The Social Construction of the Realm of the Discipline: Polish Sinology

This work picks up the long standing debate on the meaning of sinology, and particularly one of the latest contributions by "The Epistemology of China Studies: Oral History Project" hosted by the Research and Educational Center for Mainland China and Cross-Strait Relation at the National Taiwan University (NTU). It takes as a springboard the theoretical assumption about the floating meaning of sinology, which can never be fixed due to the shifting nature of disciplinary boundaries in the manner in which all knowledge is relative. It looks at the example the sinology department at the University of Warsaw (UW) and asks what counts as a discipline-specific knowledge according to the Polish academia. In order to answer this question it analyses the rhetorical work involved in the defining sinologists and defending the discipline in the selected works and interviews with the Polish scholars working on China. It comments on the phenomenon of creating disciplinary labels, the role of the external pressure on the knowledge production and the ways in which this pressure is mediated and assimilated by the staff of the sinology department at the UW.