Public Memory in Early China 早期中國的公眾記憶

Author:

Kenneth E. Brashier

Publisher:

Harvard University Press

Publication Year:

2014

Abstract:

In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity—name, age, and kinship—as ways of negotiating a person’s relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.

Table of Contents:

List of Tables and Figures*
Conventions
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Han memorial culture
1. “Repeated Inking” and the backdrop of a manuscript culture
2. “Continuous Chanting” and the backdrop of an oral culture
3. Inking and Chanting share their secret of longevity

I. Names as positioning the self
4. The ancestor’s given names as locative markers
5. The ancestor’s surname as a spatial marker
6. Following the named lineage back through time

II. Age as positioning the self
7. The age of childhood
8. The age of adulthood
9. The age of advanced years
10. The age of afterlife

III. Kinship as positioning the self
12. Weakening personal agency
13. Strengthening interpersonal bonds
14. A dynamic relationship net

IV. The tangible tools of positioning the self
15. Calling cards and the trafficking of names
16. The ancestral shrine and its tools of remembrance
17. The cemetary and its tools of remembrance
18. Commemorative portraiture as a tool of remembrance

V. The intangible tools of positioning the self
19. Reduction
20. Conversion
21. Association

Conclusion: “Here is where the Earl of Shao rested”

Notes
Bibliography

* Tables and Figures

• Tables
  
  • 1. A sample of male and female personal names from the Zoumalou records
  • 2. The bounties of seniority, by age and administrative grade
  • 3. The decreasing frequency of sacrifices
• Figures
  
  • 1. The stele of Jing Yun, magistrate of Quren, erected 173 CE, from Yunyang County, Sichuan
  • 2. Eastern Han relief of students bearing books, from Ducheng, Shandong
  • 3. Eastern Han inscription urging descendants of a thrice venerable to continue observing his name taboo, from Zhejiang Province
  • 4. Jörg Breu’s “Steps of life”
  • 5. A woman’s version of “The different stages of life”
  • 6. Simple summary of the lifeline, as envisioned in the postmedieval West
  • 7. The stele of Xianyu Huang, erected 165 CE, from Tianjin Municipal Region
  • 8. Simple summary of the life line, as envisioned in early imperial China
  • 9. The First Emperor of Qin fails to dredge up the royal tripods, in a late Eastern Han stone relief from Tengzhou, Shandong
  • 10. An Eastern Han cemetary at Yanshi, Henan
  • 11. The Kong Zhou stele, erected 164 CE, from Qufu, Shandong
  • 12. A common mid-Han labeling tag, dated 12 BCE, from Eji-na, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region
  • 13. The birchleaf pear beside an homage-receiving lord, from an Eastern Han tomb at Jiaxiang, Shandong
  •