The "Ancestors' Family Instructions": Authority and Sovereignty in Song China

Abstract

The "Ancestors' Family Instructions":Authority and Sovereignty in Song China Deng Xiaonan, Christian Lamouroux, and Luo Yinan New Appreciation Deng Xiaonan and Christian Lamouroux, "The 'Ancestors' Family Instructions': Authority and Sovereignty in Song China." JSYS 35 (2005): 79–97. This article presents a new interpretation of the Song literati's culture of practice, which was constituted by their conviction that they preserved the memory of the imperial "Ancestors' Family Instructions," their self-identity as the guardians of these "Instructions" in court politics, and their performative interactions in various historical contexts guided by these imaginative roles. Professors Deng and Lamouroux therefore challenge commonly-held views that take the competition amongst various political actors such as emperors, factions, and bureaucrats as the major theme of Song political life. Instead, the authors successfully revealed the constitutive power of political culture that shaped the content of elites' competition; it also points to the role of culture in directing the changing trajectory of Song elite politics. Deng and Lamouroux's new picture of Song political life portrays literati not as self-centered players of politics who were devoted to pursuing personal goals that were shaped by material interests and beliefs regarding ideal order. Rather, the conflicts and compromises of literati reflect their common recognition of the same cultural framework, known as the "Ancestors' Family Instructions," through which they understood themselves and others. The authors' research therefore reveals these "Instructions" as the hinge on which political life became practical. Even though political life appeared to revolve around personal interests and beliefs, it nevertheless hinged on processes of intersubjective imagination, in which political participants integrated their discrete personal experiences and perceptions with the cultural framework that bestowed meanings upon both the self and other interacting human subjects. Within this new picture, the recurring tensions and conflicts amongst Song literati did not foretell the disintegration of the literati community. On the contrary, it reflected a collective literati imaginary that was shaped by the same cultural framework that coordinated the meanings, norms, and justifications for their actions. This article inherits the academic tradition of Chinese historiography, a tradition that gained prominence in the first half of twentieth century, thanks to such great Chinese historians as Chen Yinke 陳寅恪, Qian Mu 錢穆 and [End Page 133] Deng Guangming 鄧廣銘, who believed that historical research should be an endless intellectual odyssey in which scholars strive to understand different worlds of meaning: not only those of the research objects, but also their own. Moreover, it also establishes a common ground between Chinese historiography and the ontological tradition of European social theory, which views the area of politics not simply as the aggregation of the behavior of individuals who are conceived as bounded and purposive actors, but the processes through which interrelated agents unfolded their understandings of the existential world. After its publication, this work has paved way for a great number of succeeding studies in both Chinese and Anglophone scholarship that have been continuously reshaping the landscape of Song political history. A new way of "understanding" Song history has emerged among Song scholars, who can imagine historical agents' life-streams as flowing side by side with their own, enabling them to search for a Song history that is meaningful to their own age. [End Page 134] luo yinan 羅禕楠 peking university What constraints existed on the power of the emperor in premodern China? This is a question of interest to historians of China as well as our colleagues in other fields, and we offer this research report, a partial translation of an article published in the French journal Annales—Histoire, Sciences sociales in 2004,1 as a preliminary answer. We focus on the development of the concept of the "Ancestors' Family Instructions" (zuzong jiafa 祖宗家法 or zuzong zhi fa 祖宗之法) during the Song dynasty—widely acknowledged to be both the beginning of autocratic rule and the birth of the bureaucratic state. First, we would like to present some definitions of the concept, and then we will locate it within three different historical contexts: the political, the ideological, and the administrative. We conclude with some observations on the role played by the "Ancestors' Instructions" in the making of the bureaucratic state. Many Song texts mention "Ancestors' Family Instructions." The...