| | Luke, "keeping up with the Joneses" is an Americanism (see below).
It is impossible to typify a billion people. Moreover, China is old and unlike the West has a continuous history. We cannot read hieroglyphics or cuneiform, but their script is legible across the millennia. So, generalizations are as much projection and intention as fact.
Ban Zhao (circa 45-116 CE), was a woman who wrote "Admonitions for Women." Mothers were told to sleep their baby girls at the foot of the bed, not in it, and to give them only a broken piece of clay for a toy, all to teach them how lowly they were. Sounds bad. But the same essay tells the woman to make a copy of this and give it to her daughter for when she is a mother. That means that the women were literate and expected literacy. Fifteen hundred years later, during the Late Ming, instructions for family life told women not to be always nagging their husbands and to be supportive of his new plans. Clearly,there was a lot of nagging going on and men were making plans. It is complicated. (By the same standards, judging from the sermons of Cotton Mather, it is easy to think that Puritans were dour people dressed in black. But if that were true, why all the sermons?)
Also, we need to keep in mind how singular our ideas of individualism are in the scope of things. The Chinese are no more collectivist than the Greeks. Traditionally, all societies were "high context" -- defined by your relationship with other people. What, after, all was the point of Aristotle's Politics? It was not to guarantee an individual's right to be different.
In Rome, the Censors looked into people's houses to see if they had too many luxuries. That was considered the enforcement of republican virtues. In Plutarch's biography (written in the imperial era) Cato the Censor was praised for working naked in the fields alongside his slaves.
We can find the tendrils and taproots of individualism here and there, but something unique and wonderful happened in the Renaissance. I have a standard reference book on art medals. Medals were invented in the Renaissance. The book is called The Currency of Fame. People used the format of money made large, overlarge, to carry their own portraits and inscriptions, not as cash for the marketplace, but as gifts of themselves to friends. To tout your own achievements is still considered impolite. We have a lot of "Chinese" ideas in our culture.
Mike M.
www.washtenawjustice.com
http:///necessaryfacts.blogspot.com
KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES The phrase was popularized when a comic strip of the same name was created by cartoonist Arthur R. "Pop" Momand. The strip debuted in 1916 in the New York World. The strip ran in American newspapers for 28 years, and was eventually adapted into books, films, and musical comedies. The "Joneses" of the title were neighbors of the strip's main characters, and were spoken of but never actually seen in person. An alternative explanation is that the Jones's of the saying refer to Edith Wharton's father's wealthy family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 1/12, 10:28am)
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