Workshop on “New Perspectives on the Study of Chinese Culture and Society”
Mark Edward Lewis
Stanford University
Early China
In many ways the study of early China is the least problematic of any field in terms of the
search for “new perspectives”. The continuing flood of new objects from archaeological
excavations, combined with the relatively small number of people working in the field, has
resulted in a situation in which the simple processing and assimilation of new textual and material
discoveries could keep all scholars busy for decades. Indeed with each year that passes we seem
to fall further and further behind in our efforts to keep with the constantly growing mountain of
new discoveries. However, new materials do not of themselves constitute new perspectives, and
indeed they can sometimes form an obstacle to original thought. In the following pages I will
consider some of the enduring problems of the field, the new problems introduced by the quantity
of new discoveries, and certain disciplinary or topical innovations that merit consideration. I will
structure it around the rubrics suggested in the letter proposing this workshop, as exemplified in
the example by John Lagerwey.
A. New Materials
There is no point in attempting to list all the types of materials discovered in archaeological
excavations. Written materials alone include the Shang oracle inscriptions, inscribed bronzes,
legal documents, administrative records, mantic materials (ri shu 日書 and other forms of
divination), calendars, medical and yang sheng (養生) texts, philosophical texts, poetry, historical
anecdotes, funerary inscriptions, and commentarial materials. Quite apart from their explicit
content, most of these works cast peripheral light on numerous aspects of early Chinese society,
e.g., divinatory materials provide evidence about the organization of Chinese households and the
structure of buildings, funerary inscriptions contain large bodies of verse, etc. In addition to texts,
the physical remains discovered in tombs provide all sorts of evidence about the technologies of
the period and the material forms of existence (food, clothing, housing, writing materials, musical
instruments, makeup, etc.). Images in tomb art, particularly from the Han, also provide rich
evidence about many aspects of life that are ignored or scarcely touched on in the literary record.
Finally, the evolving structures of tombs themselves provide much evidence about both early
Chinese religion and about the activities of the living. Throughout this century, and above all in
recent decades, the examination of this material has transformed our understanding of early China
and will continue to do so in the future. In addition to the numerous Chinese archaeological
journals, the Western journal Early China has become an extremely valuable forum for the
presentation of these new materials and the new vision of early China that they have provided.
However, the new materials have also created problems. First, there has been a worrying
tendency, particularly in mainland China, to argue that since new discoveries have validated some
traditions handed down in received texts, and indicated both the accuracy and antiquity of certain
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texts, the general critical program pioneered in the early Qing and developed by the authors of Gu
shi bian (loosely known under the rubric of huai gu 懷古) should now be abandoned. In fact the
program developed in Gu shi bian, in spite of its clear anti-Confucian political program and a
consequent tendency to excess, expresses the fundamental principle of modern historiography
that one should rely only on primary sources. To the extent that new discoveries restore certain
received ideas, these latter can be incorporated into our understanding of the Chinese past, but
this does not entail granting blanket credence to the imperial literary tradition.
Second, the difficulty of mastering new material has led to many aspects of early Chinese
studies becoming the exclusive domain of specialists. Some forms of this development are
probably inevitable. The reading of oracle bones and bronzes is so difficult, and the amounts of
materials now available so massive, that the study of these materials will probably always remain
a fulltime specialization. Indeed even scholars who study both oracle bones and bronze
inscriptions are becoming a vanishing breed. Computerized concordances and indices will
hopefully make the fruits of these scholars work more readily available for active reflection by
interested outsiders, but these will all ultimately rely on the firmness of the identifications and
glosses provided by the specialists.
Less necessary, and hence more worrying, has been the tendency of those working on the
Warring States and Qin/Han periods to divide up into specialties based on the choice of texts.
Thus a real chasm has emerged between those who devote themselves to newly discovered
materials, and those who continue to largely or entirely base their work on received materials.
Many of the former have adopted the position that texts from tombs, being the sole reliably
datable materials, are the only true sources for doing Warring States history. This provides an
intellectual rationale for what could simply be a matter of personal predilections or limits of time.
Nevertheless, however extreme and one-sided this position may be, it is certainly more justifiable
than the tendency of many scholars to devote themselves entirely to the study of received texts, as
though the new materials were a minor irrelevance. This problem has no doubt been exacerbated
by the fact that the categories of writing represented in the tomb discoveries diverge considerably
from those of the received tradition, so that laziness or lack of curiosity can masquerade as the
natural expression of divergent disciplinary interests. I will develop this point in the next section.
B. Topics, Methods, and Disciplinary Approaches
Probably the single greatest problem in the field of early Chinese studies, particularly in the
West, is the predominance of intellectual history, or more accurately the history of philosophy.
To a certain extent this resulted from the biases in the preservation of records; what survived from
the Warring States was predominantly the work of the philosophical masters. This was
exacerbated by the tendency of Westerners in recent centuries to approach Asia as a source of
spiritual wisdom. Whatever its origins, this concentration on one limited aspect of early China
has produced the bizarre situation in which a large intellectual field is pursued by a limited
number of scholars who virtually all devote themselves to one small aspect of the field. This
limitation manifests itself in the fact that most Western scholars have taken an interest only in the
few philosophical texts that have been found in tombs, e.g. the so-called Huang-Lao texts from
Mawangdui and the Guodian corpus, while ignoring the much larger body of materials pertaining
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to government, religion, and the mantic traditions. Support of projects should be used to
encourage a widening of the vision of early China scholars, both in terms of materials and
problems.
The most valuable tool for encouraging such a widening of topics and materials is to adopt
questions from other disciplines or from the study of other cultures (which as I will discuss below
would often amount to the same thing). As for disciplines, the most valuable conceptual tools for
the study of nay ancient history would almost certainly be derived from anthropology. One could
usefully compare the state of early Chinese studies with the history of the study of the classical
West in this century. Up until the late nineteenth century the “classical” West (as the rubric
implied) was regarded as a source of models for human excellence—with Rome as the model for
law and administration, Greece as the model for rational philosophy and science, and both as the
models for refined artistic purity. While Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy pointed toward a new
interest in the irrational or savage side of classical antiquity, it was only with the introduction of
anthropological models and techniques—first by the Cambridge school and then by the followers
of Louis Gernet in France—that the true revolution in our understanding of classical antiquity
took place. Bringing in topics and models from anthropology such as kinship, ritual, magic,
sacrifice, etc., the vision of the classical world was transformed from one of radiant light and
serene wisdom to one of dark passions and routine violence. Other social sciences such as
geography and economics were also invoked to offer new perspectives on the examination of the
classical world. This transformation of historiography through the introduction of social science
concepts was pursued more broadly in the Annales tradition.
The study of ancient China, in many ways, is in the same position as the study of the ancient
Mediterranean was in the last century. Our modern heirs of Voltaire find in the Warring States an
age of skeptical, humanist philosophers pursuing a dream of social order. The possible
contribution from the “materialist” doctrine of communist scholars on the mainland has been
largely nullified by the Stalinist chimera of a slave society. (There is a small group of scholars on
the mainland who have recently written a series of books attempting to apply anthropology to the
rethinking of early China, but for some reason they have adopted Frazier as their anthropologist
of choice.) While individual scholars, most notably in Japan, have developed many important
insights, systematic rethinking has yet to take place. Perhaps the sole move towards a more
systematic rethinking of early China comes from the contributors to the Taiwanese journal Xin shi
xue (新史學) who have adopted the model of the Annales to begin to study Chinese history
through social science methods. They have contributed numerous valuable articles and
monographs on early China.
While many of the anthropological models and concepts that informed the rethinking of
ancient Greece and Rome have been subject to serious critique, modification, or even calls for
abandonment, they or their more recent avatars remain invaluable tools for the rethinking of early
Chinese history. Moreover, the aforementioned revolution in the study of Greece and Rome
provides hundreds of valuable models for the application of these concepts to historical, literate
civilizations. Whatever their limits, anthropological models also had the benefit of highlighting
the radically alien and strange character of ancient societies, and refuting the idea that they were
basically like us, or even improved versions of ourselves. Such a recognition would be of
particular value in China, where many people of only modest education still claim to have a direct
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insight into the ideas, values, and practices of the most ancient times (often through the supposed
continuity of the Chinese script).
Having thus far written at the level of generalities, it remains to suggest certain areas or topics
in which the use of models from anthropology or the social sciences could help bring together
both received and newly discovered materials for a new synthesis. I will here suggest a handful
of topics, and hopefully offer more examples in the longer paper that I have been asked to write
for this workshop.
One of the classic anthropological topics is kinship. While we now have many detailed
studies from the later imperial period of the evolution of kin groups over time and their local
variations, the state of the field for early China remains woeful. Discovered materials have
provided us with a fair amount of new evidence for beginning a reconstruction of patterns of kin
organization during the Qin and Han. From these we can learn much about the size and makeup
of households, their interrelations, the form of lineages, the state’s definition of a household or
family, gender roles, the status of children and the aged, and so forth. Combined with
considerable evidence in the received texts to which insufficient attention has been paid, one can
finally begin to give some flesh to Jack Dull’s decades-old suggestion that the Han family was
quite distinct from the program of the ritual texts, or the lineages of late imperial China.
However, virtually nothing has yet been done.
Another popular anthropological topic that has been applied to the history of seemingly all
times and places except China is gift exchange. (There are actually now a handful of books on
gift exchange in 20th-century China, but nothing much for earlier periods.) There is in fact a
massive documentation on this topic for early China both in the excavated materials (the vast
majority of the bronzes commemorate royal gifts) and in the received materials, and scholars
should certainly begin to examine this crucial social activity and its pivotal political role.
The reconstruction of actual religious practice in Warring States and Han China has attracted
a certain amount of attention. For the Warring States most of the work has taken the form of
commentaries on or translations of newly discovered materials by scholars such as Li Ling,
Donald Harper, and Marc Kalinowski. More synthetic work remains to be done, although both Li
and Harper have made some initial steps. The scholarship of Pu Muzhou has provided initial
syntheses for Warring States funerary practices and Han religion in both Chinese and English.
His contribution has been valuable, but he has omitted much and provides a “cleaned-up” picture
of religious practice that privileges elite practice and literati interpretations. Much research could
be done on cults to animals, to mountains, and to other cults of nature that would indicate more
about the wild or savage dimensions of early Chinese religion. Anna Seidel’s demonstration that
the funerary practices of the period were devoted to the radical and permanent expulsion of the
dead from the world of the living also indicates a less positive, life-affirming religion than Pu
suggests. Seidel’s argument could be reinforced through the study of textual accounts of the
mutilation of corpses to halt attacks by spirits, and of other related practices.
Yet another topic that has spread from anthropology to many fields of history is the study of
the cultivation, manipulation, and depiction of the human body. The relatively small literature on
this topic in Chinese studies has dealt largely with the late imperial period. A few scholars such
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as Li Jianmin, Du Zhengsheng, and Shigehisa Kuriyama have made valuable contributions for the
early period, but we have only made the first steps into examining this important field. Given the
abundance of received and discovered materials relating to medicine and the “cultivation of life
[yang sheng]”, as well as extended discussions of the body in the ritual and philosophical
literature, this remains a massive topic still awaiting exploration.
A last topic that would benefit from a more anthropological (or at least socially contextual)
approach is law. Recent archaeological discoveries have vastly expanded, and chronologically
extended, our corpus of legal materials, yet the conceptual models applied to them have been
largely unchanged. In fact, virtually everything written about law in early China has been
essentially philological work devoted to legal terminology and the details of procedure. As to
what law was or what it did, we get little more than old and discredited formulations, e.g.,
Chinese law was strictly penal law used to impose the will of the state, or vacuous generalities,
e.g., in order to maintain cosmic harmony the Chinese believed that crimes should be punished,
that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the punishment should be modified according to
the status of the convicted. Actual specifics of the distinctive social or political role of law in
early China, e.g., law and the theory of language, law and the social division of labor, the
particular features attributed to a good judge, etc., have never been touched on.
C. Cross-cultural Comparison
The value of such comparisons, primarily with the ancient West but also potentially with early
India or other literate cultures, has been suggested above. However, I should here add one major
reservation. Using the classical West to think about early China, or early China to think about the
classical West, is of value only as a means of opening new questions or suggesting new lines of
research. Studies that explicitly compare the two as in such formulae as “ancient Greece had X
[tragedy, democracy, critical science, citizen armies, etc.] but the Chinese did not” or “ancient
Greece did X while the Chinese did Y” will simply strengthen the received ideas with which we
began rather than producing new ones. The idea of Chinese as the “great other” should be
eliminated from all scholarly discourse. One noteworthy example is G. E. R. Lloyd’s recent
books comparing science in ancient Greece and early China. The two collective volumes of
essays comparing ancient Greece and China also tend to fall into this vein. It is much more
productive to seek similarities or variations of related themes across these cultures, for such a
search will at least force the consideration of new models, rather than simply reiterating
stereotypes.
D. New Technology
New technologies have already begun to make significant contributions to the study of early
China and will continue to do so. Computerized concordances have been created for virtually all
received texts and several of the newly discovered ones. Computerized scanning has made
possible the manipulation of obscure inscriptions, e.g., through the addition of sharp color
differentiation, so that they can be easily read. New technologies also allowed for the retrieval of
some of the fire-damaged materials from Dingshan. They will also hopefully allow for the
introduction of better methods to preserve perishable materials, although there has thus far been
few positive developments in this direction.
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