Download or read book State and Court Ritual in China written by Joseph P. McDermott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This broad-ranging examination of Chinese court and state ritual from 1000 BC to AD 1750 represents the first modern comprehensive account of the subject in any language. The essays demonstrate how and why ritual has played such a fundamental and often controversial role in the practice of Chinese politics. By tracing the political and social development of particular rituals, such as imperial funerals and popular religious practices or Buddhist ordination ceremonies and court audiences, the authors set out to convey their historical significance. Further discussion of the role of ritual in relation to language, and elite and popular concepts of emperorhood is included in the volume. The book will be of interest to students of Chinese history, anthropology and religion, as well as those seeking to understand the legacy of that history in modern China.
Download or read book China s Economic Culture written by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's spectacular rise challenges established economic moulds, both at the national level, with the concept of "state capitalism", and at the firm level, with the notion of indigenous "Chinese management practices". However, both Chinese and Western observers emphasise the transitional nature of the reforms, thereby leaving open the question as to whether China's reform process is really a fast catch-up process, with ultimate convergence to global standards, or something different. This book, by a leading economist and sinologist, argues that "culture" is an exceptionally useful tool to help understand fully the current picture of the Chinese economy. Drawing on a range of disciplines including social psychology, cognitive sciences, institutional economics and Chinese studies, the book examines long-run path dependencies and cultural legacies, and shows how these contribute crucially to the current cultural construction of economic systems, business organisations and patterns of embedding the economy into society and politics.
Download or read book China written by John Lagerwey and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 40 years, our vision of Chinese culture and history has been transformed by the discovery of the role of religion in Chinese state-making and in local society. The Daoist religion, in particular, long despised as "superstitious," has recovered its place as "the native higher religion." But while the Chinese state tried from the fifth century on to construct an orthodoxy based on Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, local society everywhere carved out for itself its own geomantically defined space and organized itself around local festivals in honor of gods of its own choosing-gods who were often invented and then represented by illiterate mediums. Looking at China from the point of view of elite or popular culture therefore produces very different results.--John Lagerwey has done extensive fieldwork on local society and its festivals. This book represents a first attempt to use this new research to integrate top-down and bottom-up views of Chinese society, culture, and history. It should be of interest to a wide range of China specialists, students of religion and popular culture, as well as participants in the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and anthropologists.--John Lagerwey is professor of Daoist history at the ?cole Pratique des Hautes ?tudes and of Chinese studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author of Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History and editor of the 30-volume "Traditional Hakka Society Series" as well as the recently published four-volume set Early Chinese Religion.-----
Download or read book The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China written by Macabe Keliher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China presents a major new approach in research on the formation of the Qing empire (1636–1912) in early modern China. Focusing on the symbolic practices that structured domination and legitimized authority, the book challenges traditional understandings of state-formation, and argues that in addition to war making and institution building, the disciplining of diverse political actors, and the construction of political order through symbolic acts were essential undertakings in the making of the Qing state. Beginning in 1631 with the establishment of the key disciplinary organization, the Board of Rites, and culminating with the publication of the first administrative code in 1690, Keliher shows that the Qing political environment was premised on sets of intertwined relationships constantly performed through acts such as the New Year’s Day ceremony, greeting rites, and sumptuary regulations, or what was referred to as li in Chinese. Drawing on Chinese- and Manchu-language archival sources, this book is the first to demonstrate how Qing state-makers drew on existing practices and made up new ones to reimagine political culture and construct a system of domination that lay the basis for empire.
Download or read book State and Ritual in China written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Traditional Chinese Rites and Rituals written by Zhengming Du and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Chinese Rites and Rituals provides a comprehensive overview of the social practices of Chinese people on various occasions of cultural importance. While explaining how these rites and rituals are performed, it also introduces the reasons why certain norms are followed by individuals, families and the state as a whole. As such, the book offers a kaleidoscopic perspective on the plurality evident in all facets of Chinese culture.
Download or read book Norms and the State in China written by Chun-chieh Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central theme of this volume is the Chinese concept of chiao-hua, "Transformation by Instruction": the ancient idea that moral guidance in all spheres of life is one of the most essential tasks of leadership at all levels, from the central government down to local elites. Within this general perspective nineteen scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have treated topics ranging from the regulation of conspicuous consumption in Ming times to ritualization of protest in recent times. In many cases a surprising degree of cultural continuity can be observed; on the other hand, due attention has also been paid to clashes between traditional Chinese (notably Confucian) norms and the demands of modernization in contemporary Chinese society.
Download or read book Republican Lens written by Joan Judge and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? In Republican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding China’s 1911 Revolution. Dismissed by high-minded ideologues of the late 1910s and largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, this commercial culture has only recently begun to be rehabilitated in mainland China. Judge uses one of its most striking, innovative—and continually mischaracterized—products, the journal Funü shibao (The women’s eastern times), as a lens onto the early years of China’s first Republic. Redeeming both the value of the medium and the significance of the era, she demonstrates the extent to which the commercial press channeled and helped constitute key epistemic and gender trends in China’s revolutionary twentieth century. The book develops a cross-genre and inter-media method for reading the periodical press and gaining access to the complexities of the past. Drawing on the full materiality of the medium, Judge reads cover art, photographs, advertisements, and poetry, editorials, essays, and readers’ columns in conjunction with and against one another, as well as in their broader print, historical and global contexts. This yields insights into fundamental tensions that governed both the journal and the early Republic. It also highlights processes central to the arc of twentieth-century knowledge culture and social change: the valorization and scientization of the notion of "experience," the public actualization of "Republican Ladies," and the amalgamation of "Chinese medicine" and scientific biomedicine. It further revives the journal’s editors, authors, medical experts, artists, and, most notably, its little known female contributors. Republican Lens captures the ingenuity of a journal that captures the chaotic potentialities within China’s early Republic and its global twentieth century.
Download or read book The Rule of Culture written by Hong Hai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture has an abiding influence on the way countries and business corporations are governed. This book introduces the reader to the deep philosophies that drive corporations and governments in East Asia, from China through Japan and South Korea to Singapore. With sparkling clarity and spiced with anecdotes and case studies, it depicts how respect for cultures can lead to spectacular success, or the lack of it to failure. Confucian practices such as guanxi in Chinese society, the benevolent culture of entity firms in Japan, and patriarchal chaebols in South Korea are analyzed with examples like Esquel, Nissan, and Samsung. A delightful chapter on Daoism shows how it drives Jack Ma’s Alibaba.com. In the governance of nations, the author reinforces Burke’s dictum that systems of government must be consonant with traditional cultures, and he calls out misguided attempts by the West to foist liberal democracies on civilizations in the East where respect for authority and communitarian values come before individual interest. The author advances the novel concept of the meritocratic democracy in which leaders are chosen not by electoral popularity but by proven ability. In a thought-provoking concluding chapter, he evaluates prospective constitutional changes in China that would enshrine meritocratic democracy as an alternative to liberal democracies that have turned dysfunctional in many Western nations.
Download or read book Culture Power and the State written by Prasenjit Duara and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991-04-01 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era. The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity. The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place. The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Chinese Ritual and Politics written by Emily Martin Ahern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Bureaucracy and the State in Early China written by Feng Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.
Download or read book Traditional Chinese State Ritual System of Sacrifice to Mountain and Water Spirits written by Jinhua Jia and published by Mdpi AG. This book was released on 2022-12-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the traditional Chinese ritual system of sacrifice to mountain and water spirits, a significant but largely overlooked sub-field of Chinse religious studies. This system mainly comprised the five sacred peaks, five strongholds, four seas, and four waterways, and was maintained for two thousand years in imperial China. As state ritual, it was constructed of by Confucian ritual culture, but in practice, it gradually interacted and integrated with various religious traditions, such as Daoism, Buddhism, and folk belief, especially in its local manifestation and dissemination. The eighteen great mountains and waters marked geographical and directional borders and territories modelled on the yin-yang and five-phase framework that helped shape Chinese people's cosmographical understanding of the world. Together, they constituted a set of sacred spaces symbolizing the sanctioned political legitimacy of the imperium and functioning as the loca for communication with the divine, as well as the media between religion and its secular context, state ideology and local beliefs, or various ethnic groups. Through the discovery of a rich variety of historical sources, especially stele inscriptions preserved in the sacrificial temples, the contributors of the ten chapters in this volume examine the sacred peaks, strongholds, seas, and waterways respectively. While each of the chapters explores one or more perspectives, together they reveal the rich implications and ramification of the ritual system and present the first comprehensive study of this sub-field.
Download or read book Strait Rituals written by Pang Yang Huei and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two Taiwan Strait crises took place during a particularly tense period of the Cold War. Although each incident was relatively brief, their consequences loom large. Based on analyses of newly available documents from Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, Pang Yang Huei challenges conventional wisdom that claims Sino-US misperceptions of each other’s strategic concerns were critical in the 1950s. He underscores the fact that Washington, Taipei, and Beijing were actually aware of one another’s strategic intentions during the crises. He also demonstrates conclusively that both “crises” can be understood as a transformation from tacit communication to tacit accommodation. An important contribution of this study is a better understanding of the role of ritual, symbols, and gestures in international relations. While it is true that these two crises resulted in a stalemate, the fact that all parties were able to cultivate talks and negotiations brought relations, especially between the US and China, to a new and more stable level. Simply averting the threat of war was a major achievement. Strait Rituals is an important micro-history of a significant moment during the Cold War and a rich interpretation of the theoretical use of multiple points of view in writing history. It sets a new standard for understanding China’s place in the world. “Strait Rituals is a solidly detailed and thoroughly footnoted excursion into a critical stage of Cold War history. Dr. Pang’s exhaustive archival work sets a real standard in the amalgamation of different sources to reevaluate the Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s, the repercussions of which can still be felt today.” —Hsiao-ting Lin, Hoover Institution, Stanford University “An excellent book for those interested in the Taiwan Strait crises in the context of the overall history of international affairs in the Asia-Pacific region. The book will prove to be of great value to those interested in the history of the region that is bound to increase in importance in the years to come.” —Akira Iriye, Harvard University “Dispassionate, balanced, rigorous in the presentation of facts, much drawn from Chinese archival sources, Pang Yang Huei’s work will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the issues surrounding this Cold War hangover that continues to trouble contemporary politics across the Taiwan Strait.” —Geoffrey C. Gunn, Journal of Contemporary Asia
Download or read book Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China written by Alan K. L. Chan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a time of profound change, this book details the intellectual ferment after the fall of the Han dynasty. Questions about "heaven" and the affairs of the world that had seemed resolved by Han Confucianism resurfaced and demanded reconsideration. New currents in philosophy, religion, and intellectual life emerged to leave an indelible mark on the subsequent development of Chinese thought and culture. This period saw the rise of xuanxue ("dark learning" or "learning of the mysterious Dao"), the establishment of religious Daoism, and the rise of Buddhism. In examining the key ideas of xuanxue and focusing on its main proponents, the contributors to this volume call into question the often-presumed monolithic identity of this broad philosophical front. The volume also highlights the richness and complexity of religion in China during this period, examining the relationship between the Way of the Celestial Master and local, popular religious beliefs and practices, and discussing the relationship between religious Daoism and Buddhism.
Download or read book Creating Confucian Authority written by Robert L. Chard and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-19 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents extensive primary sources to reveal how Confucians in Early China parlay their knowledge of ritual into political power, from the ancient aristocratic culture of the Spring and Autumn era to the state religion of the Han empire.
Download or read book Social Memory and State Formation in Early China written by Min Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.
