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Ancestral Memory In Early China
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Book Synopsis Ancestral Memory in Early China by : K.E. Brashier
Download or read book Ancestral Memory in Early China written by K.E. Brashier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral ritual in early China was an orchestrated dance between what was present (the offerings and the living) and what was absent (the ancestors). The interconnections among the tangible elements of the sacrifice were overt and almost mechanical, but extending those connections to the invisible guests required a medium that was itself invisible. Thus in early China, ancestral sacrifice was associated with focused thinking about the ancestors, with a structured mental effort by the living to reach out to the absent forebears and to give them shape and existence. Thinking about the ancestors—about those who had become distant—required active deliberation and meditation, qualities that had to be nurtured and learned. This study is a history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Its goals are to excavate the cult’s color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for longevity, of prayers for prosperity. Ancestor worship was not, the author contends, merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.
Book Synopsis Public Memory in Early China by : K. E. Brashier
Download or read book Public Memory in Early China written by K. E. Brashier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Craft of Oblivion by : Albert Galvany
Download or read book The Craft of Oblivion written by Albert Galvany and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-07-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Social Memory and State Formation in Early China by : Min Li
Download or read book Social Memory and State Formation in Early China written by Min Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.
Book Synopsis Animals Through Chinese History by : Roel Sterckx
Download or read book Animals Through Chinese History written by Roel Sterckx and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. This title is also available as Open Access.
Book Synopsis The Sinister Way by : Richard von Glahn
Download or read book The Sinister Way written by Richard von Glahn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-04-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.
Book Synopsis Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 vols.) by : John Lagerwey
Download or read book Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC-220 AD) (2 vols.) written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 1280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).
Book Synopsis The Archaeology of Ancestors by : Hill/Hageman
Download or read book The Archaeology of Ancestors written by Hill/Hageman and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this landmark volume demonstrate that ancestor veneration was about much more than claiming property rights: the spirits of the dead were central to domestic disputes, displays of wealth, and power and status relationships. Case studies from China, Africa, Europe, and Mesoamerica use the evidence of art, architecture, ritual, and burial practices to explore the complex roles of ancestors in the past. Including a comprehensive overview of nearly two hundred years of anthropological research, The Archaeology of Ancestors reveals how and why societies remember and revere the dead. Through analyses of human remains, ritual deposits, and historical documents, contributors explain how ancestors were woven into the social fabric of the living.
Book Synopsis Excavating the Afterlife by : Guolong Lai
Download or read book Excavating the Afterlife written by Guolong Lai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective. By examining burial structure, grave goods, and religious documents unearthed from groups of well-preserved tombs in southern China, Lai shows that new attitudes toward the dead, resulting from the trauma of violent political struggle and warfare, permanently altered the early Chinese conceptions of this world and the afterlife. The book grounds the important changes in religious beliefs and ritual practices firmly in the sociopolitical transition from the Warring States (ca. 453�221 BCE) to the early empires (3rd century�1st century BCE). A methodologically sophisticated synthesis of archaeological, art historical, and textual sources, Excavating the Afterlife will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists, and textual scholars of China, as well as to students of comparative religions. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/excavating-the-afterlife
Book Synopsis Ancestral Leaves by : Joseph W. Esherick
Download or read book Ancestral Leaves written by Joseph W. Esherick and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral Leaves follows one family through six hundred years of Chinese history and brings to life the epic narrative of the nation, from the fourteenth century through the Cultural Revolution. The lives of the Ye family—"Ye" means "leaf" in Chinese—reveal the human side of the large-scale events that shaped modern China: the vast and destructive rebellions of the nineteenth century, the economic growth and social transformation of the republican era, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Cultural Revolution under the Chinese Communists. Joseph W. Esherick draws from rare manuscripts and archival and oral history sources to provide an uncommonly personal and intimate glimpse into Chinese family history, illuminating the changing patterns of everyday life during rebellion, war, and revolution.
Book Synopsis Worshiping the Ancestors by : Jan Stuart
Download or read book Worshiping the Ancestors written by Jan Stuart and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their powerful presence and exquisite quality, Chinese ancestor portraits have never been studied as a genre. This illustrated text explores the artistic, historical, and religious significance of these paintings and places them in context with other types of commemorative portraiture. During the late Ming (1368-1644) and Quing (1644-1911) dynasties, full-length portraits of individual men and women came into vogue. These ancestor portraits were important objects of veneration, and the practice continued into the 20th century, when paintings were gradually replaced by photographs. The authors explore the works in depth, presenting a fascinating glimpse of Chinese life and culture and providing biographies of the sitters. Worshiping the Ancestors should appeal to connoisseurs of Chinese art and to all those interested in social history, portraiture, and devotional art.
Book Synopsis Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State by : Roderick Campbell
Download or read book Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State written by Roderick Campbell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence of war and sacrifice were not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation.
Book Synopsis Early Medieval China by : Wendy Swartz
Download or read book Early Medieval China written by Wendy Swartz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative sourcebook builds a dynamic understanding of China's early medieval period (220–589) through an original selection and arrangement of literary, historical, religious, and critical texts. A tumultuous and formative era, these centuries saw the longest stretch of political fragmentation in China's imperial history, resulting in new ethnic configurations, the rise of powerful clans, and a pervasive divide between north and south. Deploying thematic categories, the editors sketch the period in a novel way for students and, by featuring many texts translated into English for the first time, recast the era for specialists. Thematic topics include regional definitions and tensions, governing mechanisms and social reality, ideas of self and other, relations with the unseen world, everyday life, and cultural concepts. Within each section, the editors and translators introduce the selected texts and provide critical commentary on their historical significance, along with suggestions for further reading and research.
Book Synopsis The Politics of the Past in Early China by : Vincent S. Leung
Download or read book The Politics of the Past in Early China written by Vincent S. Leung and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History mattered to the political elite in ancient China. Leung explores why it was so important and to what end.
Book Synopsis Honor and Shame in Early China by : Mark Edward Lewis
Download or read book Honor and Shame in Early China written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new study, Mark Edward Lewis traces how the changing language of honor and shame helped to articulate and justify transformations in Chinese society between the Warring States and the end of the Han dynasty. Through careful examination of a wide variety of texts, he demonstrates how honor-shame discourse justified the actions of diverse and potentially rival groups. Over centuries, the formally recognized political order came to be intertwined with groups articulating alternative models of honor. These groups both participated in the existing order and, through their own visions of what was truly honourable, paved the way for subsequent political structures. Filling a major lacuna in the study of early China, Lewis presents ways in which the early Chinese empires can be fruitfully considered in comparative context and develops a more systematic understanding of the fundamental role of honor/shame in shaping states and societies.
Book Synopsis Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community by :
Download or read book Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory in Medieval China explores memory as performed in various genres of writing, from poetry to anecdotes, from history to tomb epitaphs, thereby illuminating ways in which the memory of persons, events, dynasties, and literary styles was constructed and revised.
Book Synopsis Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China by : Timothy M. Davis
Download or read book Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China written by Timothy M. Davis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture Timothy M. Davis explains the social, cultural, and religious significance of early medieval muzhiming —one of the most versatile and persistent commemorative forms employed in the elite burials of pre-modern China.
