Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…

Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)

One of the objects of a comparative history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form.

A recent publication was the starting point of this discussion, whose purpose is to demonstrate the interest of a comparative history of the philological traditions of diverse cultures.

‘It is not possible to settle on a method of classifying manuscripts in the abstract; the lost works whose content is being reconstructed can be dated more or less precisely and the classification only acquires significance if it is accompanied by the history of the text. Then many apparent anomalies of tradition automatically disappear […]. In several of his articles Paul Maas has helped to clarify the notion of Byzantine conjecture; it would have been nice if he had placed greater emphasis in his summary on the importance of a critical history.’

Compared with the Greek and Latin fields, the systematic study of the concept of textual criticism in classical India has made little progress, despite the quality of work produced by specialists. And yet research of this nature would probably lead, paradoxically, to a clearer formulation of the aims and methods of modern critical editions of Indian texts.

The way human history has been perceived through the ages - by historians, theologians, philosophers, and ordinary mortals - is itself a topic for a historical study. Our attempt will be more modest, as we shall try to analyse some prominent examples of such perception. Our approach will be illuminated by the notions of the transient and the absolute, as they are attributed, in various ways, to the historical manifestations by historiographers and historiosophers.

‘What is important is to understand that every fact is already a theory. The blue of the sky already demonstrates the fundamental laws of chromatics. We should not look for anything behind these phenomena; they themselves are the theory’ Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, n. 575

Because of the density of the aphorism, the quotation above implies more than the words seem to say explicitly. It refers to an apprehension of reality in a poetic and conceptual mode, a vision of the world and humanity opposed to the mechanistic one that emerged from eighteenth century rationalism. Indeed Goethe is a milestone in the history of the themes inherited from ancient traditions and the Renaissance that have in common the project of integrating ‘the science of humankind, the science of nature and a study of the destiny of humanity through the adventure of existence’.

Scanning the corpus and repertoire of anthropological science, insofar as we wish and are able to, we note that ethnological observations and studies on theatre are not lacking, but that they seem to have been isolated opportunities for investigation that have never grown into a research tradition.

Dear readers, perhaps you have not realized it, but your lives so far have been spent in a period called ‘postmodern’.

The word is well-known to you. It has been around for many years. It almost always occurs unexpectedly, half way through an article, in the middle of a conversation, in the course of an argument on radio or television. Something, when all is said and done, is postmodern, someone is what he or she is because he or she is postmodern; a strange and inexplicable phenomenon can be explained as postmodern. This changeable, suggestive, authoritative term, which seems to allude to something precise and technical and which, at the same time, suggests the epoch-making, says all that is good and all that is bad of something. Postmodern is an accusation. Postmodern is praise. What is postmodern is degenerate, has got worse, is hardly serious, of low quality, a poor imitation, irresponsible, frivolous. Nevertheless, what is postmodern is also still more topical, even more modern, forward-looking, amusing and light, cultured without being boring, sophisticated without being elitist, complex without being obscure.