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 Voices from the Underworld written by Fabian Graham and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell’s ‘enforcers’, the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Voices from the Underworld offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple’s spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions on the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham’s innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the de-stigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.
Download or read book Chinese Funerary Biographies written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’ longing for the dead. These epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children—people who are not well documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories and local gazetteers. This anthology of translations makes available funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their value as teaching material for courses in Chinese history, literature, and women’s studies as well as world history. Because they include revealing details about personal conduct, families, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, these epitaphs illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Most can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, and they stimulate investigation of topics such as the emotional tenor of family relations, rituals associated with death, Confucian values, women’s lives as written about by men, and the use of sources 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 provocative discussion of literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts.
Download or read book The Oracle of Night written by Sidarta Ribeiro and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An investigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contemporary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transformation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research. Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.
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 Negotiating Rites written by Ute Husken and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual has been long viewed as an undisputed and indisputable part of (especially religious) tradition, performed over and over in the same ways: stable in form, meaningless, preconcieved, and with the aim of creating harmony and enabling a tradition's survival. The authors represented in this collection argue, however, that this view can be seriously challenged and that ritual's embeddedness in negotiation processes is one of its central features.
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.
