Cultural Legacies of the Early Chinese Bureaucracy

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The early Chinese bureaucracy has long fascinated scholars. Working with excavated materials, including oracle bone and bronze inscriptions as well as documents on bamboo strips and wood tablets, historians have illuminated the role of the bureaucracy in the state religion of the Shang, traced its development in the Western Zhou, and enumerated its workings in the Qin-Han period. Such studies have advanced our understanding of the origins of Chinese officialdom and shown the ways in which cultural factors shaped the Chinese bureaucracy. Yet scholars have often studied imperial Chinese bureaucracy merely as a mass of details and a transparent extension of power, and have yet to account systematically for the ways the bureaucracy shaped the cultural landscape of early China. Each paper in this panel thus investigates a different facet of the early Chinese bureaucracy’s cultural legacies.

Miranda Brown analyzes how bureaucratic information systems supplied healers with a framework for understanding human illness, a framework that came to exercise influence far beyond medicine. Charles Sanft argues that modes of distributing bureaucratic information led to active interaction with text at social levels lower than has been imagined. Daniel Sou examines the function of bureaucratic labor and tax policies in forming gender roles for women, roles often treated only in terms of the dominant social ideologies of the time. Sharon Sanderovitch enriches the discussion through examination of depictions of bureaucracy in poetry and text, showing that its images appeared in elevated forms of literary expression.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Charles Sanft, University of Tennessee

Chair

• Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Modeling Early Chinese Medicine: Reflections on the Relationship between Bureaucracy and Science - Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

• Han Military Bureaucracy as a Nexus of Cultural Dissemination - Charles Sanft, University of Tennessee

• Shaping the Image of “Weaving Women” in Early Chinese Society - Daniel Sou, Oriental Institute, The Czech Academy of Sciences

• The Emperor's Proxies: Bureaucracy and Representation in Han Literary Sources - Sharon Sanderovitch, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant

• Sarah Allan, Dartmouth College