Ancient China

Title: “Feasts and Gifts: Food Redistribution in Early Imperial China”
Speaker: Moonsil Lee Kim, Rhode Island College
Time: March 26, 2021 (4:30-6:30 PM EST)
The event will be held via Zoom. Please click on “Request Pre-circulated Paper” to register for the event.

Sponsored by
Tang Center for Early China;
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University;
Columbia University Seminars

Food bestowals through feasts and gifts in early imperial China were not only symbolic gestures used by emperors for political purposes, but also provided practical solutions to continue the empires in a sustainable way. While feasts and gifts emphasized the social hierarchies among various population groups, they also solved or prevented food crises that individuals would otherwise have experienced because of their specific positions in the society. For low-level officials, peasants, widows, and slaves, imperial food bestowals through feasts and gifts were key opportunities to enhance their dietary conditions or economic status. Even convict laborers who were not allowed to join in the “dividing of the sacrificial meat” (fenzuo 分胙) could benefit from sacrificial feasts, as they could purchase leftovers to supplement their regular grain-based diet. In this talk, “Statutes on Bestowals” (cilü 赐律), from the Zhangjia shan Ernian lüling 二年律令, and the Qin legal texts from Liye and Shuihudi will be analyzed in order to discuss how feasts and gifts in early imperial China were implemented for both symbolic and practical purposes.

All Meetings will be on Friday, 4:30-6:30PM, unless otherwise noted, open to members, affiliates, and graduate students.

Due to the extraordinary circumstances of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to move the seminars online for 2020-2021. All seminars will be hosted via Zoom on Fridays, but the start and end times may vary due to time differences of the speaker.

Requested Pre-Circulated Paper.

Title: “Fields, Markets and Trees: Contending Paradigms of Growth in Early China”
Speaker: Romain Graziani, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
Time: March 12, 2021 (9:00-11:00 AM EST)
The event will be held via Zoom. Please click on “Request Pre-circulated Paper” to register for the event.

Sponsored by
Tang Center for Early China;
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University;
Columbia University Seminars

The words “Fields,” “Markets” and “Trees” encapsulate three economic orientations, three distinct political agendas, and three rival visions of the natural world in early China. The first paradigm I shall examine, whose emblem is the field (arable land and battlefield) determines one major strand of economic thought. I will question its rationale and its assumptions according to which exclusive agricultural development is the only avenue to the reinforcement of the state. The second paradigm, which centers on the image of the market (with its complex semantic gradient from the village fair to the locus where state-wide forces of supply and demand converge), makes way for an alternative model of economic growth based on the promotion and/or partial rehabilitation of merchants and traders, in a more sophisticated view of wealth. The third paradigm, symbolized by wild untrimmed trees, reflects a powerful reaction of certain pre-imperial thinkers against the coercive domestication and selection of plants, animals and humans by a centralized and increasingly bureaucratized state. After describing how these rival paradigms of human and social development took shape during the pre-imperial period and exploring their dialectical interactions in major written sources of the preimperial an early imperial periods (Shangjunshu, Guanzi, Zhuangzi, Yantielun), I will question their rationale, their goals, their strengths and limitations, their ideological underpinnings, and the kind of human activities they tend to promote or proscribe in the elite as well as among commoners.

All Meetings will be on Friday, 4:30-6:30PM, unless otherwise noted, open to members, affiliates, and graduate students.

Due to the extraordinary circumstances of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to move the seminars online for 2020-2021. All seminars will be hosted via Zoom on Fridays, but the start and end times may vary due to time differences of the speaker.

Requested Pre-Circulated Paper.

Early China Seminar Lecture Series

Title: “Charting the Early Chinese Oikumene”
Speaker: Min Li, University of California, Los Angeles
Time: February 19, 2021 (4:30–6:30pm EST)
The event will be held via Zoom. Please click on “Request Pre-circulated Paper” to register for the event.

Yugong (Tributes of the Great Yu) presents an influential conceptual framework of ordering the early Chinese oikumene. Taking the Jinnan Basin as the center of its worldview, the text presents a nonary division of the civilized world known as the Yu’s Tracks, where the legendary figure allegedly toured and drained flood water at the end of the third millennium BCE. With an inventory of tribute goods and an outline of tribute routes for each region, the text aims at making the landscape legible and subject to political control, thus becoming an integral component for the ideology of kingship and empire by the late first millennium BCE.

Based on the analyses of grammatical patterns and the geographic configuration in transmitted and excavated texts, this seminar will evaluate two alternative hypotheses about the date, purpose, and sponsorship for the creation of this ideological topography: a deeply rooted prehistoric religious tradition emerging from a ritual performance of space vs. a recent political myth invented in the fourth century BCE to project imperial ambition. Variation and commonality observed in these texts suggests multiple strands of transmission and shared cultural assumptions, indicating that this notion of a Chinese oikumene had become the cornerstone of Zhou classical learning. This study calls for a significant expansion in the temporal and spatial frames for investigating the genealogy of knowledge in the Yugong tradition based on a critical understanding of the shifting archaeological landscape in Bronze Age China.

All Meetings will be on Friday, 4:30-6:30PM, unless otherwise noted, open to members, affiliates, and graduate students.

Due to the extraordinary circumstances of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to move the seminars online for 2020-2021. All seminars will be hosted via Zoom on Fridays, but the start and end times may vary due to time differences of the speaker.

Request Pre-Circulated Paper.