The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China

Author:
Michelle H. Wang

Publication date:
November 23, 2023

Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract:
This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of maps in China, centering on those found in three tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and constitute the entire known corpus of early Chinese maps (ditu). More than a millennium separates them from the next available map in the early twelfth century CE. Unlike extant studies that draw heavily from the history of cartography, this book offers an alternative perspective by mobilizing methods from art history, archaeology, material culture, religion, and philosophy. It examines the diversity of forms and functions in early Chinese ditu to argue that these pictures did not simply represent natural topography and built environments, but rather made and remade worlds for the living and the dead. Wang explores the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China.

Les Man du Fleuve Bleu : La fabrique d’un peuple dans la Chine impériale

Author: 

Alexis Lycas

Publication year: 

12 mai 2023

Publisher: 

Anacharsis

Abstract:
De la dynastie des Han (206 av. J.-C.) à la fin des Tang (907 apr. J.-C.), il a existé en Chine, sur le cours moyen du fleuve Bleu, une population insoumise qui n’a laissé nulle trace et dont on ignore à peu près tout. Ces mystérieux Man ont pourtant défié l’empire, l’ont parfois soutenu, se sont trouvés tantôt hors et dans les limites de la puissance chinoise.

Alexis Lycas se livre ici à une enquête fascinante sur les écrits des chroniqueurs, poètes, administrateurs ou militaires qui ont tenté un millénaire durant d’appréhender et définir ces populations rétives. À travers les circonvolutions de ces documents de diverses natures se déploie une « rhétorique de l’altérité » rapportant l’histoire d’une colonisation étirée sur plusieurs siècles, en même temps que se laisse deviner comment le pouvoir central a fabriqué un peuple pour mieux le dominer.

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

Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of Empire in East Asia

Author: 

Scott Pearce

Publisher: 

Oxford University Press

Publication year: 

August, 2023

Abstract:
Emerging from collapse of the Han empire, the founders of Northern Wei had come south from the grasslands of Inner Asia to conquer the rich farmlands of the Yellow River plains. Northern Wei was, in fact, the first of the so-called "conquest dynasties" complex states seen repeatedly in East Asian history in which Inner Asian peoples ruled parts of the Chinese world.

An innovative contribution to East Asian and Chinese history of the medieval period, Northern Wei (386-534) combines received historical text and archaeological findings to examine the complex interactions between these originally distinct populations, and the way those interactions changed over time. Scott Pearce analyses traditions borrowed and adapted from the long-gone Han dynasty including government and taxation as well as the new cultural elements such as the use of armor for man and horse in the cavalry and the newly-invented stirrup. Further, this book discusses the fundamental change in the dynastic family, as empresses began to play an increasingly important role in the business of government. Though Northern Wei fell in the early sixth century, the nature of the state was thus fundamentally changed, in the Chinese world and East Asia as a whole; it had laid down a foundation from which a century later would emerge the world empire of Tang.

Table of Contents:

Prologue: Defining Our Arenas

Section I: On Sources
Chapter 1: The Emperor Taiwu and the Creation of History
Chapter 2: History Writing and Its Discontents

Section II: Origins
Chapter 3: Growth from out Decay
Chapter 4: Myths of Origin

Section III: A Dynasty Takes Shape
Chapter 5: The Interloper
Chapter 6: Establishing a State

Section IV: Creating an Empire
Chapter 7: The Way of War
Chapter 8: The World Shegui Entered
Chapter 9: The World Shegui Created
Chapter 10: Troubling Innovation

Section V: Pingcheng as Center of a World
Chapter 11: The Wei Army
Chapter 12: The Wolf Lord
Chapter 13: Hunting and Gathering in the Land of Dai

Section VI: End Games
Chapter 14: A Transitional Age
Chapter 15: The Two Buddhas
Chapter 16: To Luoyang
Chapter 17: Downfall of the Theater State

Summing Up; Looking Ahead

[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

Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE

Author:
Robert Ford Campany

Publication Date: 
04/18/2023

Publisher:
Harvard University Asia Center

Abstract:
Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?
In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Approaching Dreaming and Self-Cultivation
1. Purifying
2. Diagnosing
3. Spilling Over
4. Not Dreaming, Waking Up, and Not Minding the Difference
Epilogue: Fish Traps and Rabbit Snares
Appendix A: Dream Signs in Explication of Dreams for Bodhisattvas
Appendix B: Comparing Versions of the Chapter on Diagnostic Dreams in Perfection of Wisdom Texts
Appendix C: Incubatory Spells in Three Dongshen Registers of Red Writs of the Most High