Ancestral Sacrifice Research Articles

From royal court to ancestral shrine: transposition of command documents in Early Chinese epigraphy

While the earliest attested Chinese manuscripts date only from the late fifth century BC, bronze inscriptions cast between the tenth and eighth centuries BC provide abundant evidence of the administrative use of manuscripts at the royal court, especially during the appointment ceremonies in which the royal secretaries read out the king's command to the aristocratic elite. These command documents were sometimes quoted at length in inscriptions cast on the ritual bronze vessels by these appointees, who had them displayed in their ancestral shrines and used them in ancestral sacrifices and ensuing feasts. Based on the epigraphic evidence, this paper explores various aspects of manuscript production in the Western Zhou administration (1045--771 BC) and investigates the complex editorial process behind the textual transfer from the command documents onto bronze ritual paraphernalia. Through an analysis of various editorial approaches to the composition of bronze inscriptions, the value and status imputed to manuscripts by Western Zhou aristocracy has been further discussed. Such reconstruction of lost manuscript practices can enrich our understanding of textual production not only during the Western Zhou period but in Early China in general.

Sacredness and Secularity: Evolution of Sacred Space of Traditional Villages in Western Hunan

Sacred space is an important space form of Chinese traditional villages, which combines religious belief, humanistic belief and complex space. Taking Gaoyi Village, Jingping Village of the North Dong Dynasty, Huangdu Village, Pingtan Village and Dutou Village of the South Dong Dynasty as examples, the paper analyzes the evolution of the sacred space, the change of the sacred space function and its influence mechanism in the traditional villages of the Dong nationality in western Hunan through in-depth interviews with the author. The research found that: 1) The sacred space of Dong traditional villages experienced the Ming and Qing dynasties: the space shape was preserved, and the ancestral sacrifices were the main things; During the period from the Republic of China to New China: the function of sacred space changed; After the reform and opening up: the space form is restored and the sacred space is protected. 2) The evolution of the function of the sacred space is in line with the formulation and adjustment of the social system, presenting a sacred space of religious belief type, humanistic belief type, composite type. 3) The evolution of sacred space is actually the result of the progressive evolution of agricultural culture, industrial culture, new era compound culture and other factors in different periods. 4) In different periods and different spatial scales, different sacred spaces based on local cultural identity have also been formed in the South and North Dong.

PUBERTY RITES FOR GIRLS AND BOYS IN SELECTED AFRICAN NOVELS

Puberty rites are indispensable in African social and organizational life. They serve as channels through which African children are exposed and taught how to cope/behave to be considered as dignified sons and daughters of their parents and societies. But the influences of Western education, modernization, and Christian missionary counter-teachings in Africa have put an obstacle to such traditional practices which serve as suckle of good mores among African children. Today, the African children are left without benchmarks and this has led them to social vices observed in African societies. Since writers, among others, serve as custodians of events in societies according to time and space, girls’ and boys’ puberty rites have been reproduced in the fictional writings of African writers like Ngugi’s The River Between (1965), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Nyantakyi’s Ancestral Sacrifice (1998). This article has examined how the above African writers have reproduced the puberty rites for girls and boys in their novels through the concept of rites of passage. As findings, the African writers have proved via their major characters that puberty rites for boys and girls are more or less one of the strong African traditions where the young adults are taught socio-cultural expectations of their society and how to meet up with future challenges ahead. Indeed, the girls’ and boys’ puberty rites are built on formal teaching in initiation ceremonies and on informal teaching through watching and imitating. So, the puberty rites for boys and girls start from informal teachings at home and before being societal formal teaching. On the one hand, right from home, parents associate the boys and girls who have reached the puberty stage around them to teach them things that are socially accepted in their community. Parents spend and make their boys and girls their friends. In this period, boys are encouraged to sit with their fathers and girls with their mothers to learn from them. On the other hand, it is societal when the boys and girls take part in the puberty ceremonies established for boys and girls in their community. But the conflicts of religious ideology between the whites and Africans have served as a bottleneck to the order of things in the novels. In short, the African writers have painted a vivid picture of these rites in their works so that it could not easily disappear because of globalization which is seducing most Africans to copy and paste the foreign ways of doing things. Remarkably, it seems the writers attempt to say to contemporary Africans to examine all things but retain what is good by allowing some of their radical main characters to die and by permitting the temperate ones to live to juxtapose good things in the Christian ways and both in African traditional ways.

A Study on the Return of Local Emotions of Ancestor Worship-A Case Study of Dangjia Village in Hancheng City

In the current environment of social change and development, the decline of Chinese rural culture has become increasingly prominent. Taking the Dangjia village as an example, this paper analyzes the relationship between the village, the ancestral culture and the local emotions by applying the method of text analysis and interviews. It is found that the ancestral culture is the core embodiment of the rural culture. With the development of the economic marketization, the ancestral public space gradually disappears, and the main body of ancestor worship is from collective to individual, and the ritual is from the complex to the simple. It reveals the decline of Chinese traditional culture and the weakening of local emotional attachment. This paper puts forward the suggestions of the local emotional return of the ancestral sacrifice culture by analyzing the internal and external causes of the emotional changes of the ancestors, and provides theoretical guidance for the rural development.

Real People, Real Dogs, and Pigs for the Ancestors: The Moral Universe of “Domestication” in Indigenous Taiwan

ABSTRACTHumans and other animals often engage in multispecies relations that go beyond classical definitions of “domestication,” not least because there are political dimensions to those relations. External interference with human–animal relationships has notably been part of indigenous experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism. I examine here changes in the triangular relationship between humans, dogs, and pigs among the indigenous Seejiq Truku of Taiwan. Dogs, as hunting companions, are traditionally associated with men's work; pigs, used in ancestral sacrifices, are aligned with women's work. Pigs are mediators with the spirit world, as ancestor spirits respond to regular pig sacrifices by providing prey to hunters. Dogs are important as hunting companions that make it possible to catch boars and other animals. These human–animal relations have undergone change because of the integration of the Seejiq into new markets, the state, and legal regulations about both hunting and the keeping of animals. Human–animal relations also articulate with dynamics of gender and class in a changing political economy. The Seejiq frame their intrahuman and interspecies relations in terms of Gaya, their sacred ancestral law. By affirming the value of their particular type of multispecies community, the Seejiq demonstrate resilience and a strong defense of sovereignty. [multispecies ethnography, indigenous peoples, Taiwan, human–animal relations, postcolonialism]PUSU KARI QRQUR Pnegluban seejiq ni kana samat o saw bi tkrakaw sun imi “nguciq,” aji asaw quri pnegluban quri kmlawa ka nii. Qarat paah ngangut saw pnegluban seejiq ni samat nii o kibi saw niqan cih rutut na quri saw yahan kmnlawa seejiq ni kbukuy yahan kmnlawa seejiq. Qtaun mu hini o, tru pnegluban quri seejiq, huling, ni babuy mniq alang Truku Teywan hini. Huling o, ida tuhuy snaw musa maduk tkjiyax; babuy do o, duhuy kkuyuh musa bi thmuku rudan sbiyaw. Babuy o, mniq kska seejiq ni utux, kibi dmka saw muway samat seejiq maduk ka utux rudan. Huling ka pusu balay, aji wana tuhuy seejiq nanak, asi ka smtama dhyaan musa maduk bowyak ni kana samat. Pnegluban seejiq ni kana samat ni o, wada kmpriyux da; yasa wada tmay burah alang ni kndsan ka seejiq ni kmbryux kana ka uda saw maduk uri da. Pnegluban seejiq ni kana samat o kibi saw rmngaw quri kmbriyux kkuyuh ni snaw aji uri o sblaiq ni qrinut babaw dxgan sayang. Seejiq o, rmlung saw quri pnegluban kska seejiq ni aji uri o pnegluban isil siida do, asi ka rmlung gaya rudan dha nanak. Saw ni qmita pusu malu kska alang ana manu o, pqtayun dha ka lbay dha ni hlakkun dha bi ka saw quri brax dha. [pelealay lala knlgan, seejiq tnpusu, Teywan, plutut seejiq ni samat, bukuy kmlawa]

The Formation and meaning of Chinese Ancient Ancestral Sacrifice

본고는 고대중국의 조선제사에 있어서 그 의미와 그 용례에 주목하여 祭祖 (高?神)의 儀禮와 祖先祭祀의 土臺가 되는 ‘?祭’의 기능을 검토하고, 조선제사의 근간인 종법사상 · 종족의 의미와 宗子와 ‘宗?承繼’를 파악하였다. 이를 통해서 중국고대의 조선제사의 형성과 의미를 살펴보았다. ‘追遠’의 의미를 지닌 祖先祭祀는 반드시 ‘고매신(高?神)’에게 조선제사를 올려서 그 ‘자손’을 얻고 후사를 이었다. 고대중국의 ‘祭祖’의 範圍로는 공적이 많은 炎帝와 黃帝가 포함되었다. ?祭가 天子祭祀의 禮儀制度가 된 것은 일종의 상징적 의미의 체계로서, 문화적 종교적 정치적인 강렬한 사회통합 기능으로서 질서기능을 지니고 있다는 것이다. 조선제사는 씨족혈연의 윤리질서와 직결되고, 예로서 관계망을 형성한 禮的秋序를 이룩하였다. 고대중국의 종법사회에서는 신분질서가 나타났고, 그 위계질서는 곧 예적질서로서 종족간의 적장자와 그 자손의 구별이 엄격한 종법에서 조선제사에 대한 질서도 형성되었다. 조선제사는 종족을 묶어주는 매개체 역할을 했을 뿐만 아니라 종족공동체가 宗? · 宗廟에서 함께 조선제사를 모시면서 그 종적관계를 유지시켰다. ‘支子不祭’규제로 종족의 의미는 공고해졌다. 중국 고대의 祭祖 權力이 사회상층에서 사회하층으로 확대되었을 뿐만 아니라，’庶子不祭’ 전통도 타파되고, 가정마다 모두 독립적인 ‘祖先祭祀單位’를 형성하였다. 마침내 공동체적인 ‘宗?承繼’은 조선제사의 명분을 공고히 하면서 사회적인 통합기능에 영향을 주었던 것이다.

Christ as Once for All Sacrifice: A Cultural Reading of Hebrews

The practice of sacrifices to the ancestors is still prevalent among some African Christians and it is inspired by various factors such as religious considerations or political aspirations through African renaissance. Furthermore, scholars argue as to whether this practice of sacrifices to the ancestors is Biblical or not. This article aims to determine that, from Hebrews, the demise of Old Testament sacrifices brings an end to ancestral sacrifice.

Controlling parasites, understanding practices: The biosocial complexity of a One Health intervention for neglected zoonotic helminths in northern Lao PDR

A parasitological survey in northern Lao PDR showed a remote ethnic minority village to be hyper-endemic for Taenia solium, a Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) that impacts human and pig health. An intervention combining human Mass Drug Administration (MDA) with porcine vaccination and antihelmintic treatment was then implemented, targeting both T. solium and other soil-transmitted helminths. To understand the biosocial complexity of this integrated One Health intervention, we conducted a rapid ethnographic study exploring the transmission dynamics of T. solium and locally acceptable long-term control options. Informed by two years of project work in the village, this included six focus group discussions, 35 semi-structured interviews, a latrine survey, a school-based education meeting, participant observation and many unstructured interviews conducted over two weeks in October 2013. We found that risk behaviours were mediated by various social determinants including limited market access, interrelationships between alcohol, ancestral sacrifices and the consumption of raw pork, seasonal variations and poor latrine coverage. Only sixteen percent of households had latrines, attributed to the unacceptability of dry latrines, lack of water access, poor building techniques and poverty. Whilst women could explain T. solium transmission, most men and children could not, revealing that distributed posters/leaflets relied too heavily on text and ambiguous images. Compliance with MDA was high due to trust between project staff and village leaders. However understandings of pharmacology, minor side effects, human migration and children's fear of worms may lead to resistance in future programmes. Our research highlights the complexities of controlling T. solium and other soil-transmitted helminths in a remote ethnic minority village and the need to integrate biomedical and participatory approaches. Although we showcase the heuristic value of using rapid ethnography to inform intervention strategies as part of a One Health/NTD agenda, we also identify several possible paradoxes and conundrums in embedding locally-grounded biosocial analysis into NTD programmes. These need to be acknowledged and negotiated by multidisciplinary teams.

Big Ding 鼎 and China Power: Divine Authority and Legitimacy

Paleographic, art historical, metallurgical, and archaeological data are used to identify the monumental bronze tetrapod ding vessel as a preeminent symbol of state authority and divine power during the Shang era of ca. 1640–1046 b.c.e . Paleographic data based on oracle bone terms and inscriptions includes reference to ding as a verb of ancestral sacrifice, and the ding vessel in the specialized compound, yiding , referring to the ritually and metamorphically empowered ding vessel. Art historical data accounts for differences in form and style between ding tetrapod and tripod types. Metallurgical data derives primarily from a unique source of high radiogenic lead in southern China exploited during the early Shang period. Archaeological data derives from excavated Shang tetrapod ding in royal burial or cache burials.

Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture by Paul R. Katz (review)

Book Reviews 95 Holloway’s book is problematic on many fronts. His model of what counts as religion is iconoclastic at best. Although there are many ways to argue that moral cultivation can indeed relate to religion, to lay such an emphasis on the role of faith, the faith that humanity is a physical substance and the faith that such a physical substance can be deployed in the world to create a religious community, would be very difficult to sustain against a generally Confucian worldview that for the most part resists the label religion, its dependence on the role of Heaven, ancestral sacrifice, funerary rites, and other forms of ritual notwithstanding. Second, his concentration on the tension between humanity and righteousness is a serious and valid topic of scholarly inquiry, but his conscious claim to ignore any examples from the received texts other than what is found in the “Tang Yu zhidao” radically reduces his argument to a kind of word-play with the text. One might compare his treatment to the masterful study of the same tension in Sarah Allan’s The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legends in Early China,4 which he cites but never discusses. But perhaps the most problematic aspect of Holloway’s monograph is his refusal to engage Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue, which laid the groundwork for any study of “The Five Aspects.” Holloway has only two brief and tangential footnotes to that work. Finally, Holloway often claims that his study is of the “Guodian texts,” but he only deals with two in any depth (“The Five Aspects” and “Tang Yu zhidao”); a much more valuable study would have situated his topic within the total corpus of excavated texts from Guodian as well as the numerous sites dated to roughly the same period, and in such a way he could have built upon the foundations laid by previous scholars, including Allan and Csikszentmihalyi. THOMAS MICHAEL, Boston University Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture PAUL R. KATZ. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. xiii, 224 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-44345-6. £70.00, US$140.00 hardcover. In this fascinating and groundbreaking study historian Paul Katz investigates the intimate links between China’s legal culture and its religious culture, combining textual analysis with ethnographic investigation, all the while drawing analytical inspirations from legal 4 San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981. 96 Journal of Chinese Religions anthropology as well as performance studies and speech act theories. The book should interest scholars in Chinese history (including Chinese diaspora studies), Chinese religions, ritual studies, legal history, comparative law, and anthropology (especially legal anthropology). After a useful introductory chapter summarizing the book’s key arguments and methodologies, Katz opens the book with a comparative exploration of how the idea of a “judicial underworld” developed in the West and in ancient China. As opposed to the Western, Christian model of a “moral death” that hinged upon a person’s status of having been saved or not (by God’s grace), the Chinese model of how a person fares after death is based on judgments on his acts while alive (an amalgam of Daoist and Buddhist conceptions); instead of the Christian “Final Judgment,” the Chinese developed an underworld court system that mirrored the worldly courts, including the details of bureaucratic, judicial procedures. Judicial deities emerged that specialized in handling underworld (and sometimes not so underworld) justice matters, the most prominent of which are the City God (城隍 Chenghuang) and the Emperor of the Eastern Peak (東嶽大帝 Dongyue dadi). Religious specialists such as Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and plaint writers provided ritual services for a fee to aid people in seeking justice or attempting to dodge divine punishment. One intriguing question arises: Why didn’t similar legalistic and judicial metaphors develop in the Christian West during the Roman times when law became such a prominent institution? Or did the Christian model supersede an earlier Roman model that resembled more the Chinese model? In chapter 2 Katz introduces the key notion of “the judicial continuum” to highlight the intermixing of, and “reverberation” between, a wide range of legal and dispute resolution practices found in traditional and modern China that encompasses not...

Making Claims about Standardization and Orthopraxy in Late Imperial China

This article presents research on popular cults and ancestral sacrifice from the Fuzhou region in order to reflect on James Watson’s theories of ortho-praxy and standardization. It argues that substantive standardization and adherence to orthopraxy should be distinguished analytically from claims to standardization and adherence to orthopraxy, that the historical sources sometimes indicate the latter rather than the former, and that the distinction between the two limits the theories’ capacity to fully account for social and cultural integration in late imperial China.

Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and Orthopraxy in China

This special issue contains five reassessments of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on the role of ritual in cultural standardization: Kenneth Pomeranz (History, UC Irvine) examines the Bixia yuanjun cult; Michael Szonyi (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) analyzes the Five Emperors’ cult and ancestral sacrifices in Fuzhou; Paul Katz (Modern History, Academia Sinica) discusses the cult of Marshal Wen and blood sacrifices to banners; Melissa Brown (Anthropological Sciences, Stanford) takes up the case of frontier acculturation; and Donald Sutton (History, Carnegie Mellon) looks at death rituals. To round out the special issue, Professor Watson adds his own rejoinder. On the basis of these essays and other recent scholarship, the introduction in turn questions the effectiveness of state standardization, outlines the phenomenon of heteroprax standardization, argues that “pseudo-orthoprax” local elites subverted the state’s cultural policies, reconsiders the applicability of the paired terms “ritual” and “belief,” and underlines the subjectivity of the notion of Chineseness.

Practicing kinship: lineage and descent in late imperial China

Presenting a new approach to the history of Chinese kinship, this book attempts to bridge the gap between anthropological and historical scholarship on the Chinese lineage by considering its development in terms of individual and collective strategies. Based on a wide range of newly available sources such as lineage genealogies and stone inscriptions, as well as oral history and extensive observation of contemporary ritual practice in the field, this work explores the historical development of kinship in villages of the Fuzhou region of southeastern Fujian province. In the late imperial period (1368-1911), the people of Fuzhou compiled lengthy genealogies, constructed splendid ancestral halls, and performed elaborate collective rituals of ancestral sacrifice, testimony to the importance they attached to organized patrilineal kinship. In their writings on the lineage, members of late imperial elites presented such local behavior as the straightforward expression of universal and eternal principles. In this book, the author shows that kinship in the Fuzhou region was a form of strategic practice that was always flexible and negotiable. In using the concepts and institutions of kinship, individuals and groups redefined them to serve their own purposes, which included dealing with ethnic differentiation, competing for power and status, and formulating effective responses to state policies. Official efforts to promote a neo-Confucian agenda, to register land and population, and to control popular religion drove people to organize themselves on kinship principles and to institutionalize their kinship relationships. Local efforts to turn compliance with official policies, or at least claims of compliance, to local advantage meant that policymakers were continually frustrated. Because kinship was constituted in a complex of representations, it was never stable or fixed, but fluid and multiple. In offering this new perspective on this history of Chinese lineage practices, the author also provides new insights into the nature of cultural integration and state control in traditional Chinese society.

Conceptualizing Corporations and Kinship: Comparative Law and Development Theory in a Chinese Perspective

This article places China's recent Company Law in a broader historical and cultural perspective. Noting that the Company Law consists of transplanted Western corporation law, the article argues that, in a new cultural context, even the most basic provisions of transplanted law are liable to be interpreted in new and unexpected ways. To provide an informed understanding of that context, the article begins by analyzing China's indigenous tradition of corporation law. Challenging the conventional wisdom that late imperial China had no entities analogous to the Western business corporation, the article argues that traditional Chinese family law performed many of the functions that modern American corporation law performs today. Bringing together recent scholarship in Chinese kinship anthropology and Chinese legal history, the article outlines the historical development of Chinese clan corporations. Entrepreneurs wishing to overcome official Confucian hostility to profit-seeking utilized the legal form of the so-called ancestral trust to pool property for investment-ostensibly in order to provide for ancestral sacrifices, but in practice to create professionally managed commercial enterprises. The article illustrates the various ways in which these clan corporations engaged in creative contracting to construct business entities that indeed formally corresponded to the idealized Confucian family defined by patrilineal kinship. The article also shows how twentieth-century attempts to transplant Western corporation law have achieved limited success, while the family itself has continued to maintain a distinctive legal status, and the Chinese have continued to take advantage of that status in organizing their businesses. Next, the article contrasts the traditional Chinese view of the corporation as a kinship group with the contract-based view of recent American corporate jurisprudence. Although the two views offer diametrically opposed justifications for a similar business entity, the Chinese and American traditions are in fact functionally much closer than they first appear to be. The article concludes by speculating on the jurisprudential significance of this fact and its implications for policy-makers engaged in development. Despite their surface similarities, Chinese and Western corporation law are unlikely to converge in a meaningful way so long as their legal, political, and discursive interpretations remain informed by distinct local understandings of the nature and purpose of corporations.

On the Meaning ofShangIn The Shang Dynasty

For nearly a century scholars have debated the meaning of the oracle ¬bone graphshang商 used by the Bronze Age theocracy in reference to itself and one of its settlements. Since the Zhou, the wordshanghas borne a political significance as the term for a ruling power group, yet there is no agreement as to the graph's meaning or why it stood as the eponym of China's first historic civilization. Following from Wang Guo-wei's 1923 contention thatshangwas first a place name — a claim attested to in inscriptions in the common phrasedayi shang(great settlement Shang), the present essay finds that this place was the hallowed site of the ancestral sacrifices of the Zi clan, and offers philological and artifactual evidence that the graphshangfirst depicted a rite performed before an ancestral image. Over the course of several centuries, the original, literal meaning ofshangas the graphic depiction of the telling ritual,gao吿, was generalized and extended to refer to the ancestral temple, the city where the temple was located, and finally to the Shang dynasty itself.

Chinese Family Law and Social Change in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Edited by David C. Buxbaum. Seattle: University of Washington Press (Asian Law Series No. 3), 1978. viii, 553 pp. Notes, Tables, Bibliography, Glossary, Index. $20.00.

Although and social is a current topic of scholarly discussion, little research has been undertaken on the role of family law as an instrument of social change. This multidisciplinary volume now makes available recent research conducted in this field. The first section includes an examination of the standards and rules for marriage during Han times, and of divorce in traditional Chinese law. The second section, devoted to family partition procedures, discusses the nature of family property in traditional China; the results of a field investigation on ancestral sacrifice in Manchuria; and the partition of family property in villages in southern Taiwan and in Tibet. The third section, dealing only with Taiwan, examines marriage in rural areas, summarizes field research on rural to urban migration, and looks at modernization and household composition. An investigation of marriage and divorce in the People's Republic of China, and comparisons of developments in marriage law in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China are dealt with in the fourth section. In the fifth section the authors indicate some factors that influence the relationship of law and social change in India and Indonesia.

The Soul and Sacrifice Amongst the Sisala

The Sisala are a patrilineal group of horticulturalists living in the savanna-zone of Northern Ghana. 1 Their villages are widely scattered throughout the scrub brush, which is cleared on a rotating basis, for subsistence farming. There are two climatic seasons: rainy and dry. The Sisala cultivate crops of millet, sorghum, guinea-corn, maize, yams, rice and a variety of lesser crops. Cattle are kept for purposes of bridewealth payments and sacrifices. Social organisation is based on the principle of agnatic descent. Residence is patrilocal. The Sisala are united by a loose-knit association of patri-clans which are sub-divided into villages, maximal lineages, lineages, compounds, houses and single rooms. The village is the most important political unit, while the lineage, normally comprising a patrilineally extended family, is the corporate unit of production and consumption. It is also the most important ritual unit, in terms of the frequency of ancestral sacrifice and the function of this institution as a means of social control. The compound-family, several of which comprise a lineage, is made up of either an extended family or a joint-fraternal family. Either the lineage or the compound may be the unit of production, depending on the stage of the group in the developmental cycle. The Sisala are governed by a paramount chief who, for a threeyear term, heads a five-man council of chiefs, after which time another member of the council is elected by council vote. This council has under its jurisdiction several divisional and village chiefs. Chiefship was created by the British and today exists in this form along-