The Biography of a Ritual Vessel: On Naming, and the Dialectics of Authenticity

Abstract

This essay attempts to sketch a biography for jia 斝 , a type of ritual vessel once common during the Shang 商 (c. 1600-1046 BC) and Zhou 周 (c. 1046-249 BC) periods. While its name, in various written forms, survives, the knowledge of how it looked like was lost after the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). The mismatch between the name and the artifact nonetheless became a fertile ground for conjectural and creative formulations of the idea of authenticity. The present essay identifies three key episodes in the “ life” of jia : the Song Dynasty cataloging of ancient artifacts, early 20th-century research on oracle bone script, and the mid-20th century debate on materialism and the hermeneutics of fiction. They correspond to moments of transformation and breakthrough in intellectual history, when scholars attempted to solve the puzzle presented by this vessel through innovative philological, iconographical, and literary methods. By investigating these episodes, this essay argues that, although the establishment of historic authenticity relies heavily on object-based evidence, the interpretation of the latter is conditioned by the act of naming and the narrative of provenance. More importantly, the very concept of authenticity is a regime constructed out of the relationship between persons, names, and artifacts, and is itself historicized through the ever-developing episteme.