The Construction of Space in Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Construction of Space in Early China write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 2012-02-01. The Construction of Space in Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
Writing and Authority in Early China
Writing and Authority in Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Writing and Authority in Early China write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 1999-01-01. Writing and Authority in Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose master generated power and whose graphs became potent objects.
Sanctioned Violence in Early China
Sanctioned Violence in Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Sanctioned Violence in Early China write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 1990-01-01. Sanctioned Violence in Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence--warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.
The Flood Myths of Early China
The Flood Myths of Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Flood Myths of Early China write by Mark Edward Lewis. This book was released on 2012-02-01. The Flood Myths of Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.
Social Memory and State Formation in Early China
Social Memory and State Formation in Early China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Social Memory and State Formation in Early China write by Min Li. This book was released on 2018-05-24. Social Memory and State Formation in Early China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.
