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The Continued Creation of Communities of Practice – Finding Variation in the Western Zhou Expansion (1046-771 BCE)
Full text linkThis work explores the question of when and how China became Chinese by studying state sponsored colonial expansion and intercultural interactions during the Western Zhou period (1046-771 BCE). Because Confucius and his followers considered this period the golden age of civilization, scholars have traditionally paid little attention to existing ethnic and cultural diversity and created the illusion that Chinese culture, in Han style, already existed at this early date. However, my investigation of everyday activities, food preparation and ritual events surrounding mortuary customs, highlights the complex relationship between the Zhou the people they encountered.
Following their conquest of the Shang polity in the middle of the 11th century BCE, the Zhou began a swift campaign of colonization during which members of the royal family were sent to defend and expand strategic zones around the new realm. The traditional narrative – one that focuses on the formation of the later unified Chinese Empire and civilization – sees the Zhou as those who, through military expansion and conquest, successfully Sinicized and acculturated the peoples that would make up the Chinese world. In fact the Qin state would draw heavily on this notion of a unified Zhou culture to unite all under heaven and create the first Chinese empire in 221 BCE. Yet this narrative, the product of later political discourse, overemphasizes the homogeneity of Zhou identity and fails to account for the multifaceted nature of Chinese culture and origins.
These interpretations have relied heavily on later historical texts and information gleaned from inscriptions of bronze ritual vessels, themselves biased towards the Zhou elite world view, while archaeology has mainly played a second fiddle to historical reconstructions. My dissertation compared separate regions of the Zhou expansion: Gansu in the west, Shandong peninsula in the East and the Shanxi plains to the north of the Central Plains, which each represent different types of interactions between the local populations and the Zhou newcomers.
Cemeteries are examined to investigate the mortuary customs of local people and ceramic vessels to study culinary traditions, in an effort to show how everyday practices and ritual culture were influenced by the Zhou. Culinary research involved the detailed study and usewear analysis of freshly excavated ceramic assemblages to understand community specific cooking and serving practices. Ceramic assemblages from four pre-Zhou and Zhou sites in Shandong province were compared to sites in the core zone of the Zhou polity to assess the impact of the Zhou arrival. My analysis shows that each of the four sites observed its own community specific culinary traditions: An increase in cooking vessel size at some ‒ indicating a shift from to larger eating parties ‒ while others the way food was cooked: from a mix of roasting and braising cooking modes to a focus on boiling and stewing. In Gansu the Zhou had little impact on the multitude of existing community-specific mortuary practices and remained separate from the local population, while in the Beijing area the Zhou invaders played down their military identity and allowed local groups to participate in their mortuary practices.
Consequently my study finds that the Zhou expansion did not result in the homogenization of the ancient cultural landscape, but instead that the Zhou influence had unequal results: from acceptance to rejection and mostly to its reorganization to suit local needs and agendas. In effect these interactions created various new forms of localized social identities across North China that differ profoundly from the homogeneous Zhou elite culture depicted in the canonical histories, whic have traditionally been used to understand the period. The Zhou influence was regional in scope but local in outcome. Social identities were constantly in flux, and intensified interaction created new forms of localized social identities.AnthropologyZhou China
Culture contact
Communities of practice
Social Identity
Usewear analysis
Foodway
Materializing Identity—A Statistical Analysis of the Western Zhou Liulihe Cemetery
Full text linkQuestions of identity are of paramount importance in research of the Western Zhou period, both in the central plain and among its vassal states. Yet most research done to date has focused on the Zhou bureaucratic order and government. These analyses have been very successful in delineating political culture, administration, and kinship ties, and have provided important information on elite taste and customs. However, they have paid less attention to uncovering other social groupings and relations, and do not systematically address the ways in which local identities were exercised or displayed. This article presents a multivariate statistical analysis of the Liulihe cemetery of the Western Zhou state of Yan. This analysis uncovers new elements comprising the complex social makeup and identity of the Liulihe occupants. These findings provide a richer understanding of the Yan society compared with the traditional approach that centered on the delineation of Zhou political elements and ethnic characteristics. A more intricate society emerges, one not solely defined by the amount of Zhou style it exhibited
Recommended from our members
Materializing Identity—A Statistical Analysis of the Western Zhou Liulihe Cemetery
Full text linkQuestions of identity are of paramount importance in research of the Western Zhou period, both in the central plain and among its vassal states. Yet most research done to date has focused on the Zhou bureaucratic order and government. These analyses have been very successful in delineating political culture, administration, and kinship ties, and have provided important information on elite taste and customs. However, they have paid less attention to uncovering other social groupings and relations, and do not systematically address the ways in which local identities were exercised or displayed. This article presents a multivariate statistical analysis of the Liulihe cemetery of the Western Zhou state of Yan. This analysis uncovers new elements comprising the complex social makeup and identity of the Liulihe occupants. These findings provide a richer understanding of the Yan society compared with the traditional approach that centered on the delineation of Zhou political elements and ethnic characteristics. A more intricate society emerges, one not solely defined by the amount of Zhou style it exhibited.AnthropologyVersion of Recor
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Considering change with archaeological data: reevaluating local variation in the role of the ~4.2k BP event in Northwest China
Full text linkOver the past two decades, environmental studies in research on prehistoric China have been gaining popularity and importance. For Northwest China in particular, climate change, especially the so-called ~4.2k BP event has been seen as the main reason for an alleged collapse of Late Neolithic societies and a transition to pastoral-heavy economies and mobile lifeways. Yet, these explanatory models tend to rely on limited archaeological and environmental data and non-contemporaneous historical data, resulting in simplistic causal relationships between environmental changes and social response.
This paper re-evaluates the Incipient Bronze Age in China's Northwestern region, discussing evidence for climate change and its exact dates, as well as textual and archaeological evidence. We argue that the old narratives perpetuating the image of a dichotomy between Steppe and Sown are inaccurate, while large-scale models of region-wide subsistence change in response to climate cooling tend to disregard local developments and group-specific responses as well as chronological issues. Focusing on the Xindian and Siwa archaeological phenomena, this paper provides a view into sub-regional responses to this climate event, warning against simplistic broad-brush reconstructions and calling for both a return to archaeological fundamentals and large-scale intensive fieldwork and interdisciplinary studies involving archaeologists, paleobotanists, zooarchaeologists, isotope specialists, and climate scientists
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