Curb your sinocentrism

 

I recently received an email from Steam advising me that their Lunar New Year sale had begun. I immediately tonsured my hair and started yelling at these damn kids and their new terms. I’d always grown up calling this holiday Steam is referring to here as the Chinese New Year, since it is, uh, the start of the new year in the Chinese calendar.

Now, I suppose that somewhere along the line, someone came along and said “Well what about all the cultures who celebrate this New Year but aren’t China or Chinese overseas communities? Wouldn’t it be better to call this the Lunar New Year to help include them?”

To this I say, fair enough.

But also.

What about all the cultures that have totally different lunar new years? What about Rosh Hashanah and Losar, and the Islamic New Year, or the Gujarati New Year, or the Zulu New Year, and undoubtedly many other cultures with a lunar calendar? Are these new years not lunar new years? Is the Chinese (and yes those other cultures all of which use the Chinese calendar, or a version of it) lunar calendar the determinative lunar calendar that says which of these lunar new years is the Lunar New Year? I can’t help but feel that people trying to make this change are both trying to avoid sinocentrism, but also reinforcing sinocentrism. At least the old term made clear that the term was actually the product of the Chinese lunar calendar, which some other countries also follow.

Is there a good solution to this dilemma? To be honest, probably not. If we try to go the Rosh Hashana route, and use the endogenous language, we’d again only be able to choose one name, which would favour one culture over the others. South East Asian New Year is cumbersome, unlikely to catch on, and also would lump in a bunch of countries that don’t actually celebrate the Chinese New Year. Maybe we could just make up a new meaningless name for the holiday? Again though, I think it’s pretty unlikely this would catch on.

At the end of the day, I think most people are just going to have to bite the bullet and choose their flavour of sinocentrism.