These Bones Shall Rise Again , livre ebook

A volume in the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
Roger T. Ames, editor

These Bones Shall Rise Again
Selected Writings on Early China
David N. Keightley
Edited and with an Introduction by Henry Rosemont Jr.

Cover image courtesy of David N. Keightley
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keightley, David N. and Rosemont, Henry Jr.
These bones shall rise again: selected writings on early china
ISBN 978-1-4384-4747-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934475
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Transcription Conversion Table
Part I: What Makes China Chinese?
1. Archaeology and Mentality: The Making of China
2. Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese
3. What Did Make the Chinese “Chinese”? Some Geographical Perspectives
Part II: Religion, Metaphysics, and Theology
4. The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture
5. Late Shang Divination: The Magico-Religious Legacy
6. Shang Divination and Metaphysics
7. The Making of The Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy
Part III: On Writing and Inscriptions
8. Theology and the Writing of History: Truth and the Ancestors in the Wu Ding Divination Records
9. Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China
Part IV: Early China/Early Greece
10. Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek Culture
11. Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and Deception in Early China and Early Greece
Part V: A Lighter Touch
12. Notes and Comments: “There Was an Old Man of Chang’an…”: Limericks and the Teaching of Early Chinese History
Bibliography of the Writings of David N. Keightley
David N. Keightley
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first thanks for assistance in putting this volume of David Keightley’s writings together go to David himself, who assisted me in gathering materials for it and for assistance in going through the galley proofs. I am pleased to have brought this collection of his papers together for two reasons, first as a small but not, I hope, insignificant service to the field of Chinese studies, and second as small recompense for the pleasure of having had David as a friend for a third of a century. Amanda Buster, Ph.D. student in history at Berkeley, saw to securing all necessary permissions to reprint the articles included here, and I am grateful for her efforts. Professor Emeritus Ken-ichi Takashima of the University of British Columbia was of major assistance in making and copying fresh images of many of the illustrations in this volume, for which I, electronically challenged to an extreme, am particularly thankful. My greatest debt for helping me with this volume goes to Professor Michael Nylan, cherished friend of mine, David’s successor at Berkeley, Amanda’s mentor, and Professor Takashima’s friend. Her efforts with all three of them on the West Coast, and with me in Newport, Rhode Island, were crucial for getting this book into its present form, completed and published, and she did it all efficiently, with grace and warmth to boot. I am deeply grateful to her, disappointed only by her declining my entreaties to join me formally as co-editor of it. At SUNY Press, I enjoyed working with Nancy Ellegate and Diane Ganeles, both highly efficient, graceful and warm; I am especially indebted to them (and SUNY Press) for accepting this work for publication without my having to redo every one of the papers herein to conform to the stylesheet of the Press. Every editor should be so fortunate to work with such a professional editor and production manager.
Finally, but without which not, I am pleased to acknowledge the original publishers of these articles of David’s here listed seriatim in the order in which they appear:
Photo of David Keightley by Grant Ward; courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1986 (on the announcement of his MacArthur award).
“Archaeology and Mentality: The Making of China,” Representations 18, Spring 1987.
“Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese,” in Heritage of China , edited by Paul S. Ropp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
“What Did Make the Chinese ‘Chinese?’: Musings of a Would-be Geographical Determinist” first appeared in Lotus Leaves 3.2, Summer 2000, and was reprinted in Education About Asia 9.2, Fall 2004.
“The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture.” History of Religions 17, 1978.
“Late Shang Divination: The Magico-Religious Legacy,” in Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology , edited by Henry Rosemont Jr. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984.
“Shang Divination and Metaphysics,” Philosophy East & West , 38.4, October 1988.
“The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy,” in Chinese Religion & Society: The Transformation of a Field , vol. 1, edited by John Lagerway. Hong Kong: Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-orient and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2004.
“Theology and the Writing of History: Truth and the Ancestors in the Wu Ding Divination Records,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 1.1–4, 1999.
“Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China,” in Archaeology of Asia , edited by Miriam T. Stark. London: Blackwell, 2006.
“Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek Culture,” in Religion and the Authority of the Past , edited by Tobin Siebers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
“Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and Deception in Early China and Early Greece,” in Early China, Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons , edited by Steven Shankman and Stephen Durrant. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
“ ‘There Was an Old Man of Changan…’ Limericks and the Teaching of Early Chinese History,” The History Teacher 22.3, May 1989.
PREFACE
Professor David N. Keightley was born in London in 1932 and spent the World War II years there, coming to the United States in 1947. A graduate of Amherst College (an English major and biochemistry minor) in 1953, he studied medieval French at the University of Lille in northern France as a Fulbright student and received his M.A. in modern European history at New York University in 1956. After a number of years working as a fiction and nonfiction editor and freelance writer in New York City, he entered Columbia University’s graduate school in 1962 and received his Ph.D. in East Asian history in 1969. During that time, he spent two years in Taiwan and Japan in language training and research.
Convinced, when a freelance writer, that China was one of the frontiers of our time, Keightley decided to learn Chinese in order to write about contemporary Chinese society and culture. After three years of study, however, he realized that some of the most fundamental issues that help explain the many differences between Chinese and other societies lay far back in the past. Resisting both the theories of Karl Wittfogel about “oriental despotism” and of Marxism about “slave society,” Keightley’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou,” attempted to place the mobilization and control of labor in its religious and social context.
A member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley from 1969 to 1998, and a specialist in China’s earliest historical documents, Professor Keightley was the author of Sources of Shang History: The Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (1978) and The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China , ca. 1200–1045 B.C. (2000), and the editor of The Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983). One of the founders and editors of the journal, Early China , he published over seventy articles dealing with the religion and history of the Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Ages. His work paid particular attention to the cultural significance of early Chinese religion and divination (as seen in the Shang dynasty oracle-bone inscriptions), to the Neolithic roots of China’s bronze-age culture, and to comparative studies of “classical” literature and “classical” role-models in bronze-age China and bronze-age Greece.
Keightley authored the articles on Chinese “Prehistory” and “The First Historical Dynasty: The Shang” in The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedie (1987), a chapter, “The Shang: China’s First Historical Dynasty,” for the Cambridge History of Ancient China , edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (1999), and the entry for the “Shang Dynasty” in the Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2002. Given the difficulty of the oracle-bone inscriptions, he also reviewed books—particularly in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1977 and 1982 and the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1900 and 1997—that served as new to the field.
Professor Keightley visited