ECS Program 2012-2013
(Papers will be
posted here for the registered members of the seminar about 10 days before the
meetings in which they are presented).
September 15, Saturday,
Rowan Flad (Harvard University): “Opening New Fields:
The Origins and Development of Civilization in Ancient Sichuan, China” PDF
The Sichuan Basin in China has been a major
breadbasket and population center for Chinese states and empires since the late
fourth Century BC. Despite this, the region has only recently become an
intense focus of archaeological research as it has become clear, based on
accidental finds and discoveries made in the course of development projects,
that a complex civilization developed that predated the earliest historical
records that document societies in the area. Most famous were the
discoveries at Sanxingdui in 1986 of two sacrificial
pits, which contained gold, bronze, ivory, jade and other material remains of
this lost civilization. Despite these tremendous finds, however, only in
the past decade has systematic research focused on trying to document the
broader social and political context within which these pits were buried, and
the conditions that led up to the establishment of Sanxingdui.
This talk reviews some of this recent work and examines the process by which
the Chengdu Plain was first occupied. A challenging modern landscape in the
Chengdu Plain has required a multi-tiered methodology for archaeological survey
in the region. The data we have collected allow us to evaluate this process by
comparing aggregate data across the survey zone.
James Stoltman
(University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Ceramic
Petrography, An Old Fashioned Technique Provides New
Insights into Bronze Age Chinese Society” PDF
Petrography
is a venerable geological technique that provides reliable identifications of
minerals and rocks. This presentation reports the results of recent and ongoing
research on Chinese ceramics from Yinxu (Anyang),
Houma, and Guicheng using the venerable geologic
technique of petrography. This research has revealed the enormous
sophistication and complexity of Bronze Age Chinese artisans not just in making
ceramic vessels to perform various tasks but in the fabrication of models and
molds in order to make spectacular bronze containers and weapons.
November 10, Saturday
Newell Ann Van Auken (University of Iowa): “Teaching the Spring and Autumn:
Two Early Commentarial Traditions Embedded in the Zuǒ
zhuŕn” PDF
This study takes as its focus some of the earliest surviving
commentarial remarks on the Spring and Autumn, a group of passages that
have not been transmitted as an independent text, but that have come down to us
embedded in another early work associated with the Spring and Autumn,
the Zuǒ zhuŕn
左傳. The Zuǒ zhuŕn is
best known for its historical narratives, but it also contains approximately
180 passages that comment directly on Spring and
Autumn records. These commentarial remarks may be divided into two sets on
the basis of formal features, content, and patterns of distribution in the Zuǒ zhuŕn.
This evidence suggests that the two types of remark were not drawn from a
single source, but from two very different sorts of texts. Both were aimed at
explaining and teaching the Spring and
Autumn, but they apparently had different organizations and pedagogical
aims. Even though neither source text has survived intact, the fragments
preserved in the Zuǒ zhuŕn allow us to derive a surprising amount of
information about what these early commentarial works may have been like.
Crispin Williams (University of Kansas): “Scribal Variation and the Meaning of the Houma and Wenxian
Covenant Texts’ Imprecation Ma Yi Fei Shi麻夷非是” PDF
The
paper presents the findings of a survey of the imprecation phrase ma yi fei shi麻夷非是and its
variations, as written (using brush and ink) on several thousand excavated
covenant texts (mengshu
盟書) from
Houma侯馬 and Wenxian 溫縣. I argue that the findings support Zhu Dexi 朱德熙and Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭’s analysis of the phrase as mi yi bi shi 靡夷彼氏 “Wipe out that shi” (shi, I suggest,
referring to the covenantor and his direct male
descendants). Through comparison of scribal hands, I demonstrate that those
variations which do not fit this analysis were produced by a small number of
scribes who, in almost all cases, exhibit uncertainty in their understanding of
the phrase. I conclude that such variations are unreliable and do not require
us to reject Zhu and Qiu’s analysis. These examples
suggest that formulaic stock phrases, such as this imprecation, were liable to
be misinterpreted even during the period in which they were in common use.
Identification of scribal hands was essential to this analysis, demonstrating
not only the importance of this methodology in such research, but also the
potential value of these materials for furthering our understanding of scribal
habits in early China.
February 9, Saturday
Martin Kern (Princeton University): “Ideologies of Kingship in the ‘Yaodian’:
Style, Argument, and Purpose” PDF
This paper presents a rhetorical and ideological analysis of the first chapter of the Shangshu, the “Yaodian,” that in the “Modern Text” version of the classic includes what in the forged “Ancient Text” version are the “Yaodian” and the “Shundian.” Without trying to rehabilitate the “Ancient Text” version, I argue that the “Yao” and the “Shun” parts are indeed profoundly distinct in both rhetoric and ideology, and that it was the “Shun” section that appealed directly to an early imperial (Qin-Han) audience: while the “Yao” section represents a model of charismatic (and to some extent idiosyncratic) rulership prior to the establishment of a well-ordered world (and state), the “Shun” section presents an ideal of kingship eminently compatible with early imperial rule. (In this context, it may be more than accidental that the series of observations that has led scholars to date the entire “Yaodian” chapter into Qin-Han times all come from the “Shun” section.) Altogether, I argue to read the “Yaodian” not as a work of mythological or historical narrative but as a piece of early political rhetoric: not as a disinterested account of the past but as an intervention into Warring States through early imperial political debates. As part of this analysis, I also challenge the traditional reading of the text as narrative; through detailed linguistic analysis, I show that important parts of the text—most significantly its first section—is not narrative but speech.
Li Feng
(Columbia University): “A First Reading
of the Qiye
耆夜 among the Qinghua
Strips and the Related Issues about the Textual Transmission of the Shijing Poems” PDF
The Qiye text among the Qinghua manuscripts describes a reception to celebrate the Zhou’s successful campaign against the polity of Qi 耆 (also known as Li 黎). The event was attended by most politically influential figures of the early Western Zhou time and was highlighted by the Duke of Zhou’s composition of a poem named “Cricket” (Xishuai 蟋蟀) towards the end of the session. Interestingly, “Cricket” is the title of a poem now included in the “Tang feng” 唐风 section of the Shijing, and the two, though related to each other in content and form, are clearly two different poems. The paper offers a close reading of the Qiye text including the “Cricket,” diverging in many places from the “original” reading published by the Qinghua University research team. The paper shows that the Qiye “Cricket” maintains language as well as script features of the Western Zhou period along with astronomically based political meanings. But these features of what might have been an original composition were completely lost when the poem was revised/recomposed, in the author’s interpretation, to become one of the poems in the Shijing — the Shijing “Cricket”.
April 13, Saturday
Ethan Harkness (New York University): “Almanacs as a Window
on Early Chinese Natural Philosophy” PDF
Traditional studies of the Chinese
natural philosophy of the late Warring States period through the Western Han
dynasty have based their analysis on data gleaned from transmitted texts,
including elite, historically-and-politically-oriented works like Zuozhuan and more explicitly focused explications of
natural philosophy such as chapters three, four and five of Huainanzi. Numerous discoveries of excavated
texts in recent decades, particularly the sub-genre of almanac-like texts known
as rishu 日 書, now provide a wealth of new data and an
alternative perspective on early Chinese natural philosophy as well as an
improved sense of its possible quotidian applications. In this talk, I
will take examples from a variety of almanacs to illustrate their potential not
only to refine our current understanding of early Chinese thought, but also to
suggest new questions about perceptions of the natural world, man's role
therein, and the process by which the correlative cosmology that became a
prominent feature of both political and proto-scientific thought took shape.
Maxim Korolkov (Columbia University): “Study of Ancient China in Russia: Recent Developments” PDF
This presentation summarizes some developments in the study of early China by the Russian scholars. These include the progress in the traditional large-scale translation projects focused on classical writings such as the Shi ji translation accomplished in 2011 and the ongoing work on the Zhou li and Zuo zhuan translations; the emerging attention towards the excavated paleographic texts; and new hypotheses concerning the early state formations and the emergence of writing in East Asia. I will also discuss the recent China-related archaeological excavations and contributions to the archaeological survey of the northern border regions of ancient Chinese oecumene.
May 19, Sunday
Joachim Gentz (University of Edinburgh): “Divinatory Hermeneutics and Early Canon Exegesis in China” PDF