“I Write Therefore I Am”: Scribes, Literacy, and Identity in Early China
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“I write therefore I am”: Scribes, Literacy, and Identity in Early China Armin Selbitschka NYU Shanghai [email protected] Accepted for publication in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78.2 (2018). In a recently published article on literacy and identity, Elizabeth Birr Moje and Alan Luke distinguish five “metaphors for identity in history and contemporary research.” More importantly, though, the authors reviewed a tremendous amount of sociological and social-psychological literature in order to demonstrate how scholarship has increasingly related different conceptions of identity and the self to literacy. Accordingly, “texts and the literate practices that accompany them not only reflect but may also produce the self. Moreover, some have also argued that texts can be used as tools for enacting identities in social settings.”1 In view of the fact that a significant number of Chinese individuals living during the fifth through first centuries BCE were buried with manuscripts, such arguments seem pertinent for early Chinese society as well. What does it say about the self-concept of a person when his or her ability to write and / or read assumed a prominent role in funerary rites? This is the main question this article is going to pursue. Research on literacy in the field of Early China studies has gained some momentum with the release of a volume edited by Li Feng and David Prager Branner,2 yet the issue of identity has so far not been raised in this context. This article will therefore first discuss evidence of literacy and the skill of writing that are found in Chinese literary and archaeological sources of the late pre- imperial and early imperial period. It will then proceed to an in-depth analysis of the training and Acknowledments: I would like to thank Michael Loewe, Charles Sanft, Paul Goldin, Mick Hunter, Hans van Ess, Maria Khayutina, Joachim Gentz, Matthias Richter, Barend ter Haar, Wolfgang Behr, Martin Kern, Michael Puett, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Duane Corpis, and John Kieschnick for valuable suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Melissa J. Brown and the anonymous Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies reviewers for their corrections and recommendations for improvement. They were greatly appreciated. 1 Elizabeth Birr Moje and Allan Luke with Bronwyn Davies and Brian Street, “Literacy and Identity: Examining the Metaphors in History and Contemporary Research,” Reading Research Quarterly 44.4 (2009): 415-37, esp. 416. I have also benefited from two online bibliographies; see Barend ter Haar, “Literacy, Writing and Education in Chinese Culture,” http://faculty.orinst.ox.ac.uk/terhaar/literacy.htm, and Wolfgang Behr, “Writing, Literacy, and Orality in Ancient China,” http://faculty.orinst.ox.ac.uk/terhaar/bib-projet.PDF (both last accessed on December 26, 2015). 2 Li Feng and David Prager Branner eds., Writing & Literacy in Early China: Studies from the Columbia Early China Seminar (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011). 2 work of late pre-imperial and early imperial scribes that draws on information provided by manuscripts excavated from tombs and settlements sites as well as transmitted sources. In a third step I identify some Chinese tomb occupants as literate beings by relating writing paraphernalia yielded by their tombs to various kinds of manuscripts that were also buried with them.3 Finally, sociological and anthropological explanations of identity will help to demonstrate that among such archaeologically verified writers, scribes, as a distinct group, assumed a special position. I am not only going to argue that the actual ability to write is palpable through certain kinds of texts that were associated with writing paraphernalia, but that the ability to write was a crucial aspect of the self-representation of shǐ 史, “scribes.”4 LITERACY AND WRITING IN ANCIENT CHINA In acquainting readers with his preferred definition of literacy, William V. Harris cites a UNESCO report on world literacy dating from 1977, according to which a person counts as illiterate when she / he “’cannot with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on [her /] his everyday life.’”5 Li and Branner oppose a straightforward equation of mere writing and reading skills, arguing more generally that literacy is “a phenomenon possessing multiple social extensions and serving multiple contexts within which it is meaningful and by which it can be measured.”6 On a more theoretical level, Walter Ong famously understood writing as the technologization of oral communication in the sense that the written word only conveys the content of spoken exchanges.7 Jan Assmann’s “cultural memory” concept transferred this perception into a broader 3 See, for instance, Marc Kalinowski, “Bibliothèques et archives funéraires de la Chine ancienne,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l'Académiedes Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 147.2 (2003): 889-927; Enno Giele, “Early Chinese Manuscripts, Including Addenda and Corrigenda to ‘New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts’,” Early China 23-24 (1998-1999): 247-337, esp. 306-28; and Enno Giele, “Database of Early Chinese Manuscripts,” http://www.dartmouth.edu/~earlychina/research-resources/databases/early- chinese-manuscripts.html (last accessed on December 26, 2015); Paul R. Goldin “Ancient Chinese Manuscripts: Bibliography of Materials in Western Languages,” http://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/paul-r-goldin (see headline “Resources;” last accessed on December 26, 2015). 4 A similar point was made for a scribe of the Twelfth Dynasty (1938-1756 BCE) in ancient Egypt; see R. B. Parkinson, Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry: Among Other Histories (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 127-37. 5 William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3. 6 Li and Branner, Writing & Literacy, p. 5. 7 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 30th Anniversary Edition with Additional Chapters by John Hartley (London, New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 77-79. John Hartley, however, cautioned that orality does not take precedence over literacy, but that both modes of communication coexist; see his “After Ongism,” in Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 205-21, here 216. 3 historical context. Writing, he argued, is essential for any given culture to develop a collective memory (i.e. a collective identity) over time as texts are necessary to store and conserve relevant information. 8 Following Assmann’s line of reasoning, the emergence of a literate élite that maintained itself by writing and texts – in other words, the establishment of a central bureaucracy in ancient China – was both a reflection of and a driving force behind this hunger for collective memory.9 In short, ancient literacy and the importance of writing are quite complicated subjects. With regard to a single individual, literacy may very well be conceived as the ability to write and read short notes as William Harris remarked. Viewed from a broader perspective it is, however, easy to see that “simple statements” on personal daily experiences would not have sufficed to sustain complex late pre-imperial and early imperial Chinese societies. It is only prudent, then, not to fixate on a universally acceptable definition, but to acknowledge the fact that different degrees of literacy must be discerned. Harris, again, led the way by demarcating “scribal literacy” from “craftsman’s literacy.” The former denotes a group of specially trained writers who fulfilled essential duties in state administration, whereas the latter describes the extent of writing skills of artisans who were 8 Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2007), p. 19. See also Poo Mu-chou, In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 179-80; Michael Nylan, “Calligraphy, the Sacred Text and Test of Culture,” in Character & Context in Chinese Calligraphy, eds. Cary Y. Liu, Dora C.Y. Ching, and Judith G. Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 1999), pp. 16-77, here 42; Elzbieta Halas, “The Past in the Present: Lessons on Semiotics of History from George H. Mead and Boris A. Uspensky,” Symbolic Interaction 36.1 (2013): 60-77, here 68. 9 Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3 (1963): 304-45, here 314; also see Christopher Leigh Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), esp. pp. 1, 11, 42, 44-45 (critically reviewed by Martin Kern in China Review International 7.2 (2000): 420-25); Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), esp. pp. 13-51 (extensively reviewed by Martin Kern, “Writing and Authority,” China Review International 7.2 (2000): 336-76; Michael Nylan, “Textual Authority in Pre-Han and Han,” Early China 25 (2000): 205-58); Poo, Personal Welfare, pp. 179-80; Nylan, “Calligraphy,” p. 19; Michael Nylan, “Toward an Archaeology of Writing: Text, Ritual, and the Culture of Public Display in the Classical Period (475 B.C.E.-220 C.E.),” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 3-49, here 7-8; Wang Aihe, Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 105. For a brief outline of the role of early imperial scribes (shǐ), see Robin D.S. Yates, “Introduction: The Empire of Scribes,” in Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited, eds. Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach and Robin D.S. Yates (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2014), p. 145. For a critical assessment of Goody and Watt’s arguments, see John Halverson, “Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis,” Man, N.S., 27.2 (1992): 301-17.