Brazen Kings and Bronze Vessels

China, like any venerable, classical civilization, has woven its own web of mythological foundations. As anthropologists and psychoanalysts of the 19th and 20th centuries have insisted, understanding the mysterious and fantastical foundations of civilization is essential to more fully grasping the evolutionary nature of human history. In the case of China, familiarizing ourselves with the legends of great emperors long past and some central, creation myths and aetiologies, allows us to tap into the rich deposits of Chinese historical and imaginary thinking. While avoiding psychoanalyzing these myths (in the way Greek myth is often allegorized) we may miss posing any universal, human substratum to legend that make them transculturally intelligible. However, this avoidance is also an interpretive strategy with its own benefits, by which we hope to attain to a more precise historical nature of the legends and their repeated use throughout a millenial Chinese history. By learning these legends, we immediately become sensitive to the myriad ways in which they are inovked in subsequent texts to specific political ends. Today, we familiarize ourselves with a portion of the quasi-historical or mythological foundations of China that will assist us in understanding later historical moments and discussions in which they arise:

*Yu
*Yi the archer

Important archealogical discoveries of ritualized bronze vessels beginning in the early Han dynasty (206BC-220AD) posed a material site on which to ground Chinese historical and mythological fantasies. These bronze vessels, once used as ritualized containers of foods and wines, from the Han to the modern era became receptacles for a Chinese imagination of its own origins. They were both the proof of cultural intuitions of greatness and uniqueness and the material, fetishized oracle of re-imaginations of the same. Thus, they were the tangible sign of illustrious civilization and the material mandate for future, cultural consolidation and diffusion. A grotesque, but nonetheless telling, example of how the bronze vessel was used to benefit later generations comes at the end of the Southern Song dynasty (960-1127AD). Faced with the invasion of Jurchen tribes and imminent evacuation to the South, the Song court issued a number of imperial edicts requiring the melting down of bronze vessels into coinage--a literal monetization of what had to that point been only commercable, cultural capital. While this act appears to betray the hallowed significance that the bronze vessel seemed to promise to most eras, it actually reveals the true nature of the power relationship between history and the present, by which the past is ultimately at the mercy of current exigensies and interpretations.

Questions:
(1) What initial, social function do you see these mythologies serving? What might they explain?
(2) What are some scenarios in which you imagine these mythologies being invoked?
(3) Why are material discoveries (i.e. bronze vessels) so important to the formation of identity in the present?
(4) Why were bronze vessels important in the first place? (Shaughnessy 175-83)

Maps and links:
(1) The Met's introduction to Shang and Zhou bronzes
(2) The Piece-mold Method
(3) Chinese Discovery Channel Intro. to Bronze Vessels
(4) The Dynasties
(5) Map of Shang
(6) Map of Zhou


Secondary References:
*Treasures from the Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People's Republic of China. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980.
*Edward L. Shaughnessy. Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

What does it mean to study "Chineseness'?

In the postscript to her chapter “Against the Lures of Diaspora,” Brown University Professor and leading Chinese scholar Rey Chow summarizes the complexities and pitfalls of speaking of and for China from the space of the First World. She explains:

"What are we doing talking about modern Chinese literature and Chinese women in the North American academy in the 1990s? As such activities of speaking and writing are tied less to the oppressed women in Chinese communities in China than to our own intellectual careers in the West, we need to unmask ourselves through a scrupulous declaration of self-interest. Such declaration does not clean our hands, but it prevents the continuance of a tendency, rather strong among Third World intellectual in diaspora as well as researchers of non-Western cultures in First World nations, to sentimentalize precisely those day-to-day realities from which they are distanced." (41)

Chow’s question and its implications are primarily directed at the diaspora of Chinese intellectuals who now find themselves abroad enjoying particularly advantageous positions (conceptually and professionally) from which to give voice to their homelands which have been treated historically as global afterthoughts, minor literatures and cultures. The situation in which we find ourselves is slightly different. Nonetheless, the need to “unmask ourselves” and scrupulously confess our “self-interests” and monitor our sentimentalization of the Chinese Other is no less crucial to the tasks we pose for ourselves in this course.

The social, cultural and linguistic distances that separate us from the Chinese objects of our study is an immense expanse of creative space created by our privilege as so-called First World investigators. However, it is important to realize that this position while it carries with it in name and truth real power, is ultimately delusional as an imagined, exalted height. In other words, the privileged space we occupy is largely an outgrowth of our own ignorance and lack of experience with Chinese languages and cultures. Thus, it behooves us as we study throughout the semester to remind ourselves constantly that our desires, interests, opinions and readings of the history and arts of China are not only underwritten by our own American self-interests but more importantly our fundamental ignorance of our subject. The embrace of this realization will help us to avoid trivializing, essentializing and sentimentalizing Chinese culture as we diligently study and formulate our own critical positions.

Questions:
(1) What are some of your assumptions about what it means to be Chinese?
(2) What are your motives in seeking to define the image of Chineseness?
(3) What are some of our assumptions in feeling empowered, entitled to study this subject?

Introductory Video Clips:
(1) SpongeBob in China
(2) Tom Carter's Portrait of a People


Secondary texts:
*Gayatri Spivak. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271-313. (esp. 275)
*Xiaomei Chen, "Introduction," Occidentalism (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 17.

Words to Live By

The Four Books of Confucianism was a collection designated by Song dynasty intellectual Zhu Xi as the foundation of Confucianism and the basis for the civil service examinations. It contained the words of Confucius and his closest disciples (and later commentators), including his famed successor Mencius. The Four Books include: The Great Learning, The Golden Mean, The Analects and The Mencius.

The first two are actually chapters from the classical text, The Book of Rites, purportedly written by Confucius himself. The Great Learning and The Golden Mean place learning, virtue, and self-cultivation well within the scope of the interests of society and the pursuit of ideas of dialectical and social harmony. In a sense, unlike a radical Grecian or Christian truth that promises to destabilize society, a Confucian truth tends to harmonize all facets of personal and collective existence. The last two books, The Analects and The Mencius, are the Chinese equivalents of Platonic dialogues in which the master Confucius and his disciples (principally Mencius) are shown conversing with important political leaders and their own followers in which they convey proper behavioral and ethical codes. These books were the cornerstones of learning, ethics and courtesy in China for millenia. Their wisdom and stories are part of the Chinese collective memory and still on the tip of many tongues.

Readings:
The Great Learning
The Golden Mean
The Analects
The Mencius

Questions:
(1) Find evidences where personal cultivation and social harmony meet.
(2) How do you negotiate the dynamic between the wisdom of tradition and the virtue brought to bear by the individual?
(3) What does a web of learning look like? And what is meant by man's resting place within it?
(4) What are the attributes of a learned, virtuous man as defined by these texts?

Links:
(1) The Classic of Poetry as the anchor of Confucianism (LiJi 29)


Secondary readings:
*Wing-Tsit Chan. "Neo-Confucianism: New Ideas on Old Terminology" Philosophy East and West vol.17, no. 1/4 (1967): 15-35.

Hooking-Up in Antiquity

A dominant trend in Shijing scholarship over the past century has taken a markedly anthropological approach to the interpretation of these some 300 classical, Chinese poems. The collection's poems deal most directly with concerns, activities, rituals and histories intimately connected to the lives of the common folk. Their origins in a pre-literate, oral reality, combined with their later, overtly Confucian overlay, have lead many sinologists to emphasize the social, ritualized significance of the verses. One of the dominant topics of the Shijing, love and courtship, continues to fascinate anthropologists seeking to piece together the habits of the ancient enamored.

Our readings of the Shijing poems (mainly from the opening Guofeng section) will address the potential social functions indicated by the above anthropological method as well as the later Confucian interpretations and allegorizations that solemnized the poems as guides for ethical, proper behavior in civilized, courtly society (v.s. Large and Small prefaces).

Readings:
Odes Of Zhou (1-11)
Odes of Shao (12-25)

Questions:
(1) What is the tone of the various poetic voices in these poems?
(2) What do the poems convey to you about romantic or marital relationships in (pre-) classical China?
(3) How does the fact that the poems were written by men about women's relationships affect our understanding of what is conveyed in the poems?

Links:
(1) Great Preface
(2) Guan-guan
(3) Virginia's dual-language Shijing etext

Secondary references:
* Kern, Martin. "Shijing Songs as Performance Texts: A Case Study of 'Chu ci'." Early China 25 (2000): 49-111.
*Shaugnessy, Edward L. "From Liturgy to Literature: The Ritual Contexts of the Earliest Poems in the Book of Poetry." Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 165-197.
* Granet, Marcel. Festivals and Songs of Ancient China. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975.