Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.7, 2017

 

Artifacts as Ritual: With a Focus on Early Chinese Writing

(Abstract)

 

Yan Yuezhen

 

Artifacts bear the memories of social culture through the continuity of their ritual meanings. Firstly, the music and dance rituals in early Chinese literature invoked performance using artifacts to realize harmony between the human and the divine and between people, initiating, supporting and strengthening memories of ritual music and culture; secondly, naming activities in the field of social thought in the Axial Age acquired techniques from the making of artifacts that were used in normative discourse in politics, ethics, literature and so on, establishing the basic propositions of early Chinese culture; and thirdly, from the Han Dynasty on, the collection of inscribed artifacts was a branch of the systemic classification employed in construction of the whole cultural order of Heaven, Earth, man, events and objects. The three above-mentioned historical forms exhibit, narrate and sum up the social and cultural functions of artifacts. The artifacts left by ancient society have a non-static existence; their physical states bear within them certain latent forms of social ideology and paradigms of historical narration.