Organizer: Shana J. Brown, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Wen-Hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Xin Liu, University of California, Berkeley
This panel features the research of three graduate students in different disciplines: history, art history, and literary studies. Each paper addresses issues surrounding the development of modern Chinese social sciences, describing the influence of traditional scholarship, nationalistic sentiment, and modernity on the emerging disciplines of archaeology and folklore studies in early twentieth-century China. As a body of research, these papers seek to answer the question: in what ways did scholars seek to define Chinese modernity, and what was the content of their definitions?
While approaching a similar set of problems, the papers differ in both topic and methodology. Shana Brown (History, UC Berkeley) links modern archaeology with classical scholarship, and shows how the market in Chinese antiquities influenced the emerging discipline of oracle bone research in the early decades of the twentieth century. Guolong Lai (Art History, UCLA) continues this inquiry into the development of archaeology, focusing on the debates over nationalism and classicism that surrounded the excavations at Yinxu, Henan Province, in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, Ann Pedone (East Asian Languages and Literature, UC Berkeley) examines the rise of folklore studies and the influential journal Folksong Weekly (published between 1919 and 1923), arguing that the representation of funu (woman) in the scholarship presented by this journal indicates the blurring of "public" and "private" boundaries in the modern nation.
This panel will be chaired by Professor Wen-Hsin Yeh of the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley. The discussant will be Professor Xin Liu of the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley.
What Price History? Chinese Oracle Bone Research, 1899–1928
Shana J. Brown, University of California, Berkeley
This paper is part of my dissertation research on the evolution of late Qing bronze and stone studies (jin-shi xue) into modern archaeology, and the influence of the commercial market in antiquities from the 1860s to the late 1920s on the development of this field.
In this paper I examine the discovery of the Shang Dynasty oracle bones in 1899 and the earliest scholarship on their inscriptions. My research focuses on the activities of Liu E, Wang Guowei, and Luo Zhenyu. I first unpack the narrative of scientific "discovery" that has come to describe the work of these scholars. I examine the relationship of oracle bone studies to late-Qing kaozheng scholarship, showing the indebtedness of oracle bone studies on fin-shi xue research, and then I demonstrate the influence of Western historiography and epistemology on the research and cataloguing of Chinese oracle bone collections.
Next, I discuss how Wang Guowei, Luo Zhenyu, and other scholars participated in the commercial antiquities market in excavated bones, buying and selling the objects of their scholarly research in ways that shocked their contemporaries. Finally, I demonstrate the linkage between scholarly research and market commodification. I argue that Chinese scholars actively represented oracle bones as objects containing a uniquely essentialized, and very modern idea of ancient "Chineseness"—thus increasing their market value to both Chinese and foreign collectors, and endowing oracle bone scholarship with nativistic properties. In fact, the commodification of Shang artifacts and their politically-determined identification as evidence of Chinese history determined both the methodologies and conclusions of early oracle bone research.
Digging Up China: Nationalism, Politics and the Yinxu Excavation, 1928–1937
Guolong Lai, University of California, Los Angeles
This is the first part of a project on the history of modern Chinese archaeology. In this paper, I show how the excavation of Yinxu (1928–37)—the birth of modern Chinese archaeology—reveals how the institutionalization of archaeology in Republican China (1911–49) assisted in the construction of the nation-state.
The initial introduction of modern archaeological thought was closely related to constructing a new national history during the 1910s and 1920s. Archaeology was considered a tool to increase historical data for the writing of a new national history. Early archaeological practice, such as Li Ji’s excavation at the Neolithic Xiyincun site, was influenced by the search for the factuality of traditional historiography, launched by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980) and his "Doubting Antiquity" school during the 1920s. At this time, socio-political and intellectual trends—from Gu Jiegang’s "Doubting Antiquity" to Fu Sinian’s "Reconstructing Antiquity"—were directly influenced by the nation-state building of the Nationalist government during the Nanjing Decade. Yinxu was in fact selected by cultural conservatives as the first site for national archaeology in order to refute the "Doubting Antiquity" scholars and to sustain tradition.
The Yinxu excavations were first conducted under the joint auspices of the Freer Gallery of Art (FGA), and the newly founded Institute of History and Philology (IHP), Academia Sinica. Disputes over the ownership of excavated objects soon began, first between the Henan provincial government and the IHP, and next between the FGA and the IHP. These disputes illustrate how Fu Sinian and Li Ji, as directors of the excavation, used their archaeological activities to gain political support from the government and to fight both localism and imperialism. The relationship between modern archaeology and Chinese traditional learning was ill-defined and was also manipulated to serve their arguments in the contexts of academic and political debates. The Yinxu excavation was thus both a catalyst for the development of modern Chinese archaeology and an embodiment of the political conflicts inherent to the nation-state building enterprise of Republican China.
The Science of the Folk: Negotiating Representations of Sexuality and Science in Folklore Studies, 1918-1929
Ann Pedone, University of California, Berkeley
The folklore publications which emerged in the early twentieth century often broached the scope of literary journals by featuring collections of folk literature and ethnographic studies as well as critical articles that attempted to articulate the emergence of folklore studies as an academic discipline. Folklore was thus theorized as the object of both literary and scientific study. Crucial to this linkage was the ethnographic work done on rural Chinese woman (funu) in the pages of Geyao zhoukan (Folksong Weekly), 1919–1923, that defined funu both as the "producers" of modern folklore and as the primitive remnants of "authentic" Chinese culture. These representations expose the ambiguity of the category funu and the ways in which it is enmeshed with the histories of other concepts including "the social" and "the folk."
In order to explore the culture and gender politics underlying this ambiguity, I take the ethnographic work surrounding the legend Lady Meng Jiang published in Folksong Weekly as focal point from which to examine the ways in which funu was voiced in new ways by the developing social sciences of anthropology, psychology, and folklore studies. I interrogate funu as a modern social category that reveals a bluffed ground between the public sphere and the domestic space defined vis-à-vis the category funu. I argue that this association of funu with the public sphere accompanied a displacement and a permanent erosion of the distinction between the "public" and "private" at the same time that the space of the political was being redefined.