe that liberation theologians sought to free themselves. In so doing, they could call upon original tradition worth reviving. But the awareness of the tradition grew slowly. In 1968, the conventional date for the start of 'liberation theology' in the modern sense, the stress fell on what was new. The Latin American bishops, meeting at Medellín, made the crucial move. How was the Christian doctrine of 'salvation' to be presented in terms that would be intelligible to the suffering peoples of Latin America? 'Salvation' always implies a metaphor, whether of restoration to health after sickness or 'redemption' from slavery. The Latin American bishops decided that the best translation of 'salvation' for their oppressed peoples was liberation. To be meaningful, however, they would have to stand with their oppressed peoples. The phrase 'option for the poor', first used in a letter from Pedro Arrupe to the Jesuits of Latin America in May 1968, expressed this truth.

‘Liberation theology’ came into being to expand on and explain these two insights. Its originality consisted in the fact that it was not just a theology about liberation, as the theology of ‘grace’ was about grace. It was for liberation, promoting and propagating it. Likewise, it was not just a theology about the poor, it was theology for the poor. So it would be an active practical theology intended to make a difference in the real world: the Marxist concept of praxis indicated that. The stress of liberation theology lay as much on orthopraxis (right action) as on orthodoxy (right thinking). But despite these claims to practical effects, liberation theology could only qualify as serious theo-logos, discourse about God, if it spoke relevantly of God.

Feminist theology is a global theology, or rather, a family of contextual theologies committed to the struggle for justice for women and the transformation of society. It is therefore a critical theology of liberation engaged in the reconstruction of theology and religion in the service of this transformation process, in the specificity of the many contexts in which women live. Whereas in European and North American contexts the term 'feminist theology' is most frequently accepted, in other parts of the globe, in order to heighten visibility, recognise identity and respect the diversity of experiences and goals, the different theologies of Asian, African and Latin American women have acquired their own distinctiveness, together with Womanist theology (the theology of the United States black American women and women of colour), and Mujerista theology (the liberation theology of Hispanic women). Increasingly emergent is the spirituality of, for example, indigenous American Indian women and indigenous Indian women in Latin America, as well as of aboriginal women in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

If there is a commonality of purpose in all this diversity, it is the liberation of humankind together with all sentient life. The words of the American poet Adrienne Rich are widely inspirational:

May Day in 1983 will always remain indelibly etched on my memory. It was my first Saturday in Brazil, in the middle of a period of military dictatorship in that country, and I was taken to visit some theologians working with base ecclesial communities in São Paulo. I recall entering a large building which served as a community centre for one of the shanty towns on the periphery of this enormous city. Inside there were about forty men and women listening to a woman expound the first chapter of the book of Revelation. She was standing at a table at which were sitting two men. Her lecture was constantly interrupted by her audience sharing their experience of situations parallel with that of John on Patmos: witness, endurance, and tribulation. One man who had been active in trade unions spoke with me after the meeting describing the way in which the book of Revelation spoke to his situation: he had been imprisoned without trial, and a Church which had seemed so irrelevant and remote had become a shelter and inspiration for his life. There was an atmosphere of utter comprehension of, and accord with, John's situation, as trade union activists, catechists and human rights workers shared their experiences of persecution and harassment as a result of their work with the poor and marginalised. They found in John a kindred spirit as they sought to understand and build up their communities in the face of the contemporary beast of poverty and oppression. It was readily apparent as I listened to their eager attempts to relate Revelation to their situation that they had discovered a text which spoke to them because they had not been desensitised by an ordered and respectable life of accommodation and assimilation. The woman and one of the men at the front of the meeting were teachers at the local seminary and the other man the local Roman Catholic bishop. They had been conducting a regular training day for representatives from the hundreds of base ecclesial communities who had gathered for training in Scripture and its interpretation.

No one needs to be persuaded that language plays a fundamental part in any society’s everyday activities and constitutes one of the most durable fibers in the tapestry of human history. Indeed, language is a defining feature of our species. The present chapter describes the structure, history, and setting of the Chinese language, as well as the first appearance and subsequent development of its script, over the millennium from 1200 B.C., the time of the earliest known written record of Chinese, down to the beginning of the imperial era, ca. 200 B.C. While this is primarily a linguistically slanted presentation, it is important to remain aware of the extent to which language history is intertwined with fundamental issues of cultural history in general. The historian may see in language history a rich record of the lives of real people played out in a real world setting and may find clues even to a people’s prehistory. These kinds of broad historical considerations depend on the narrower work of the linguist.

For the linguist, language history is the sum of a painstakingly assembled collection of internal analyses of speech forms and phonetic formulas. The historical linguist is concerned with the evolution of sounds, words, and structures of language, and with linguistic affinities per se. The fact that the linguist’s work is accomplished with little reference to the associated nonlinguistic culture enables the linguist to make an especially valuable contribution to the overall historical study of a people by providing a body of evidence largely independent of the historian’s other sources.

This chapter attempts to identify some of the institutions that were devised and the advances that were achieved principally in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods and with out which no idea of a united empire could have been implemented. In some instances it may be seen how an experiment in administrative or economic practice that was carried out with in the confines of a particular region could later be adopted or adapted to suit the needs of a mighty empire. But it is in no way suggested here that those who initiated such steps so as to control a people or organize its labors saw them as instruments devised to lead toward such a unification.

While the unification of Qin and Han should be seen as a definite break and reaction against the practices of the past, it would be erroneous to judge it as a sudden and immediately effective change. For some time, earlier methods of statecraft and the lessons of the past continued to exert their influence, affected as they had been by the ambitions that many had entertained to exercise power and their struggles to do so in the face of the antagonism of their rivals. Alliances could be formed or abandoned with scant attention to personal integrity; loyalties could shift from master to master as circumstance might require. Only rarely were kings or their senior advisers brought face to face with moral aspects of their behavior. Ideas of what had come to be regarded as the normal policies of princes persisted into imperial times; they may well have accounted for the suspicions that some of the emperors entertained of their immediate followers and supporters, seeing them as potentially disloyal rebels.

In 1984 the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published an Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology of Liberation', known from the first two words of its Latin text as Libertatis Nuntius. The intention of this document was, it says, 'limited and precise', which was

The issue, then, was Marxism, or the use of it within some versions of liberation theology. The document is careful to point out that it offers no general criticism of liberation theology as such, at any rate insofar as liberation theology is defined by its response to the 'preferential option for the poor'; nor, it adds, should its criticisms of liberation theology on the score of its Marxism 'serve as an excuse for those who maintain an attitude of neutrality and indifference in the face of the tragic and pressing problems of human misery and injustice'. The Apostolic See, it goes on, has a good record of denunciation, for it 'has not ceased to denounce the scandal involved in the gigantic arms race', nor does it any longer tolerate 'the shocking inequality between rich and poor' the injuries of which to the poor, it notes, are aggravated by 'the memory of crimes of a certain type of colonialism'.

Introduction

Economics - in the general sense of the critical study of production, distribution and consumption of wealth in human society - is a central theme of liberation theology. Although liberation theologians do not address the technical questions that constitute modern economic theory, they are concerned with the broader issues of the way in which economic organisation relates to the historical experience of humanity in general and to the 'infinite value' of the poor to God in particular. These issues of economic organisation and social justice are similar to the agenda of European political economy until the end of the last century, and still central to debates on sustainable development strategies in poor countries. But a concern for life itself as the criterion for judging economic institutions can be considered to be a specific contribution from liberation theology. Further, this theology is probably unique in being located within the broader context of debates in poor countries on the origins of underdevelopment and the condition of poverty - mainly but not exclusively in Latin America - which themselves have a major economic dimension. In consequence, the 'economics of liberation theology' has had a considerable impact beyond church structures, ranging from grassroots social movements throughout the developing world to influential non-governmental organisations in industrialised countries.