The Craft of Oblivion：Forgetting and Memory in Ancient China

Editor:
Albert Galvany

Publication date:
July 2023

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Abstract:
The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Albert Galvany

PART I. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL NARRATIVES

1. Cultural Amnesia and Commentarial Retrofitting: Interpreting the Spring and Autumn
Newell Ann Van Auken

2. Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recently Unearthed Historiographical Manuscripts
Rens Krijgsman

3. Shaping the Historian’s Project: Language of Forgetting and Obliteration in the Shiji
Esther Sunkyung Klein

4. The Ice of Memory and the Fires of Forgetfulness: Traumatic Recollections in the Wu Yue Chunqiu
Olivia Milburn

PART II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS

5. The Daode jing’s Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral Cult
K. E. Brashier

6. So Comfortable You’ll Forget You’re Wearing Them: Attention and Forgetting in the Zhuangzi and Huainanzi
Franklin Perkins

7. The Practice of Erasing Traces in the Huainanzi
Tobias Benedikt Zürn

8. The Oblivious against the Doctor: Pathologies of Remembering and Virtues of Forgetting in the Liezi
Albert Galvany

9. Wang Bi and the Hermeneutics of Actualization
Mercedes Valmisa

PART III. RITUAL AND LITERARY TEXTS

10. Embodied Memory and Natural Forgetting in Early Chinese Ritual Theory
Paul Nicholas Vogt

11. Exile and Return: Oblivion, Memory, and Nontragic Death in Tomb-Quelling Texts from the Eastern Han Dynasty
Xiang Li

12. Lost in Where We Are: Tao Yuanming on the Joys of Forgetting and the Worries of Being Forgotten
Michael D. K. Ing

[Dissertation] The Politics of Ecological Memory: Changes in Human-Animal Relationships from the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in the Middle Huai River Valley, Anhui Province, China

Author: 

Ko, Wing Tung Jada

School: 

Harvard University

Year: 

2022

Abstract:

In the world we currently live in, we hear about the loss of a slice of biodiversity almost every day. Meanwhile, stories about the repopulation and even overpopulation of some species make us question why certain living organisms are more susceptible to extinction than the others. While not a single explanation or narrative characterizes the disappearance of an infinite array of life forms, as a zooarchaeologist whose work involves bringing back to our living memories animals that no longer exist or no longer exist in their archaic forms, I cannot help but wonder if the survival of a species has anything to do with how it is conceptualized and remembered by human societies. 

My dissertation dissects the meanings, implications, and workings of what I have coined the Politics of Ecological Memory to address this concern. The term deals with the intersections between power dynamics, social memory, and human-animal relationships. It highlights the correlations between the political means by which certain animals are (to be) remembered, the survival of these animals, and the socio-cultural developments and survival of human societies. I argue that the Politics of Ecological Memory is a ubiquitous process in societies at different socio-political scales in both the present and the past, and bring together zooarchaeological analyses with historical and ethnographic research to reconstruct the longue durée of human interactions with animals and the environments within which they live, with a focus in the geo-political boundaries defining China today. 

The central focus of empirical discussions concerns archaeofaunal datasets from three archaeological sites namely Xiaosungang (5200-4800 B.C.), Nanchengzi (3100-1450 B.C.), and Taijiasi (1400-1250 B.C.) located in the middle reaches of the Huai River in Anhui Province. Using these data, I reconstruct the processes by which animals were transformed from inherent members of the biosphere to mnemonic devices that served the needs to construct and sustain different forms of power relations among and between societies. Through these processes, many animals were extracted and anthropogenically reproduced to maintain stable sources of social power. Rather than a linear narrative about how animals are remembered and serve similar political functions, I demonstrate through zooachaeological and historical evidence that the political significance of animals is constantly invented and re-invented, and can even be completely forgotten as human and animal niches overlap. I conclude the dissertation by providing the example of the changing roles various species of freshwater turtles played in China through time to point out how, despite changes in political agendas since prehistory in relation to which these animals were attributed with changing social values, these changes can have lingering effects on the survival of the animals in the long-run. 

This dissertation is an attempt to not only begin a conversation questioning how social memory and politics affect the integrity of the biosphere from the perspective of zooarchaeology, but also provide answers to the question “what it means to lose a species?” particularly in the world we live in today.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction: Embracing my Inner Biophilia

Chapter 2 The Becoming of a Political Animal

Chapter 3 Visualizing the Anhui Middle Huai River Valley (AMHRV)

Chapter 4 The Beginning of a Political Relationship with the Biosphere in the AMHRV:

Zooarchaeological Analysis of Xiaosungang (5200-4600 B.C.)

Chapter 5 Growing Interactions Beyond the AMHRV: Zooarchaeological Analysis of

Nanchengzi (3100-1450 B.C.)

Chapter 6 Animals as Local Sources of State Power: Zooarchaeological Analysis of Taijiasi

(1400-1250 B.C.)

Chapter 7 Pathways to the Politics of Ecological Memory in the AMHRV

Chapter 8 Turtles and their Changing Roles in the AMHRV and Beyond

Chapter 10 Conclusions: Stepping Back into Nature

Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community

Editors: 
Wendy Swartz and Robert F. Campany

Publisher:
Brill

Publication Date:
June 2018

Abstract:

Memory is not an inert container but a dynamic process. It can be structured by ritual, constrained by textual genre, and shaped by communities’ expectations and reception. Urging a particular view of the past on readers is a complex rhetorical act. The collective reception of portrayals of the past often carries weighty implications for the present and future. The essays collected in this volume investigate various aspects of memory in medieval China (ca. 100-900 CE) as performed in various genres of writing, from poetry to anecdotes, from history to tomb epitaphs. They illuminate ways in which the memory of individual persons, events, dynasties, and literary styles was constructed and revised through processes of writing and reading.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Robert Ford Campany and Wendy Swartz

1 Artful Remembrance: Reading, Writing, and Reconstructing the Fallen State in Lu Ji’s 陸機 “Bian wang” 辨亡
Meow Hui Goh

2 Intertextuality and Cultural Memory in Early Medieval China: Jiang Yan’s Imitations of Nearly Lost and Lost Writers
Wendy Swartz

3 On Mourning and Sincerity in the Li ji and the Shishuo xinyu
Jack W. Chen

4 “Making Friends with the Men of the Past”: Literati Identity and Literary Remembering in Early Medieval China
Ping Wang

5 Yu Xin’s “Memory Palace”: Writing Trauma and Violence in Early Medieval Chinese Aulic Poetry
Xiaofei Tian

6 Structured Gaps: The Qianzi wen 千字文 and Its Paratexts as Mnemotechnics
Christopher M.B. Nugent

7 Genre and the Construction of Memory: A Case Study of Quan Deyu’s 權德輿 (759-818) Funerary Writings for Zhang Jian 張薦 (744–804)
Alexei Ditter

8 Figments of Memory: “Xu Yunfeng” and the Invention of a Historical Moment
Sarah M. Allen

9 The Mastering Voice: Text and Aurality in the Ninth-century Mediascape
Robert Ashmore

The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China: From the Bronze Age to the Han Empire

Author:
Alice Yao

Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Publication Year:
2016

Abstract:

Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms. Their distinctive material tradition--intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell containers--have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule however, imperial conquest under the Han state reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation.

Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. Alice Yao grounds an archaeological account of the region where local landscape histories and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and of kingly genealogies. In particular, this book illustrates how buried precious material objects--drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries--enabled the transmission and memorialization of biographies and lineage wealth across successive generations. A provocative picture emerges of imperial absorption and change as a problem entangling the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles and the penetration of Chinese dynastic history as well as time of bureaucracy and state economy. Yao extends conventional approaches to empires to show how prehistoric forms of temporal experience can complicate imperial efforts to incorporate and unify time.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I. De-centering a historicity of the periphery

1. History regained in prehistory
2. Death and funerary ritual: where multiple time frames converge

Part II. Bronze Age histories

3. Time and place in the early Bronze Age
4. Bronze kettledrums and iconic halberds: the political symbols of an emerging regional tradition (650-500BC)
5. A southwest political time (500-250BC)

Part III. Native subjects and Han rule

6. A divided and entangled imperial frontier
7. The d(eb)atability of the past: the past in the imperial present

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
  •