Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Chinese Ritual and Politics PDF full book. Access full book title Chinese Ritual and Politics by Emily Martin Ahern. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Emily Martin Ahern Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521040907 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
As a result of the strength and dominance of the centralized state, ritual action in China often takes its logic from political action. In this book Emily Ahern explores the implications of this. She argues that forms of control attempted ritually on non-human persons (gods and other spirits) in China parallel those forms of control which people regard as effective in ordinary life, namely political control, and draws important conclusions from this. She shows that in China it is possible to discard terms such as 'magic', which imply that acts directed to spirits operate on a different basis from acts in ordinary life. She also challenges claims in anthropology that, since they seem arbitrary and the actions of participants in them highly predictable, rituals support established authority. Her book will be of interest not only to specialists in Chinese studies, but to social anthropologists and others interested in the link between ritual and political processes.
Author: Emily Martin Ahern Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521040907 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
As a result of the strength and dominance of the centralized state, ritual action in China often takes its logic from political action. In this book Emily Ahern explores the implications of this. She argues that forms of control attempted ritually on non-human persons (gods and other spirits) in China parallel those forms of control which people regard as effective in ordinary life, namely political control, and draws important conclusions from this. She shows that in China it is possible to discard terms such as 'magic', which imply that acts directed to spirits operate on a different basis from acts in ordinary life. She also challenges claims in anthropology that, since they seem arbitrary and the actions of participants in them highly predictable, rituals support established authority. Her book will be of interest not only to specialists in Chinese studies, but to social anthropologists and others interested in the link between ritual and political processes.
Author: Kwang-chih CHANG Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674029402 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 157
Book Description
A leading scholar in the United States on Chinese archaeology challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. Questioning Marx's concept of an "Asiatic" mode of production, Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis," and cultural-materialist theories on the importance of technology, K. C. Chang builds an impressive counterargument, one which ranges widely from recent archaeological discoveries to studies of mythology, ancient Chinese poetry, and the iconography of Shang food vessels.
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: 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: Paul Nicholas Vogt Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009051199 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
In accounts of Chinese history, the Western Zhou period has been lionized as a golden age of ritual, when kings created the ceremonies that underlay the traditions of imperial governance. In this book, Paul Nicholas Vogt rediscovers their roots in the vagaries of Western Zhou royal geopolitics through an investigation of inscriptions on bronze vessels, the best contemporary source for this period. He shows how the kings of the Western Zhou adapted ritual to create and retain power, while introducing changes that affected later remembrances of Zhou royal ritual and that shaped the tradition of statecraft throughout Chinese history. Using ritual and social theory to explain Western Zhou history, Vogt traces how the traditions of pre-modern China were born, how a ruling dynasty establishes and holds on to power, how religion and politics can support and restrain each other, and how ancient peoples made, used, and assigned meaning to art and artifacts.
Author: François Louis Publisher: ISBN: 9781941792100 Category : Art, Asian Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Today, China's classical antiquity is often studied through recovered artifacts, but before this practice became widespread, scholars instead reconstructed the distant past through classical texts and transmitted illustrations. Among the most important illustrated commentaries was the Sanli tu, or Illustrations to the Ritual Classics, whose origins are said to date back to the great commentator Zheng Xuan. Design by the Book, which accompanies an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center Gallery, discusses the history and cultural significance of the Sanli tu in medieval China. The Sanli tu survives in a version produced around 960 by Nie Chongyi, a professor at the court of the Later Zhou (951-960) and Northern Song (960-1127) dynasties. It is now mostly remembered--if at all--for its controversial entries and as a quaint predecessor of the more empirical antiquarian scholarship produced since the mid-eleventh century. But such criticism hides the fact that the book remained a standard resource for more than 150 years, playing a crucial role in the Song dynasty's perception of ancient ritual and construction of a Confucian state cult. Richly illustrated, Design by the Book brings renewed focus to one of China's most fascinating medieval works.
Author: Miranda Brown Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 0791479803 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
The Politics of Mourning in Early China reevaluates the longstanding assumptions about early imperial political culture. According to most explanations, filial piety served as the linchpin of the social and political order, as all political relations were a seamless extension of the relationship between father and son—a relationship that was hierarchical, paternalistic, and personal. Offering a new perspective on the mourning practices and funerary monuments of the Han dynasty, Miranda Brown asks whether the early imperial elite did in fact imagine political participation solely along the lines of the father-son relationship or whether there were alternative visions of political association. The early imperial elite held remarkably varied and contradictory beliefs about political life, and they had multiple templates and changing scripts for political action. This book documents and explains such diversity and variation and shows that the Han dynasty practice of mourning expressed many visions of political life, visions that left lasting legacies.
Author: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429748965 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
This book focuses on Shenzhen, one of China’s most globalized metropolises, a leading centre of high-tech industries and, as a melting pot of migrants from all over China, a place of vibrant cultural creativity. While in the early stages of Shenzhen’s development this vibrant cultural creativity was associated with the resilience of traditional social structures in Shenzhen’s migrant ‘urban villages’, today these structures undergird dynamic entrepreneurship and urban self-organization throughout Shenzhen, and have gradually merged with the formal structures of urban governance and politics. This book examines these developments, showing how important traditional social structures and traditional Chinese culture have been for China’s economic modernization. The book goes on to draw out the implications of this for the future of Chinese culture and Chinese economic engagement in a globalized world.