| part 2: oracle bones as distributed personhood
nick vogt |
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| Crucial though they may have been in determining the physical and social structure of the Shang state, these early stages of the “life” of an oracle bone served mainly to prepare it for the single moment in which it would play its most important role: the divination ceremony. To address the social function served by a divining | ||||||||||||||||||||
| oracle bone, however, it is first necessary briefly to characterize Shang divination as both a conceptual system and a social construct.
conceptual basis of shang divination The Shang recognized and venerated a variety of spirits associated with observable natural phenomena, including those of the winds, of important mountains, and associated with the cardinal directions. Chief among these was the supreme Shang deity Di 帝, chief among the various spirits, to whom the Shang ascribed a great deal of control over the macro-circumstances of physical existence, including the harvest, the success of military campaigns, and the success of new settlements. Though they certainly sacrificed to him, the Shang did not appeal directly to Di through the divinatory medium, resorting instead to the mediation of deceased ancestors. [10] The Shang generally believed that their ancestors continued to exist and to exercise influence over the living world. Through sacrifices, they sought to appease these ancestors, to secure their positive influence over events, and perhaps most importantly to persuade them to intercede with Di on behalf of the living. [11] Oracle bones entered the picture as the standard medium through which the Shang communicated their hopes, desires, fears, and expectations to the various numina constituting their religious milieu, typically through the intercession of the spirits of their ancestors. It has been noted that, though it cannot be denied that it served a prognosticative function, Shang divination was as much an effort at influencing the behavior of intangible forces as at predicting it. [12] The tone of the inscriptions is frequently that of a polite request made by a subordinate to a superior. As such, a great deal of the inscriptions are concerned with the conduct of sacrificial ceremonies – i.e.., with determining whether the planned offerings will satisfy the spirits concerned and achieve the desired result – and were likely made immediately preceding the ceremonies in question. [13] It is easy to speculate that this practice may reflect the ultimate origin of Shang pyromancy in the disposal of the remains of animal sacrifices. As described above, though oracle bones required extensive preparation before use, the process of divination with oracle bones was physically simple. At the appropriate time, the divining party – sometimes the king, sometimes a designated court diviner – applied a source of intense heat to the hollows in the back of the prepared bone or shell. The resulting cracks were read as predictions concerning questions asked in some form during this process. Queries were often repeated at great length and in multiple forms, perhaps so as to gain the most reliable or favorable result. This was part and parcel of the divinatory process. After the divination, however, oracle bones were again subject to a lengthy and labor-intensive treatment process. The time and circumstances of the divination, the questions under consideration, and occasionally notes about the interpretation of the divination and subsequent events were inscribed on each bone. Further measures, such as cutting along the divination cracks with a knife or rubbing colored material into the cranks and inscription, were sometimes taken to ensure the continued readability of the bone or shell. [14] Through this process, the divinatory medium became part of a religio-historical record detailing the activities of the Shang king, his patrilineal ancestors, and, by extension, the Shang state as a whole. |
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shang divination as a social construct Shang divination was not the exclusive prerogative of the reigning monarch. [15] Nevertheless, the oracle bones as we know them today are overwhelmingly concerned with the activities of the Shang king and, given their ideological connection to the patriline of Shang monarchs, must be considered along with the sacrificial corpus as an organ of royal power. The labor-intensive nature of Shang pyromancy, discussed above, may have contributed to elite control of the practice. That same labor-intensive nature, however, necessitated the involvement of a variety of persons in the divination process, including: 1. contributors of raw materials 2. caretakers of livestock and/or turtles 3. scribal specialists 4. religious specialists (i.e., diviners) 5. the sponsoring party (usually the king) The perpetuation of the institution of Shang pyromancy itself created, maintained, and expressed social dynamics between all of these parties. Each of them had, to a greater or lesser degree, the power to affect the others through the pyromantic institution. The king, of course, could do so via the perpetuation of institutionalized divinatory practices by royal decree, as well as through his power, as chief of the Shang patriline, to limit access to the numinous influence of the Shang royal ancestors. Moreover, the king sometimes conducted divinations himself (or at least appropriated that role in the associated inscriptions), [16] presumably allowing him the freedom to interpret the results as he saw fit; and the king frequently recorded verifying “interpretations” of inscribed divinatory results. [17] All of this speaks to an active role for the king in the political implementation, as well as the cultural perpetuation, of the Shang ancestral cult. Most oracle bones record the names of diviners other than the king; these religious specialists must have played nearly as influential a role both in and through the pyromantic institution as the king himself. The Shang method of pyromancy was highly developed, involving, as noted above, a great deal of complicated preparation. It is not unlikely that Shang diviners were to some degree capable of manipulating the physical form of pyromantic cracks so as to produce the results they saw fit. Whether this was the case or not, however, the interpretation of oracle bone divinations must have fallen primarily to these diviners, giving them substantial power over a number of Shang state activities. It is difficult to say to what degree the parties responsible for inscribing oracle bones determined the final forms of the inscriptions, as no information about them is preserved. Those parties providing the raw materials thereof, however, must certainly have enjoyed some degree of influence. As noted above, the Shang in their heyday consumed great quantities of turtle shells, which were commonly received in tribute; thus Shang relationships with neighboring cultures were affected by and expressed through Shang use of shells in divination. It has been noted as well that the efficiency with which the Shang employed individual shells varied greatly; Keightley suggests that this variance may correlate to changes in the abundance of shells, among other factors. [18] If so, this variance must have afforded great opportunity – or great trouble – for those parties able to provide them. |
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oracle bones as distributed persons In Art and Agency: An Anthropological Perspective, Gell proposes a model of “distributed personhood” exemplified by the oeuvre of the artist Marcel Duchamp. Drawing on earlier elaborations of the idea of style as a recognizable force creating coherent and delineated bodies of work, Gell proposes that the development of an artist’s oeuvre is analogous to the process of human consciousness, in that each work therein, like each state of mind experienced by a specific psyche, is both determined in part by those preceding it and partially predictive of those to follow. Combining this proposition with his previously developed model of art objects as agents and/or indexes of agency, Gell suggests in essence that Duchamp’s oeuvre is itself another Duchamp, constituting in itself a cognitive process which, except in its physically distributed nature, is not unlike that of its creator Duchamp, and moreover which, thanks to that very distributed nature, is the Duchamp that most of us know and that exercises agency over millions of art appreciators. [19] The oracle bone example offers a tempting venue in which to implement and complicate Gell’s model of distributed personhood. As an acknowledged corpus, oracle bones share a narrow range of common characteristics that make it possible immediately to qualify an object as belonging or not belonging to the category; they are thus possessed of a “style” in a recognizable sense, if not that in which Gell uses the term. [20] More to the point, inscriptional distinctions exist between oracle bones that allow us to divide them along meaningful lines with respect to agency: all those dating to the period of a certain king, for example, or all those conducted by the same diviner. It is possible, then, to consider a group of oracle bones that constitute a temporally contiguous and spatially distributed set of indexes of the agency of a specific individual – precisely the criteria satisfied by the oeuvre as Gell considers it. In, say, all of the oracle bones inscribed during the reign of King Wu Ding, then, we have a set of works indexing (and, indeed, exercising) the agency of the same person and, for the most part, situated in relative temporal order (since many oracle bones record the date of their use). Does this mass of objects, however, meet Gell’s other criterion for resemblance to the cognitive process, i.e., that each is causatively related to all those preceding and following it? From the standpoint of inscriptional content, such an argument is easy to support. Since virtually all oracle bones record the activities of real Shang kings taking part in social processes, and since the oracle bones themselves played a role in the decision-making process of those kings, it can be argued that the events recorded in a specific oracle bone of Wu Ding’s time are the continuation of past events in which oracle bone divinations likely played a role, and that the events to follow, which will subsequently be recorded on oracle bones, will likewise carry on from the events divined about and recorded in the present. It must also be recognized, however, that many if not most of the events recorded in oracle bones were religious ceremonies, the circumstances of which were determined at least in part by established cultural norms, but were variable based on the results of pyromancy. Such a set of deterministic external constraints can perhaps be compared with the various physical circumstances, both external and internal, that provide the human cognitive process with both its inherent limitations and its motive force. From a formal standpoint, the point is harder to make. As a corpus, oracle bones show certain definite developmental trends across a wide temporal range – a tendency toward reduced character size, for instance. Within categories drawn on the basis of indexed agents, however, systematic comparison of the formal characteristics of oracle bones to locate trends has not to my knowledge been performed. The patchy nature of the archaeological record and the physical condition of most surviving oracle bones may in fact make such work impossible. If we accept the historical content of oracle bone inscriptions as a constituent quality of the bones as objects – a leap that I am inclined to make, given the oft-artificial quality of historical narrative -- sets of bones divided by indexed agent seem quite nicely to conform to Gell’s model of distributed persons. From the modern archaeologist’s perspective, this idea is intuitive: after all, as the historical personage Wu Ding is referred to in textual sources only with extreme brevity, the Wu Ding known to the modern archaeologist is constituted almost entirely by the inscriptions of the oracle bones surviving from his period. In the modern day, Wu Ding is the oracle bones, in the same sense in which the Duchamp to whom an art historian refers is the sum total of the agency abducted (to borrow Gell’s term) from his extant works; [21] any Wu Ding who may have performed mundane actions unrecorded in oracle bones is lost to the passage of time, but the Wu Ding whose deeds the bones record still exercises agency today. Perhaps the most intriguing point about oracle bones, in contrast to the work of Duchamp, is that this model of chronologically and physically distributed agency mirrors closely the Shang model of the continuing effective agency of the deceased ancestors to whom their sacrifices were dedicated, to whom their divinations appealed, and of whose agency all oracle bones are ultimately indexes. In this sense, the conceptual basis of the production of oracle bones was precisely that expressed independently by Gell in his final work in 1998. |
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[10] Allan, p. 56; see also Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 47-50. [11] Puett, ibid. [12] Keightley, p. 33. [13] Ibid., pp. 33-6. [14] Ibid., pp. 33-56. [15] Ibid., pp. 31-2. [16] See, e.g., ibid., p. 29. [17] See, e.g., ibid., pp. 42-4. [18] Ibid., pp. 25-6. [19] Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 232-51. [20] See Gell, p. 215. [21] See Gell, pp. 14-6. |
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