Death Rituals And Politics In Northern Song China

Author : Mihwa Choi
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-03
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190459789

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Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China by Mihwa Choi Pdf

In traditional China, a funeral and the accompanying death rituals represented a critical moment for the immediate family of the deceased to show their filial piety, a core value of the society. At the same time, death rituals were social occasions, and channels for the outward demonstration of belief in a religiously pluralistic society. During the Northern Song period, however, death rituals increasingly became an arena for political contention as attempts were made to transform these practices from a private matter into one subject to state control. Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China examines how political confrontations over the proper conduct of death rituals during Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) inaugurated a period of Confucian revivalism. Mihwa Choi interprets Northern Song court politics, family ritual practices, burial practices, and the popular imagination of the afterlife as sites of contest between groups of varying social status, political vision, and religious belief. She demonstrates that the oversight of ritual affairs by scholar-officials helped them gain the political upper hand they sought, and, more broadly, fostered a revival of Confucianism as the dominant value system of Chinese society in the period that followed.

Author : James L. Watson,Evelyn S. Rawski
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN : 0520071298

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Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China by James L. Watson,Evelyn S. Rawski Pdf

During the late imperial era (1500-1911), China, though divided by ethnic, linguistic, and regional differences at least as great as those prevailing in Europe, enjoyed a remarkable solidarity. What held Chinese society together for so many centuries? Some scholars have pointed to the institutional control over the written word as instrumental in promoting cultural homogenization; others, the manipulation of the performing arts. This volume, comprised of essays by both anthropologists and historians, furthers this important discussion by examining the role of death rituals in the unification of Chinese culture.

Author : Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824882754

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Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China by Cong Ellen Zhang Pdf

Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than 2,000 funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.

Author : Sangaralingam Ramesh
Publisher : Springer
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2018-11-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9783030016081

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The Rise of Empires by Sangaralingam Ramesh Pdf

This book describes and evaluates how institutional innovation and technological innovation have impacted on humanity from pre-historical times to modern times, and how societies have been transformed in history. The author interrogates the relationship between innovation and civilisation -– particularly the dynamic whereby innovation leads to empire-building -– and explores innovation efforts that stimulated economic and social synergies from the Babylonian Empire in 1900 BC up to the British Empire in the twentieth century. The author uses historical cross-cultural case studies to establish the factors which have given competitive advantages to societies and empires. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in political economy, economic history, economic growth and innovation economics.

Author : Cheung Hiu Yu
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9789888528585

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Empowered by Ancestors by Cheung Hiu Yu Pdf

Empowered by Ancestors: Controversy over the Imperial Temple in Song China (960–1279) examines the enduring tension between cultural authority and political power in imperial China by inquiring into Song ritual debates over the Imperial Temple. During these debates, Song-educated elites utilized various discourses to rectify temple rituals in their own ways. In this process, political interests were less emphasized and even detached from ritual discussions. Meanwhile, Song scholars of particular schools developed various ritual theories that were used to reshape society in later periods. Hence, the Song ritual debates exemplified the great transmission of ancestral ritual norms from the top stratum of imperial court downward to society. In this book, the author attempts to provide a lens through which historians, anthropologists, experts in Chinese Classics, and scholars from other disciplines can explore Chinese ritual in its intellectual, social, and political forms. “Cheung knows the history and culture of China’s Imperial Temple system best and pulls together a decade of research to share his mature reflections. Most modern scholars have avoided this arcane institution; Cheung clarifies its role in Song political culture, its influence in late imperial China, and its legacy in contemporary constructions of cultural memory and legitimacy.” —Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Arizona State University; coauthor of Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties “Professor Cheung helps us wrap our minds around the weight Song Confucian scholars put on reviving ancient rituals. He does this by digging deeply into their positions on the arrangement of the Imperial Ancestral Shrine and placing their contentions in both political and intellectual contexts.” —Patricia Ebrey, University of Washington; author of Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites

Author : Dieter Kuhn
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Burial
ISBN : STANFORD:36105016399086

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Burial in Song China by Dieter Kuhn Pdf

Author : Sue Fawn Chung,Priscilla Wegars
Publisher : Rowman Altamira
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 0759107343

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Chinese American Death Rituals by Sue Fawn Chung,Priscilla Wegars Pdf

They have looked to individual beliefs, customs, religion, and environment for this resolution. This volume expertly describes and analyzes cultural retention and transformation in the after-death rituals of Chinese American communities."--Jacket.

Author : Tong Chee Kiong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2004-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135798437

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Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore by Tong Chee Kiong Pdf

Through a cultural analysis of the symbols of death - flesh, blood, bones, souls, time numbers, food and money - Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore throws light upon the Chinese perception of death and how they cope with its eventuality. In the seeming mass of religious rituals and beliefs, it suggests that there is an underlying logic to the rituals. This in turn leads Kiong to examine the interrelationship between death and the socioeconomic value system of China as a whole.

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Maggie Bickford
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : China
ISBN : 9780674020

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Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Maggie Bickford Pdf

Author : Norman Kutcher
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1999-08-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521624398

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Mourning in Late Imperial China by Norman Kutcher Pdf

Kutcher's study of mourning demonstrates how Qing China's Manchu leaders quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.

Author : Yaxiong Du
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Music
ISBN : UOM:39015057526207

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Ritual Music in a North China Village by Yaxiong Du Pdf

In 1951, a group of young men from a village, Beixinzhuang which is about 25 km southeast of Beijing, orgainized a music club and started to learn music from a monk in the village. The music was primarily influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism. The author followed the music club for more than two decades. He watched the villagers' gradual adaptation to the music from modern media. The book carefully examines the cultural and social background, local belief, and the club's activities. Professor Du gives vivid accounts about the music played by the villagers, their favorite repertoire and the new modern additions, and the instruments used. A rare timeline of the musical life of a Chinese village.

Author : Erik Mueggler
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 347 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2017-12-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226483412

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Songs for Dead Parents by Erik Mueggler Pdf

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

Author : Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Ping Yao (Professor of history),Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Burial
ISBN : 0295746416

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Chinese Funerary Biographies by Patricia Buckley Ebrey,Ping Yao (Professor of history),Cong Ellen Zhang Pdf

"Tens of thousands of epitaphs or funerary biographies survive from imperial China. Written to be engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biographical information and exemplary words and deeds, expressing survivors' longing for the dead. Epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of people who are not well-documented in such sources as the dynastic histories and local gazetteers: women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children. This anthology makes available a set of funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years of history, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their potential as teaching material for courses on Chinese history, literature, and women's studies as well as world history. Funerary biographies, due to their inclusion of telling details about personal conduct, family life, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, can illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Since most funerary biographies can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, they have the potential to stimulate discussion of topics such as the emotional tenor of family life, rituals associated with death, whether the values seen in these biographies should be called Confucian, ways to analyze women's lives from sources written by men, and how to use sources that can be assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate interesting discussion about literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts"--

Author : James McMullen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 566 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2021-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684175994

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The Worship of Confucius in Japan by James McMullen Pdf

How has Confucius, quintessentially and symbolically Chinese, been received throughout Japanese history? The Worship of Confucius in Japan provides the first overview of the richly documented and colorful Japanese version of the East Asian ritual to venerate Confucius, known in Japan as the sekiten. The original Chinese political liturgy embodied assumptions about sociopolitical order different from those of Japan. Over more than thirteen centuries, Japanese in power expressed a persistently ambivalent response to the ritual’s challenges and often tended to interpret the ceremony in cultural rather than political terms. Like many rituals, the sekiten self-referentially reinterpreted earlier versions of itself. James McMullen adopts a diachronic and comparative perspective. Focusing on the relationship of the ritual to political authority in the premodern period, McMullen sheds fresh light on Sino–Japanese cultural relations and on the distinctive political, cultural, and social history of Confucianism in Japan. Successive sections of The Worship of Confucius in Japan trace the vicissitudes of the ceremony through two major cycles of adoption, modification, and decline, first in ancient and medieval Japan, then in the late feudal period culminating in its rejection at the Meiji Restoration. An epilogue sketches the history of the ceremony in the altered conditions of post-Restoration Japan and up to the present.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 568 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Dissertations, Academic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105133522099

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Dissertation Abstracts International by Anonim Pdf