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Author: Mihwa Choi Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190849460 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
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: Mihwa Choi Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190849460 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
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: Mihwa Choi Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019045976X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
This study examines how political and legal disputes regarding the performance of death rituals contributed to shape a revival of Confucianism in eleventh-century Northern Song China.
Author: James L. Watson Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520071292 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
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 ISBN: 082488275X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
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 ISBN: 3030016080 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
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 ISBN: 9888528580 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
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: Sue Fawn Chung Publisher: Rowman Altamira ISBN: 9780759107342 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
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: Erik Mueggler Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022648341X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
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 Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674021273 Category : China Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.