Download or read book Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China written by Mihwa Choi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China written by Mihwa Choi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China written by Cong Ellen Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand 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.
Download or read book The Rise of Empires written by Sangaralingam Ramesh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Empowered by Ancestors written by Cheung Hiu Yu and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Ancestors Instructions Must Not Change Political Discourse and Practice in the Song Period written by Xiaonan Deng and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an account of how ‘ancestors’ instructions’ were used and abused in the Song period. It digs deeply into abundant resources to tease apart the complex and versatile relationship between the meaning and the truth of the Song discourse of ancestors’ instructions.
Download or read book Mourning in Late Imperial China written by Norman Kutcher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To win the approval of China's native elites, Qing China's new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state--unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded--quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.
Download or read book Songs for Dead Parents written by Erik Mueggler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of China Volume Two written by Zhaoguang Ge and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of traditional Chinese knowledge, thought and belief from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries with a new approach that offers a new perspective. It appropriates a wide range of source materials and emphasizes the necessity of understanding ideas and thought in their proper historical contexts. Its analytical narrative focuses on the dialectical interaction between historical background and intellectual thought. While discussing the complex dynamics of interaction among the intellectual thought of elite Chinese scholars, their historical conditions, their canonical texts and the "worlds of general knowledge, thought and belief," it also illuminates the significance of key issues such as the formation of the Chinese world order and its underlying value system, the origins of Chinese cultural identity, foreign influences, and the collapse of the Chinese world order in the 19th century leading toward the revolutionary events of the 20th century.
Download or read book The Sage and the People written by Sebastien Billioud and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Pierre-Antoine Bernheim Prize for the History of Religion by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres After a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition might play in a contemporary context. The Sage and the People is the first comprehensive enquiry into the "Confucian revival" that began in China during the 2000s. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork carried out over eight years in various parts of the country, it explores the re-appropriation and reinvention of popular practices in fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual, and politics. The book analyzes the complexity of the "Confucian revival" within the broader context of emerging challenges to such categories as religion, philosophy, and science that prevailed in modernization narratives throughout the last century. Exploring state cults both in Mainland China and Taiwan, authors Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval compare the interplay between politics and religion on the two shores of the Taiwan strait and attempt to shed light on possible future developments of Confucianism in Chinese society.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Wilderness written by Sébastien Billioud and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A syncretistic and millenarian religious movement, the Yiguandao (Way of Pervading Unity) was one of the major redemptive societies of Republican China. It developed rapidly in the 1930s and the 1940s, attracting millions of members. Sébastien Billioud offers an in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao., Repressed and forbidden after 1949, the group is one of the most influential religious movements of the Chinese world and at the same time one of the least known and understood. Reclaiming the Wilderness delves into a Yiguandao community in Hong Kong that serves as a node of circulations between Taiwan, Macau, China and elsewhere. It explores the expansionary dynamics of a group that now now reestablishinges itself in China and elsewhere in Asia. In I, Sébastien Billioud offers the first in-depth anthropological and sociological study of the Yiguandao, focusing on a community in Hong Kong that now plays a central role in the circulation and growth of the movement.
Download or read book Asian Culture Diplomacy and Foreign Relations Volume I written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two books offer readers a fresh perspective to re-examine and revaluate the so-called “China Threat” and the non-Western way of conducting foreign relations exercised by Asian countries due to the lasting impact of their traditional cultures on their diplomacy. 此書著為讀者提供全新視角來重新檢驗和評估所謂的”中國威脅論”和亞洲國家之非西方式外交及其傳統文化外交之影響.
Download or read book Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern Chinese Religion written by John Lagerwey and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 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.
Download or read book The Age of Confucian Rule written by Dieter Kuhn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just over a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty emerged as the most advanced civilization on earth. Within two centuries, China was home to nearly half of all humankind. In this concise history, we learn why the inventiveness of this era has been favorably compared with the European Renaissance, which in many ways the Song transformation surpassed. With the chaotic dissolution of the Tang dynasty, the old aristocratic families vanished. A new class of scholar-officials—products of a meritocratic examination system—took up the task of reshaping Chinese tradition by adapting the precepts of Confucianism to a rapidly changing world. Through fiscal reforms, these elites liberalized the economy, eased the tax burden, and put paper money into circulation. Their redesigned capitals buzzed with traders, while the education system offered advancement to talented men of modest means. Their rationalist approach led to inventions in printing, shipbuilding, weaving, ceramics manufacture, mining, and agriculture. With a realist’s eye, they studied the natural world and applied their observations in art and science. And with the souls of diplomats, they chose peace over war with the aggressors on their borders. Yet persistent military threats from these nomadic tribes—which the Chinese scorned as their cultural inferiors—redefined China’s understanding of its place in the world and solidified a sense of what it meant to be Chinese. The Age of Confucian Rule is an essential introduction to this transformative era. “A scholar should congratulate himself that he has been born in such a time” (Zhao Ruyu, 1194).
Download or read book Chinese Funerary Biographies written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tens of thousands of epitaphs or funerary biographies survive from imperial China. Written to be engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biographical information and exemplary words and deeds, expressing survivors' longing for the dead. Epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of people who are not well-documented in such sources as the dynastic histories and local gazetteers: women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children. This anthology makes available a set of funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years of history, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their potential as teaching material for courses on Chinese history, literature, and women's studies as well as world history. Funerary biographies, due to their inclusion of telling details about personal conduct, family life, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, can illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Since most funerary biographies can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, they have the potential to stimulate discussion of topics such as the emotional tenor of family life, rituals associated with death, whether the values seen in these biographies should be called Confucian, ways to analyze women's lives from sources written by men, and how to use sources that can be assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate interesting discussion about literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts"--
Download or read book Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature, the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm labeled Confucian. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore written by Tong Chee Kiong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a cultural analysis of the symbols of death - flesh, blood, bones, souls, time numbers, food and money - Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore throws light upon the Chinese perception of death and how they cope with its eventuality. In the seeming mass of religious rituals and beliefs, it suggests that there is an underlying logic to the rituals. This in turn leads Kiong to examine the interrelationship between death and the socioeconomic value system of China as a whole.
