Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Shaping the Life History of Objects
Published on 20. December 2018
Book
Hardback
308 pages
978-1-108-47257-9 (ISBN)
Description
Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises; 10 Maps; 57 Halftones, black and white; 17 Line drawings, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 259 mm
Width: 179 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
812 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-47257-9 (9781108472579)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Francis Allard | Yan Sun | Kathryn M. Linduff
Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Shaping the Life History of Objects
E-Book
01/2019
Cambridge University Press
€88.99
Available for download
E-Book
12/2018
Cambridge University Press
€73.99
Available for download
Persons
Francis Allard is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Pennsylvania. Allard is a scholar of complex societies, nomadic pastoralism, and the expansion of the Han Empire. Yan Sun is Professor of Art History at Gettysburg College. A scholar of the bronze cultures in north China, she is co-author of Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors (Cambridge, 2017). Katheryn Linduff is Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. A specialist in the art and archaeology of Eurasia and East Asia, she is most recently co-author of Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors (Cambridge, 2017) and editor of several books.
Content
Introduction: memory and agency in Ancient China: shaping the life histories of objects Francis Allard, Yan Sun and Katheryn M. Linduff; 1. Memory, amnesia and the formation of identity symbols in China Gideon Shelach; 2. The lives of shovels and bells in early South China: memory, ritual and the power of destination Francis Allard; 3. The whole and fragmented lives of jade objects from late Neolithic Middle Yangzi river burials (ca. 2000 BC) Sascha Priewe; 4. The social life of salt in Ancient China from the Late Neolithic to the Han Dynasty Pochan Chen; 5. A divergent life history of bronze willow-leaf-shaped swords of Western Zhou China from 11th to c. 10th centuries BCE Yan Sun; 6. Bird-pillar basins and cylindrical vessels: object lineage in Ancient China Xiaolong Wu; 7. Toiletries and the production of social memory from the warring states through the Han (4th c. BCE-3rd c. CE) Sheri Lullo; 8. A biographical approach to the study of the mounted archer motif during the Han Dynasty Leslie Wallace; 9. Dynamic between form and material: the bi disc in Western Han noble burial ritual Eileen Lam; 10. Crossing the Taiwan Strait: contextualizing and re-contextualizing Taiwan Aboriginal Objects (1895-1980) Du Hui; 11. Artifacts that invoke the aura and authority of the ancient Katheryn M. Linduff