Material Culture Power And Identity In Ancient China

Author : Xiaolong Wu
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : HISTORY
ISBN : 1108230997

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Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China by Xiaolong Wu Pdf

In this book, Xiaolong Wu offers a comprehensive and in-depth study of the Zhongshan state during China's Warring States Period (476?221 BCE). Analyzing artefacts, inscriptions, and grandiose funerary structures within a broad archaeological context, he illuminates the connections between power and identity, and the role of material culture in asserting and communicating both. The author brings an interdisciplinary approach to this study. He combines and cross-examines all available categories of evidence, including archaeological, textual, art historical, and epigraphical, enabling innovative interpretations and conclusions that challenge conventional views regarding Zhongshan and ethnicity in ancient China. Wu reveals the complex relationship between material culture, cultural identity, and statecraft intended by the royal patrons. He demonstrates that the Zhongshan king Cuo constructed a hybrid cultural identity, consolidated his power, and aimed to maintain political order at court after his death through the buildings, sculpture, and inscriptions that he commissioned.

Author : Xiaolong Wu (Art historian)
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : China
ISBN : 1107591457

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Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China by Xiaolong Wu (Art historian) Pdf

Author : Xiaolong Wu
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2017-02-09
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781107134027

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Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China by Xiaolong Wu Pdf

This book is a comprehensive and in-depth study of a mysterious state of China's Warring States Period (476-221 BCE): the Zhongshan.

Author : Yan Sun
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 548 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231552622

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Many Worlds Under One Heaven by Yan Sun Pdf

In the mid-eleventh century BCE, the Zhou overthrew the Shang, a dynastic power that had dominated much of northern and central China. Over the next three centuries, they would extend the borders of their political control significantly beyond those of the Shang. The Zhou introduced a political ideology centered on the Mandate of Heaven to justify their victory over the Shang and their territorial expansion, portraying the Zhou king as ruling the frontier from the center of civilization. Present-day scholarship often still adheres to this core-periphery perspective, emphasizing cultural assimilation and political integration during Zhou rule. However, recent archaeological findings present a more complex picture. Many Worlds Under One Heaven analyzes a wide range of newly excavated materials to offer a new perspective on political and cultural change under the Western Zhou. Examining tombs, bronze inscriptions, and other artifacts, Yan Sun challenges the Zhou-centered view with a frontier-focused perspective that highlights the roles of multiple actors. She reveals the complexity of identity construction and power relations in the northern frontiers of the Western Zhou, arguing that the border regions should be seen as a land of negotiation that witnessed cultural hybridization and experimentation. Rethinking a critical period for the formation of Chinese civilization, Many Worlds Under One Heaven unsettles the core-periphery model to reveal the diversity and flexibility of identity in early China.

Author : Professor of Art History Yan Sun,Yan Sun
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Borderlands
ISBN : 0231198426

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Many Worlds Under One Heaven by Professor of Art History Yan Sun,Yan Sun Pdf

Many Worlds Under One Heaven analyzes a wide range of newly excavated materials to offer a new perspective on political and cultural change under the Western Zhou. Examining tombs, bronze inscriptions, and other artifacts, Yan Sun challenges the Zhou-centered view with a frontier-focused perspective that highlights the roles of multiple actors.

Author : Erica Brindley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2015-09-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107084780

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Ancient China and the Yue by Erica Brindley Pdf

A richly empirical discussion of ethnic identity formation in the ancient world, presenting the peoples of China's southern frontier.

Author : Constance A. Cook,Xinhui Luo
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438467122

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Birth in Ancient China by Constance A. Cook,Xinhui Luo Pdf

Reveals cultural paradigms and historical prejudices regarding the role of birthing and women in the reproduction of society. Using newly discovered and excavated texts, Constance A. Cook and Xinhui Luo systematically explore material culture, inscriptions, transmitted texts, and genealogies from BCE China to reconstruct the role of women in social reproduction in the ancient Chinese world. Applying paleographical, linguistic, and historical analyses, Cook and Luo discuss fertility rituals, birthing experiences, divine conceptions, divine births, and the overall influence of gendered supernatural agencies on the experience and outcome of birth. They unpack a cultural paradigm in which birth is not only a philosophical symbol of eternal return and renewal but also an abiding religious and social focus for lineage continuity. They also suggest that some of the mythical founder heroes traditionally assumed to be male may in fact have had female identities. Students of ancient history, particularly Chinese history, will find this book an essential complement to traditional historical narratives, while the exploration of ancient religious texts, many unknown in the West, provides a unique perspective into the study of the formation of mythology and the role of birthing in early religion. Constance A. Cook is Professor of Chinese at Lehigh University and the author of Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man’s Journey. Xinhui Luo is Professor of Chinese Ancient History at Beijing Normal University, China.

Author : Craig Clunas
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2004-05-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0824828208

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Superfluous Things by Craig Clunas Pdf

Now in paperback This outstanding and original book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes “superfluous things”—the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China—and describes contemporary attitudes to them. He informs his discussions with reference to both socio-cultural theory and current debates on eighteenth-century England concerning luxury, conspicuous consumption, and the growth of the consumer society.

Author : Katheryn M. Linduff,Yan Sun,Wei Cao,Yuanqing Liu
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108418614

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Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors by Katheryn M. Linduff,Yan Sun,Wei Cao,Yuanqing Liu Pdf

This volume looks at the effects of interaction and the nature of identity construction in a frontier or contact zone through the analysis of material culture, especially in mortuary settings.

Author : Yegor Grebnev
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-07-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231555036

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Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China by Yegor Grebnev Pdf

Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism. Grebnev demonstrates the centrality of the Yi Zhou shu in Chinese intellectual history by highlighting its simultaneous connections to canonical traditions and esoteric Daoism. He also shows that the Daoist rituals of textual transmission embedded in the Grand Duke traditions bear an imprint of the courtly environment of the Warring States period, where early Daoists strove for prestige and power, offering legitimacy through texts ascribed to the mythical sage rulers. These rituals appear to have emerged at the same period as the core Daoist philosophical texts and not several centuries later as conventionally believed, which calls for a reassessment of the history of Daoism’s interrelated religious and philosophical strands. Offering a far-reaching reconsideration of early Chinese intellectual and religious history, Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China sheds new light on the foundations of the Chinese textual tradition.

Author : P. Sangren
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1987-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804766609

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History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community by P. Sangren Pdf

This book is a case study of history and culture in the Taiwanese town of Ta-ch'i and the group of rural villages that constitute its standard marketing community. However, its scope exceeds that of most community studies. The author attempts to construct a holistic view of Chinese culture from an analysis of the relationship between history and ritual in a particular locality. The author argues that social institutions and collective representations are dialectically connected in the process of social and cultural reproduction. He describes this dialectical process through an analysis of the key cultural concept of ling, the magical power attributed to ghosts, gods, and ancestors. In analyzing the symbolic logic of ling, he asserts that it can be fully understood only as a product of the reproduction of social institutions and as a manifestation of a native historical consciousness. Structuralist and Marxist insights are combined to explain how ling is best understood as both a cultural logic of symbolic relations and a material logic of social relations. The book is in three parts. Part I is a social and economic history that outlines what one might call an objectivist or positivist view of Ta-ch'i's history, describing events as they were, regardless of the perceptions of local participants. This material is a background to the synchronic sociological analysis of local territorial cults that constitutes Part II. In Part III, the author unsettles the objectivist assumptions of Part I by showing how the idiom of ling underlies Taiwanese constructions of history and identity and how the cultural construction of history dialectically reproduces society and creates history. The book is illustrated with 8 pages of photographs, 17 line drawings, and 9 maps.

Author : Michelle H. Wang
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Cartography
ISBN : 9780226827469

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The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China by Michelle H. Wang Pdf

"This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of cartography in China. Its chief players are three maps found in tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and together constitute the entire known corpus of ancient Chinese maps (ditu). A millennium separates them from the next available map from 1136 CE. Most scholars study them through the lens of modern, empirical definitions of maps and their use. This book offers an alternative view by drawing on methods not just from cartography but from art history, archaeology, and religion. It argues that, as tomb objects, the maps were designed to be simultaneously functional for the living and the dead-that each map was drawn to serve navigational purposes of guiding the living from one town to another as well as to diagram ritual order, thereby taming the unknown territory of the dead. In contrast with traditional scholarship, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China proposes that ditu can "speak" through their forms. Departing from dominant theories of representation that forge a narrow path from form to meaning, the book braids together two main strands of argumentation to explore the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China"--

Author : Wicky W. K. Tse
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2018-06-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781315532318

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The Collapse of China's Later Han Dynasty, 25-220 CE by Wicky W. K. Tse Pdf

In the Later Han period the region covering the modern provinces of Gansu, southern Ningxia, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan, and western Shaanxi, was a porous frontier zone between the Chinese regimes and their Central Asian neighbours, not fully incorporated into the Chinese realm until the first century BCE. Not surprisingly the region had a large concentration of men of martial background, from which a regional culture characterized by warrior spirit and skills prevailed. This military elite was generally honoured by the imperial centre, but during the Later Han period the ascendancy of eastern-based scholar-officials and the consequent increased emphasis on civil values and de-militarization fundamentally transformed the attitude of the imperial state towards the northwestern frontiersmen, leaving them struggling to achieve high political and social status. From the ensuing tensions and resentment followed the capture of the imperial capital by a northwestern military force, the deposing of the emperor and the installation of a new one, which triggered the disintegration of the empire. Based on extensive original research, and combining cultural, military and political history, this book examines fully the forging of military regional identity in the northwest borderlands and the consequences of this for the early Chinese empires.

Author : Elizabeth Childs-Johnson,John S Major
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2023-05-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000873122

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Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion by Elizabeth Childs-Johnson,John S Major Pdf

Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion demonstrates that the concept of metamorphism was central to ancient Chinese religious belief and practices from at least the late Neolithic period through the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty. Central to the authors' argument is the ubiquitous motif in early Chinese figurative art, the metamorphic power mask. While the motif underwent stylistic variation over time, its formal properties remained stable, underscoring the image’s ongoing religious centrality. It symbolized the metamorphosis, through the phenomenon of death, of royal personages from living humans to deceased ancestors who required worship and sacrificial offerings. Treated with deference and respect, the royal ancestors lent support to their living descendants, ratifying and upholding their rule; neglected, they became dangerous, even malevolent. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates archaeologically recovered objects with literary evidence from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions to canonical texts, all situated in the appropriate historical context, the study presents detailed analyses of form and style, and of change over time, observing the importance of relationality and the dynamic between imagery, materials, and affects. This book is a significant publication in the field of early China studies, presenting an integrated conception of ancient art and religion that surpasses any other work now available.

Author : Elizabeth Childs-Johnson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 768 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199328376

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The Oxford Handbook of Early China by Elizabeth Childs-Johnson Pdf

The Oxford Handbook on Early China brings 30 scholars together to cover early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE). The study is chronological and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach, covering topics from archaeology, anthropology, art history, architecture, music, and metallurgy, to literature, religion, paleography, cosmology, religion, prehistory, and history.