Bodies and self-inflicted violence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China.

详细信息   

• 作者：Yu ; Jimmy Yung Fung.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2008
• 导师：Teiser, Stephen F.
• 毕业院校：Princeton University
• 专业：Religion, History of.;Anthropology, Cultural.;History, Asia, Australia and Oceania.
• ISBN：9780549525806
• CBH：3305782
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：8967315
• Pages：328

文摘

This dissertation is a cultural history of self-inflicted violent body practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. It examines how these practices were represented, publicly and privately, within the cultural systems of the time. The range of body practices in this study includes writing letters and copying scriptures with one's blood to perpetuate religious orthodoxy or challenge imperial authority; slicing a piece of flesh from one's body to make medicine for sick parents or parents-in-law; mutilating one's face to resist remarriage or rape; and exposing one's naked body to the sun or setting oneself on fire to produce rain. Those who engaged in these acts include Buddhist clerics, children, chaste women from elite and common backgrounds, officials, and emperors. They sought to graphically demonstrate religious sanctity, filial piety, chastity, loyalty, and the mandate of heaven. Self-inflicted violence was both an inherited construction in late imperial China and a practice remade by historical actors who were themselves shaped by social, political, and religious forces. Performers inflicted violence to their bodies to negotiate new social relations, power structures, and affect meteorological changes. Self-inflicted violence highlights the centrality of the body and the ways in which the body could be used to intervene into the external world in times of personal, social, political, and ideological threat. In this sense, the performers' bodies were sites of contestation and transformation, both for themselves and for others who witnessed or narrated their performance.;Numerous accounts of these practices appear in an unusually wide range of genres, including imperial histories, local gazetteers, hagiographies, compendiums of exemplary lives, illustrated books, vernacular literature, poetry, and even medical texts. This range of evidence demonstrates the widespread performance of asceticism and self-mortification, and the preoccupation with the body in Chinese culture during this time. Most discussions of these different practices limit their sources to one genre of evidence, and are also limited to the boundary of one academic discipline, whether in Buddhist studies, Chinese social history, or Chinese literature. Yet the modalities and themes behind these practices are complex and demand an interdisciplinary approach in order to appreciate their cultural significance. This study examines different primary sources in order to portray the pervasiveness of self-mortification in late imperial China; it presents a more nuanced understanding of the social and cultural dynamics involved in specific cases of self-inflicted violence. To date, this approach has never been followed systematically and the broader significance of these practices has remained unexplored.