An Archaeology of Gesture. Western Manuals of Chinese Etiquette at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This paper draws on a corpus of Western handbooks of Chinese etiquette published in China at the turn of the twentieth century, mainly in Protestant missions, but also in Catholic missions and diplomatic networks. Using this corpus, it discusses the status of the gestures these texts describe and analyse. This is achieved by articulating the centuries-long history of the ritualization of the body in China, the history of Western perceptions of Chinese etiquette from the eighteenth century onwards, and the practical issues which prompted missionary societies and diplomatic services to impose the learning of Chinese etiquette on the agents they dispatched to China throughout the nineteenth century. In doing so, this paper sheds light on the threefold logic that underlies the sequencing of the gestures described within these handbooks. This sequencing is shaped by the importance the gestures of etiquette assumed within the Chinese ritualistic literature, by the Western belief that Chinese populations, subjected to a tyrannical etiquette, consciously performed the slightest gesture, and by the painstaking self-fashioning undertaken by missionaries and diplomats in nineteenth century China. Beyond the Chinese context, this paper contributes to the history of gestures by reflecting on what conclusions can actually be drawn from the sources on which this history is based.