Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire PDF Download
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Author: Liang Cai
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438448511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion Winner of the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141–87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian's The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91–87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.
Author: Liang Cai
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438448511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
Finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion Winner of the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141–87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian's The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91–87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.
Author: Liang Cai
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143844849X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence under Chinas Emperor Wu. When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (14187 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qians The Grand Scribes Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 9187 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.
Author: Esther S. Klein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004376879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
In Father of Chinese History, Esther Klein explores the life and work of the great Han dynasty historian Sima Qian as seen by readers from the Han to the Song dynasties. Today Sima Qian is viewed as both a tragic hero and a literary genius. Premodern responses to him were more equivocal: the complex personal emotions he expressed prompted readers to worry about whether his work as a historian was morally or politically acceptable. Klein demonstrates how controversies over the value and meaning of Sima Qian’s work are intimately bound up with larger questions: How should history be written? What role does individual experience and self-expression play within that process? By what standards can the historian’s choices be judged?
Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Lewis sheds new light on the early Chinese empires through an ambitious examination of evolving ideas about honor and shame.
Author: Markus Asper
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311066903X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
Who is afraid of case literature? In an influential article ("Thinking in Cases", 1996), John Forrester made a case for studying case literature more seriously, exemplifying his points, mostly, with casuistic traditions of law. Unlike in modern literatures, case collections make up a significant portion of ancient literary traditions, such as Mesopotamian, Greek, and Chinese, mostly in medical and forensic contexts. The genre of cases, however, has usually not been studied in its own right by modern scholars. Due to its pervasiveness, case literature lends itself to comparative studies to which this volume intends to make a contribution. While cases often present truly fascinating epistemic puzzles, in addition they offer aesthetically pleasing reading experiences, due to their narrative character. Therefore, the case, understood as a knowledge-transmitting narrative about particulars, allows for both epistemic and aesthetic approaches. This volume presents seven substantial studies of cases and case literature: Topics touched upon are ancient Greek medical, forensic, philosophical and mathematical cases, medical cases from imperial China, and 20th-century American medical case writing. The collection hopes to offer a pilot of what to do with and how to think about cases.
Author: Yuri Pines
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031536304
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 686
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Book Description
Author: Chris Goto-Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
The promise of magic has always commanded the human imagination, but the story of industrial modernity is usually seen as a process of disenchantment. Drawing on the writings and performances of the so-called 'Golden Age Magicians' from the turn of the twentieth century, Chris Goto-Jones unveils the ways in which European and North American encounters with (and representations of) Asia - the fabled Mystic East - worked to re-enchant experiences of the modern world. Beginning with a reconceptualization of the meaning of 'modern magic' itself - moving beyond conventional categories of 'real' and 'fake' magic - Goto-Jones' acclaimed book guides us on a magical mystery tour around India, China, and Japan, showing us levitations and decapitations, magic duels and bullet catches, goldfish bowls and paper butterflies. In the end, this mesmerizing book reveals Orientalism as a kind of magic in itself, casting a spell over Western culture that leaves it transformed, even today.
Author: Fei-Ling Wang
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438467494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
Examines the rising power of China and Chinese foreign policy through a revisionist analysis of Chinese civilization. What does the rise of China represent, and how should the international community respond? With a holistic rereading of Chinese longue durée history, Fei-Ling Wang provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the nature of persistent and rising Chinese power and its implications for the current global order. He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world orderthe China Orderis based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the Peoples Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy. An original, important, well-researched, and powerfully argued exploration of the virtues and vices of the Chinese state from its ancient past to its likely future. Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison A masterpiece. Wang provides a grand, sweeping, even epic review of two thousand years of Chinese history. His argument is compelling and well documented; the richness and variety of sourcesChinese and Englishhe cites is breathtaking. The book is likely to end up on the reading list of every serious student of Chinas position in the world for many years to come. Daniel C. Lynch, author of Chinas Futures: PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy This imaginative and provocative grand tour of Chinese cosmological order and geopolitical strategy, past and present, is destined to become a classic. Ming Xia, author of The Peoples Congresses and Governance in China: Toward a Network Mode of Governance
Author: Ben M. Debney
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811555699
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
This book investigates the normalisation of blame-shifting within ideological discourse as a broad feature of history, working from Churchill’s truism that history is written by the victors. To that end, it explores historical episodes of political persecution carried out under cover of moral panic, highlighting the process of ‘Othering’ common to each and theorising a historical model of panic-driven scapegoating from the results. Building this model from case studies in witch panic, communist panic and terrorist panic respectively, The Oldest Trick in the Book builds an argument that features common to each case study reflect broader historical patterning consistent with Churchill’s maxim. On this basis it argues that the periodic construction of bogeymen or ‘folk demons’ is a useful device for enabling the kind of victim-playing and victim-blaming critical to protecting elite privilege during periods of crisis and that in being a recurring theme historically, panic-driven scapegoating retains great ongoing value to the privileged and powerful, and thus conspicuously remains an ongoing feature of world politics.
Author: Mark Csikszentmihalyi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438485441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).
