Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Shaping the Life History of Objects
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Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Shaping the Life History of Objects
About this book
Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Foreword: In Memory of Pochan Chen
- Introduction: Memory and Agency in Ancient China: Shaping the Life Histories of Objects
- One Memory, Amnesia and the Formation of Identity Symbols in China
- Two The Lives of Shovels, Vessels, and Bells in Early South China: Memory, Ritual, and the Power of Destination
- Three The Whole and Fragmented Lives of Jade Objects from Late Neolithic Middle Yangzi River Burials (C. 2000 BCE)
- Four The Social Life of Salt in Ancient China from the Late Neolithic to the Han Dynasty
- Five A Divergent Life History of Bronze Willow-Leaf-Shaped Swords...
- Six Bird-Pillar Basins and Cylindrical Vessels: Object Lineage in Ancient China
- Seven Toiletries and the Production of Social Memory from the Warring States...
- Eight A Biographical Approach to the Study of the Mounted Archer Motif during the Han Dynasty
- Nine Dynamic between Form and Material: The BI Disc in Western Han Noble Burial Ritual
- Ten Crossing the Taiwan Strait: Contextualizing and Re-Contextualizing Taiwanese aboriginal Objects (1895–1980)
- Eleven Artifacts that Invoke the Aura and Authority of the Ancient
- Index