| part 1: the life-cycle of an oracle bone
nick vogt |
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| In the wake of debate over the agency or non-agency of objects and the possibility and utility of distinguishing them from people, Kopytoff’s essay “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process” introduced us to the practice of “object biography”, the ultimate subjectification of objects. [1] | |||||||||||||||||||
| Leaving aside the insurmountable question of the division between subjects and objects, one inestimably important effect of this practice is the tendency to view objects as chronologically situated phenomena. Like persons, objects progress through stages of development, and as with persons, these stages may mandate widely varying social roles and may necessitate and legitimate the existence of institutions designed to validate transitions between them. To consider exclusively an object in any one of these stages is to risk overlooking the conceptual framework underlying them, which may well make it impossible to understand the social role that the object in that stage plays. At the same time, to overestimate the consistency of the motivations behind the object’s uses at various times can lead one to simplify one’s conception of the practices of the society in question beyond the threshold of believability. Both of these dangers must be guarded against. | |||||||||||||||||||
| living creature
The phrase “life cycle” is particularly easily applied to oracle bones, as they began their existences as parts of living, breathing, moving creatures. The material basis of the vast majority of oracle bones consisted either of the scapula of a bovine – probably a water buffalo – or as the plastron, or undershell, of a turtle. The Shang seem to have farmed these animals, particularly the latter, in great volume. [2] This kind of animal husbandry must have required great investiture of labor and resources, both in caring for the animals and in arranging the aquatic habitats they required in order to survive; full-time personnel were likely engaged in the former employment, at least. Before even assuming their general shapes, then, oracle bones influenced the structure of Shang society. Not all oracle bones, however, came from Shang-raised livestock. It is known that turtle plastrons were imported from outlying regions in volumes numbering as high as in the thousands, either as tribute or as trade goods. [3] The massive Shang appetite for oracle bones, then, was a vehicle through which the political and cultural relationships between the Shang and their neighboring populations manifested itself. It is perhaps not remiss to speculate that one purpose behind the Shang’s large-scale consumption of oracle bones may have been to perpetuate and validate these manifestations. Most oracle bones were scapulae or plastrons, but not all. On occasion, the Shang were known to inscribe the bones of deer, horses, or tigers. Generally, these inscriptions recorded that the creature from which the bone was taken was captured in the hunt or offered in sacrifice. [4] Part of the efficacy of bones as carriers of inscriptions, then, would seem to have derived from the qualities of the creatures from which they were obtained. A creature that made a potent sacrificial victim was also useful as a medium of inscription. This conception is borne out by the general awe, fear, and reverence shown by the Shang towards tigers, which frequently appear in their iconography, particularly on axe heads. [5] This observation leads naturally to the question of human oracle bones. The Shang sacrificed humans in substantial numbers, most often captives taken from a nearby population known as the Qiang. Their use of human bones as inscriptional materials, however, was limited to the bones – especially skulls – of foreign leaders whom the Shang took as captives of war and subsequently sacrificed. The logic underlying Shang inscription of human bones, then, was that of their use of tiger bones as well, namely that they sacrificed and subsequently inscribed the bones of particularly powerful or intimidating individuals. They did not, however, inscribe the bones of humans captured and sacrificed en masse, nor did they conduct pyromancy with the bones of humans or tigers. [6] Bovines and turtles seem to have possessed, in the eyes of the Shang, some qualitative difference making them particularly well suited for divination. |
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slaughter and processing In order for a bone or plastron to be used in divination, it had first to be removed from the animal containing it. The typical disposition of that animal is as yet unclear. Oracle bones frequently record the use of bovines as sacrificial victims, suggesting that the bones thereof may have been put to use in divination, but this cannot be confirmed. [7] Turtles, on the other hand, were not normally sacrificed, a fact setting them apart from all the other creatures employed as sources of oracle bones. Sarah Allan has suggested that the Shang saw the turtle as a miniature instantiation of the cosmos; [8] if true, this might explain the apparent disparity between the comparatively low ritual significance of turtles and that of the other living sources of oracle bones. Once a bone or shell was removed from its original host, it could not simply be tossed in the fire and read, but had first to undergo a variety of preparations. Prospective oracle bones were scraped clean, trimmed down to accepted shapes, and polished flat to make them more suitable surfaces for writing. The responsible parties then prepared each bone or shell for cracking by boring a series of paired hollows, each consisting of a long, deep hollow and a wide, shallow one – into its back. Diviners would later insert a heated instrument into these hollows to produce the cracks on which they based their prognostications. [9] As with the farming of animals for divination, this preparatory work, while not excessively complex, must have required a substantial investment of specialized labor; in this case, that labor demonstrably produced no tangible material profit apart from the tools of divination themselves. In this second stage of its “life”, too, then, the oracle bone impacted the organization of Shang society to a substantial degree. |
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life cycle: early stages Let us briefly reexamine the progress of an oracle bone up to this point as a “life cycle”. The bone or shell is “born” from the flesh of a once-living creature, whose relative position in the Shang religious system will in turn determine the precise role the bone is to play in that system. A cadre of specialists then prepares it for its role in Shang ritual by modifying its “natural” state, by refining it, by making of it a more efficient slate on which the religious affairs of the Shang can be imprinted in linguistic form, even by mutilating its surface in ritually significant fashion. Soon it will undergo the ceremony – a trial by fire – that will transform it from a “juvenile” piece of raw material into a “mature” oracle bone. Only once this process is complete can it assume its role in recording and perpetuating the structures of Shang royal power and religious beliefs. The analogy is perhaps overstated. Nevertheless, the fact that the existence of an oracle bone can be put into such terms with relative ease indicates the degree to which our understanding of objects is tied into our understanding of the lives of living beings and vice versa. The key commonality between these phenomena is the idea of chronologically situated stages of development, the intuitive understanding that, like a child that grows into an adult, an object can remain the same thing while changing in appearance and social function. As is the case with humans, the stages through which objects pass and the norms according to which they develop are typically held in common throughout large groups, with internal variations manifested in hierarchical arrangements. In this sense, the mass-produced object in particular is ideally suited as a reflection of human social structures and a manifestation of human relationships. In-depth consideration of the parallel between the maturation (i.e., production) of objects as exemplars of their types and that of humans as social entities has the potential to call into question distinctions between humans and objects based on agency. |
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[1] Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 64-94. [2] David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Ancient China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 6-12. [3] Ibid., pp. 11-2. [4] Ibid., pp. 7-8. [5] See Sarah Allan, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 149-57. [6] Keightley, p. 7. [7] Ibid., p. 11. [8] Allan, p. 173. [9] Keightley, pp. 12-27. |
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