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Public Memory In Early China
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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 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 Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 496 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 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 Social Memory and State Formation in Early China by : Min Li (Anthropologist)
Download or read book Social Memory and State Formation in Early China written by Min Li (Anthropologist) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Exhibiting the Past by : Kirk A. Denton
Download or read book Exhibiting the Past written by Kirk A. Denton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.
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.
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 Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern Chinese Religion by : John Lagerwey
Download or read book Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern Chinese Religion written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the fifth century BC to the present and dealing with Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and popular religion, this book explores the four periods of paradigm shift in the intertwined histories of Chinese religion, politics, and culture. It serves as the introduction to the eight-volume Early and Modern Chinese Religion.
Author :Garret Pagenstecher Olberding Publisher :Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN 13 :3110749920 Total Pages :272 pages Book Rating :4.1/5 (17 download)
Book Synopsis The Exercise of the Spatial Imagination in Pre-Modern China by : Garret Pagenstecher Olberding
Download or read book The Exercise of the Spatial Imagination in Pre-Modern China written by Garret Pagenstecher Olberding and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.
Book Synopsis Literate Community in Early Imperial China by : Charles Sanft
Download or read book Literate Community in Early Imperial China written by Charles Sanft and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the role of meditation on the five elements in the practice of Yoga. This book examines ancient written materials from China’s northwestern border regions to offer fresh insights into the role of text in shaping society and culture during the Han period (206/2 BCE–220 CE). Left behind by military installations, these documents—wooden strips and other nontraditional textual materials such as silk—recorded the lives and activities of military personnel and the people around them. Charles Sanft explores their functions and uses by looking at a fascinating array of material, including posted texts on signaling across distances, practical texts on brewing beer and evaluating swords, and letters exchanged by officials working in low rungs of the bureaucracy. By focusing on all members of the community, he argues that a much broader section of early society had meaningful interactions with text than previously believed. This major shift in interpretation challenges long-standing assumptions about the limited range of influence that text and literacy had on culture and society and makes important contributions to early China studies, the study of literacy, and to the global history of non-elites. Charles Sanft is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty, also published by SUNY Press.
Book Synopsis Language as Bodily Practice in Early China by : Jane Geaney
Download or read book Language as Bodily Practice in Early China written by Jane Geaney and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a “language crisis.” Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney’s interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers’ intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius’s proposal to rectify names (zhengming). Jane Geaney is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and the author of On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought.
Book Synopsis Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China by : Yegor Grebnev
Download or read book Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China written by Yegor Grebnev and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China by : Jane Geaney
Download or read book The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China written by Jane Geaney and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-07-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text."
Book Synopsis The Oxford World History of Empire by : Peter Fibiger Bang
Download or read book The Oxford World History of Empire written by Peter Fibiger Bang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 1353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first world history of empire, reaching from the third millennium BCE to the present. By combining synthetic surveys, thematic comparative essays, and numerous chapters on specific empires, its two volumes provide unparalleled coverage of imperialism throughout history and across continents, from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas. Only a few decades ago empire was believed to be a thing of the past; now it is clear that it has been and remains one of the most enduring forms of political organization and power. We cannot understand the dynamics and resilience of empire without moving decisively beyond the study of individual cases or particular periods, such as the relatively short age of European colonialism. The history of empire, as these volumes amply demonstrate, needs to be drawn on the much broader canvas of global history. Volume Two: The History of Empires tracks the protean history of political domination from the very beginnings of state formation in the Bronze Age up to the present. Case studies deal with the full range of the historical experience of empire, from the realms of the Achaemenids and Asoka to the empires of Mali and Songhay, and from ancient Rome and China to the Mughals, American settler colonialism, and the Soviet Union. Forty-five chapters detailing the history of individual empires are tied together by a set of global synthesizing surveys that structure the world history of empire into eight chronological phases.
Book Synopsis Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory by : Edward Shaughnessy
Download or read book Chinese Annals in the Western Observatory written by Edward Shaughnessy and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative history of studies by Western scholars, as well as an exhaustive bibliography and biographies of important scholars in the field. It is also supplied with a list of Chinese translations of these studies, as well as a complete index of authors and their works. Whether the reader is interested in the history of ancient China, ancient Chinese paleographic documents, or just in the history of the study of China as it has developed in the West, this book provides one of the most complete accounts available to date.
