1,720,978 research outputs found
Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens and Marianne Bujard, Les Dynasties Qin et Han : Histoire générale de la Chine (221 av. J.-C.-220 apr. J.-C.), sous la direction de Damien Chaussende, Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 2017
No full textNylan Michael. Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens and Marianne Bujard, Les Dynasties Qin et Han : Histoire générale de la Chine (221 av. J.-C.-220 apr. J.-C.), sous la direction de Damien Chaussende, Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 2017. In: Études chinoises, vol. 37, n°2,2018. pp. 195-201
Recommended from our members
“Discarding That, Adopting This” 去彼取此: The Northern Wei and Stories of Chinese Legal History
Get PDFWhether they know it or not, many views of Chinese legal history continue to rely on the idea that Chinese law became thoroughly Confucian thousands of years ago and has since resisted all efforts to adjust that underlying philosophy. This “Confucianization” hypothesis represents a consequential misunderstanding: in the US, it adds fuel both to increasingly dangerous Sino-American hostilities and anti-Asian violence, while in China it underpins the government’s ethno-nationalist expansionism in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. This dissertation begins by examining the historical roots and some of the present-day effects of this view.A key assertion of the Confucianization hypothesis is that Chinese law was never significantly influenced by any of the “non-Chinese” groups who governed the territory administered today by the People’s Republic of China. In fact, supporters of this idea claim, Chinese culture in general and law in particular was so attractive to these outside groups that they adopted it almost wholesale. A prime example offered as evidence of this picture of largely untroubled cultural homogeneity is the Northern Wei 北魏 (386-535), a dynasty founded by a formerly nomadic group which conquered and then ruled China for a century and a half. In a speech several years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping 習近平 singled out the Northern Wei and its adoption of Chinese practices as proof of the unique power and worth of Chinese culture.I challenge such claims by examining two major texts relating to Northern Wei law: the administrative and legal treatises in the History of Wei 魏書, a government-sponsored history written in the sixth century by Wei Shou 魏收 (506-572). Many of the most reductionist views of Chinese legal history draw on these texts, while many of the scholars focusing on the ethnic and cultural complexity of Northern Wei (contra the Confucianization hypothesis) have turned away from the History of Wei, leaving it primarily to those with the most polemical ends. I argue that these texts actually reflect a diversity of theory and practice far beyond what is generally recognized, and that the origins of important features of imperial Chinese law and administration can be found in the synthesis of approaches these treatises record. By focusing on that diversity, this dissertation hopes to revive interest in works that offer the potential to further complicate some of the simplistic but still-influential attitudes to both the Northern Wei and to Chinese history as a whole
Recommended from our members
Paperwork Before Paper: Law and Materiality in China's Early Empires (221 BCE-220 CE)
Get PDFxThis dissertation examines the role of law in the formation of China’s earliest empires (221 BCE-220 CE). Using thousands of manuscripts written on bamboo and wood which have been excavated in China in the several decades, I argue that legal practice was central to the formation of imperial identity. Building on theoretical insights from the anthropology of paperwork, as well as from recent studies of manuscript culture, I argue that legal manuscripts can be read not only as representations or records of social conditions, but as material objects whose production and circulation itself constituted new forms of sociality. Eschewing a conventional law and society approach, my dissertation follows a diverse array of actors —women, servants, magistrates, foreigners and family members— as they use practices of writing and law to lodge claims of status, identity, kinship, and property. In linking newly excavated manuscripts with discussions of law and materiality, this dissertation aims to challenge multiple orthodoxies derived from notions of European legal and bureaucratic modernity. Accounts of early law have long cited certain types of legal text, such as penal statutes, as evidence for the idea that early law was informed by the rationality of state and directed at social control. By locating legal practice not in state sanction but in the circulation of legal manuscripts, I am able to reframe this persistent debate to take account both of newly discovered manuscripts and also to interpret receive sources in new ways. My dissertation thus complements and provides crucial context for revisionist trends in the historiography of imperial China that query the central presumption of despotism and legal orientalism. By linking law to material practices, I am further able to sidestep teleological narratives of rationalization and state control, and to provide a plausible explanation of why imperial legal culture could persist both beyond the geographic reach of the imperial court and long after its collapse
Recommended from our members
Courtly Institutions, Status, and Politics in Early Imperial China (206 BCE-9 CE)
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates the imperial court during the Western Han dynasty, the first period of sustained, unified rule in imperial China. It asks the following questions: What was the court? How was it conceived? How did these conceptions of the court change over the two centuries of the Western Han? As in many European languages, the word for "court" in classical Chinese, chao 朝, could refer equally to a space, a ritual action, or a group of people. The dissertation investigates changes in these three meanings of the word in order to answer the above questions. In the process, it shows that key changes in Western Han political culture were rooted in the transformation of the imperial court, which grew significantly in size, population, and wealth over the course of the dynasty. Participants in court life and political began to fashion their own definitions of court institutions, articulating new ideals about courtly status and life at court and fashioning new conventions in administrative and literary writing. This capacity of the imperial court to absorb more people and afford them a personal interest in the court ultimately contributed to the longevity of the dynasty. The dissertation thus argues that the imperial court was just as much a product of courtier writings and political struggles as it was a tool for the exertion of centralized political power. In making this argument, the dissertation emphasizes that almost all of our extant received sources from the Western Han period, particularly the Shiji and Hanshu, were produced at the imperial court. It highlights the problems of culling these court sources in order to outline institutions of power and court social groups. As an alternative approach, the dissertation instead emphasizes critical readings of these same sources in order to understand how members of the court during the Western Han characterized and understood the world that they inhabited. In doing so, it draws connections between studies of court culture and literature on the one hand and court institutions and political power on the other
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Recommended from our members
Navigating Precedents: Law and Ritual in Early Imperial China
Get PDFThis thesis constructs an account of the force and functions of legal, ritual, and classical precedents, through close analysis of the court debates during which Han officials invoked them to champion policies, to reform rites, or to assess crimes. Each chapter considers the extent of the force of Han precedents in Han policy debates, the strategies through which policymakers challenged this force, and the roles that the Classics reportedly played in arguments. Chapter 1 examines a series of arguments that Han emperors should abandon their commitments to following the precedents set by an honored forebear, Emperor Wu (r. 141-86 BCE). This chapter will show that, throughout the Western Han, it was far from settled as to whether many of Emperor Wu’s precedents should be deemed binding or problematic. Chapter 2 challenges the common assumption that Han law was an extension of the ruler’s will. As it will show, Han legal thinkers were keenly aware that legal precedents could easily be inappropriately manipulated, often to the detriment of the ruler’s authority. For this reason, fair legal administration often required adherence to principles that transcended both obligations to the ruler and to following the letter of the written laws. Turning then to ritual, Chapter 3 examines the changing uses of the posthumous title of “Honored Ancestor” (zong 宗) and the Han and pre-Han precedents that policymakers invoked in debates over its meaning. While most scholars have assumed that these debates were settled by recourse to citations from an orthodox classical tradition, this chapter will instead consider how court members constructed the meanings to be attached to this ritual honor through successive reforms, and how the political concerns that guided these reforms likely shaped court members’ interpretations of the Classics, rather than the reverse
Recommended from our members
Civil Laws and Civil Justice in Early China
Get PDFCivil laws and civil justice in early China have not received sufficient scholarly attention, because scholars tend to assume that laws in pre-modern China were merely criminal laws promulgated and enforced to maintain public order. This dissertation challenges that view by analyzing excavated evidence and reexamining transmitted evidence.Chapter One establishes the existence of civil laws in early China by examining non-criminal case reports preserved in the Juyan strips and by assessing the role of district bailiffs in handling civil disputes. Chapter Two further demonstrates the existence of civil laws and reveals the civil justice system by studying domestic statutes and how two cases of inheritance disputes preserved in the Comprehensive Discussion of Customs (Fengsu tongyi, comp. ca. 200) illustrate the application of these statutes. Chapter Three examines two important civil legal concepts: zhi (a straight account of the facts) and mingfen (title and portion) to reveal the underlining notions that uniformly guided the application of the civil laws. Chapter Four, the concluding chapter, goes beyond the boundaries of civil laws to address larger issues, such as the legal ideal of reforming people's morals to reduce lawsuits, the relationship between rituals and laws, and the Classics as a source of legal authority in litigations. Overall, I conclude that civil laws and civil justice existed in early China; and that this distinctive body of civil laws, while not systematically codified, were substantial, sophisticated, and empire-wide in application and authority
Recommended from our members
Heaven is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Religion and Human Agency in Early Imperial China
Get PDFThis dissertation is about the religious (extra-human) legitimation of political power during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE- 9CE). It reexamines the correlation between religious, cultural, and political unity, closely analyzing Sima Qian's (ca. 145-86 BCE) Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), the first universal narrative of Chinese civilization from its origins through the first century of the Western Han empire. This text became the model for all dynastic histories until 1911, when the imperial age came to an abrupt end. The contrast between Sima Qian's treatment of religious practices, official and unofficial, and accounts in the classical Greco-Roman historiography about imperial cults and propaganda provides an intriguing point of departure from which my thesis questions the applicability of paradigms imported and applied to the case of early China from the ancient Mediterranean world (e.g., “religion,” “metaphysics,” “divinity,” “sacred vs. secular,” “scripture,” “myth,” and “ritual”). This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the relationship between “religion,” “morality,” and “cultural identity” in China by calling into question those very categories. By adopting a comparative approach, it shows how the discourse on the sacred by historians and philosophers has been often informed by intellectual prejudices and pre-formed conceptions that have hindered the mutual understanding between East and West. To overcome these obstacles, this dissertation proposes a new trans-cultural attitude aimed both at the deconstruction of these ethnocentric biases and at the reconstruction of Sima Qian's own analytical criteria and concerns
Recommended from our members
The Matter of Wu and Yue: Story Cycles in Early Chinese Historiography
Get PDFThis dissertation proposes that writings about the past in the classical era (323 BCE- 316 CE) are best viewed as rhetorical constructs, rather than history. Classical-era writers were interested in the past mainly because history provided useful examples, good and bad, for addressing sociopolitical problems in the present. In writing the histories of the kingdoms of Wu and Yue (sixth-fourth centuries BCE), classical-era writers, centuries removed in time, space, and customs from the southeast, took individual anecdotes and speeches associated with famous historical figures such as Wu Zixu and Fan Li, which were in oral and written forms, for didactic and even entertainment purposes. These anecdotes and speeches they inserted into a chronological order in order to “reconstruct” history” and repurpose it. By examining nine complete versions of the Wu-Yue legends from the received texts, “side-by-side.” this thesis attempts to show that the early empires' rhetorical needs shaped the structures and logics of the narratives that did develop. For that reason, characters and events central to one story version were sometimes omitted from other versions of the same story, and frequently rhetorical devices such as dramatic irony were employed to make the narrative arcs of the versions more memorable. For modern scholars writing histories of early China, this hypothesis has important implications for how we understand the unseen processes by which our sources were compiled and transmitted, which, in turn, suggests that scholars need to modify their current methodological approaches to the early histories, legends, and myths, given that the stuff of history was not usually intended primarily to convey reliable accounts of the remote past.
As was the case with the “histories” of Wu and Yue, stories – even stories about the most famous historical figures from those regions – tell little about the inhabitants of those kingdoms over time, even the rulers of those kingdoms. Attention to the epigraphical evidence shows us that many rulers besides Goujian were unknown to the authors and compilers of Qin and Han. Even by Western Han, their strange-sounding names were only half-remembered in jumbled and confused king lists, and key events during their reigns tended to be forgotten or unremarked. Perhaps forgetting some part of the past allowed Goujian and other semi-legendary figures from the remote past to be “remembered” in a new way
- …
