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Exorcising the Past: Writing Death's Ruptures in Medieval China
Organizer: Ian Chapman, Princeton University
Chair: Yang Lu, Harvard University
Discussant: Stephen H. West, Arizona State University
At appointed times of the year, officials buried abandoned corpses, communities banished agents of death and disease, rites were held for “hungry ghosts.” Death, at finite historical moments, turned the living into bones, ghosts, and memories. Reconciling and even harnessing the volatile schism between these states was of the utmost importance in medieval China; even more so when ruptures were compounded by deviation from normal stabilizing processes. Strategies comprised not just “exorcism,” but the utilization of residues and tensions. Disparity between new and old techniques created further temporal divisions. Death also had strong pragmatic and symbolic links with political, spatial, and social dislocations.
This panel explores constructions, especially in anomaly accounts (zhiguai) and brush jottings (biji), of how the living and the dead ordered their mutual relationships, and how they accommodated deviation from desired norms. Lewis Mayo begins by examining the creation of one such order, which situated death control within hierarchies of human, animal, and spirit beings. Ian Chapman looks at Six Dynasties explanations of festivals as “unnatural” death commemoration, finding therein an indigenous model of how measures to channel spiritual and cultural potencies become institutionalized. Benjamin Ridgway explores the disruption to ancestral death rites following the Song court's flight to Hangzhou, which unleashed troublesome spirits associated with memories of the former capital. Jessey Choo’s study of late medieval narratives of mortal and spirit world intermarriage argues that a new conception of fate led people to question the whole premise of being able to ritually control the dead.
Death and Non-Human History in Medieval Dunhuang
Lewis Mayo, Leiden University/University of Melbourne, Netherlands
How does death figure in non-human pasts? For animals, death may be ordained by humans as part of the reproduction of human power – as is the case in animal sacrifice. Equally, the marking of animals as non-human involves not only the right to take their lives, but also in the different social meaning granted to their deaths compared to the deaths of humans. One of the other great non-human realms, that of gods and spirits, is distinguished by its simultaneous immunity from death and by the prominence it has in the human representation of death, which can be said to help bring spirit beings into existence.
In the medieval writings from the oasis of Dunhuang, death is pre-eminent in the depiction of non-human histories – both those of animals and those of divinities and spirits. Animal death appears in these writings, (which include texts for the funerals of animals as well as lists of dead animals) within a framework of human sovereignty over the animal realm. But at the same time, concern with animal death marks animals as in some sense recognized “social beings”, beings inside society. By contrast, gods and spirits, which are pervasive presences in Dunhuang texts, seem to be outside of the social sphere, wielding authority over the human and animal realms through the force of death. The triad of human, animal and spirit beings constitute foundational categories in the Dunhuang social order, distinguished by their shared and different relationships to death as an historical phenomenon.
Dancing with the Dead: the Morbid Genealogy of Early Medieval Chinese Festivals
Ian Chapman, Princeton University
Why did natives of Six Dynasties Chu hold mid-summer boat races? Or those of wintry Taiyuan forbid the lighting of fires? Folklore and scholarship agreed on a neat and malleable solution for these and numerous other festival customs: death. A festival accorded a history was usually one spawned by a death—typically unjust or self-sacrificial.
Unnatural deaths arose from, or unleashed, potent forces—both spiritual and cultural. Six Dynasties accounts explain how improvised measures to contain or channel these became institutionalized as periodic ritual. The blind visitation of baleful airs on infants prompted apotropaic measures. Word soon spread when a spirit appeared requesting offerings in return for favors. Martyrs to virtue attracted sacrifices of a reverential nature. Individual rituals might be shared by other contexts. Death, not coincidentally, was the only life event observed as a recurrent anniversary in classical ritual, through taboos. However, as festival cocktail they formed a unique matrix of relationships, rich also in political and cultural associations: in the Wu region, festival martyrs were also the main heroes of folk songs.
Time relationships are similarly complex. Commemorations of Qu Yuan ritually freeze their hero in his moment of death. Dropping rice balls in the water both reenacts the effort at his drowning to lure away river predators, and serves as an offering to a ghost still imprisoned at the death site. Festivals are also museums of their own evolution, with new deaths added to the commemoration roster, and once powerful rites described as mere habitual residue.
Strange Tales of Two Cities: The Movement of Populations and Memories between Kaifeng and Hangzhou
Benjamin Ridgway, Middlebury College
In 1127 the northern Jurchen army sacked Kaifeng, capital of the Northern Song dynasty, captured the Song Emperors Huizong (reigned 1100-1126) and Qinzong (reigned 1126-1127), and conquered the territory of the Chinese empire north of the Huai river. The only heir to the throne fled to the south and reestablished the dynasty in the southeastern city of Hangzhou. Waves of displaced northern refugees, estimated at five million over a fifteen-year period, followed the court in its relocation to the south, fundamentally altering the cultural and urban landscape of Hangzhou. This catastrophic event became a well-spring for accounts of the former capital as well as tales of the journey south. Here I consider a number of “anomaly accounts” (zhiguai ??) contained in the massive collection Tales of the Listener (Yijian zhi ???) complied by Hong Mai ?? (1123-1202) to explore the cultural aftereffects of the traumatic transfer between these two dynastic capitals, Kaifeng and Hangzhou. Viewing ghosts as manifestations of the returned memory of the former capital city, I focus on several story archetypes, including possession of refugees by the spirits of perished family members, the movement of bodies and spirits across borders through reburial, and acts of revenge wrought by ghosts. These story archetypes, I argue, represent Hangzhou as a city where the living walked among the dead, where memories of the two urban spaces overlap and clash.
Strange Tales of Death and Marriage in Late Medieval China
Jessey Choo, Villanova University
What is our understanding of death? Is it the act or fact of dying? The final cessation of the vital functions of an individual? The end of life? OED agrees with all of the above. Yet, in late medieval China, even the dead and buried sought spouses among the living. The boundary between the living and the dead was apparently not set in stone. Death, as we find in narratives of the strange, was sometimes a means that brought people together in marriage. We are all familiar with the formula perhaps. A promising young scholar chanced to meet an unearthly beauty. They fell in love and quickly consummated their passion. In some cases, the living partner soon gave up his life to continue the relationship in the other world. In others, the dead partner returned to life. In most cases, these were highly successful and loving marriages between two persons who would not have met under normal circumstances. What can we know of late medieval marriage and death through the lens of Fate? What invisible territory, be it religious, social, or political, did these narratives of the strange, with their focus on the marvel of Fate (ming), transgress and why? How are they different from the narratives that center on grudgeful ghosts and troubled pasts? I focus particularly on how Fate was evoked to shatter the boundary that Rites sought to draw between the living and dead that interested my co-panelists.