Daybooks in the Context of Manuscript Culture and Popular Culture Studies

CHAPTER 3 Daybooks in the Context of Manuscript Culture and Popular Culture Studies

Donald Harper

Like other archaeological artifacts, manuscripts found in by various social groups in the course of everyday life in Warring States, Qin, and Han tomb and non-tomb sites local communities. Some of the contents indicate shared since the twentieth century are not easy to explain. Most knowledge among manuscripts intended either for elite often the newly discovered manuscripts are without prec- readers or for users in general. The silk-sheet manuscripts edent in texts that were transmitted down through the with texts on astrology, divination, and medicine from centuries and survive today in printed editions. Excavated Mawangdui 馬王堆 tomb 3, Hunan (burial dated 168 bce), manuscripts, unexpected modern intrusions in the record bespeak a literature that specialists produced for the elite. of civilization based on transmitted texts, are new sources However, daybooks with their hemerologies and diverse of Chinese history. At the same time, their existence ne- information—five-agents correlations, topomancy, in- cessitates reevaluation of text-based research. Philology cantations, and rituals—were not simply abbreviated as a method of determining correct readings in the print- versions of the specialists’ texts. They warrant classifica- ed editions of transmitted Chinese texts is different when tion as a distinct text type with its own characteristics and manuscripts found in a single tomb or in more than one function in manuscript culture. site give us multiple copies of a text and when the vari- Beneath their diversity, daybooks provided their ance among them is the result of the active process of original readers and users with practical information manuscript production. We must learn to appreciate the and transmitted a shared worldview. Wang Chong 王充 manuscript as cultural object and as material support for (27–ca. 100) may have been familiar with manuscripts the text written on it. We must reconsider our ideas about like the examples of daybooks we have today when he the function of writing, manuscript production, and liter- included all of society in his criticism of hemerology acy based on the new manuscript evidence. In light of the (zeri 擇日 “selecting days”) as the common custom of the haphazardness of archaeological excavation and instanc- times (first century ce): “People of the age—stupid or in- es of looted manuscripts, we must address the question of telligent, paragon or fool, lord or commoner alike—are whether the manuscripts we now have are representative led to believe out of fear and dread and dare not violate of contemporaneous manuscript culture and consider (hemerological prescriptions). No one is able to discern their relation to the transmitted texts. Finally, we must when in the past this began, so they treat it like the books admit how little we know about the regional, social, and of heaven and earth or the art of sages.”2 cultural realities of the people who produced and used My suggestion that Wang Chong’s rhetoric was in- the manuscripts. We are outsiders, modern readers trying formed by the type of text restored to us through the mod- to simultaneously use the manuscripts as sources of his- ern excavation of daybook manuscripts raises the second tory and re-create the experience of their original users. set of issues examined in this chapter, which requires The study of Warring States, Qin, and Han manuscript modern mediation between the manuscripts as artifacts culture includes all manuscripts. Daybooks and daybook- of popular culture and received knowledge in transmitted related manuscripts are a special category. On the one texts. For the statement quoted, the process of mediation hand, manuscript examples of historical, intellectual, and includes assessing the ideological background of Wang literary texts, as well as of technical occult and scientific Chong’s notion of popular credulity in his lifetime while literature, mostly represent manuscript production for the treating his statement and daybook manuscripts equally elite, whose social status was associated with literacy and as historical evidence, making modern sociological pre- access to positions of authority in government.1 Daybook sumptions that need not represent Wang Chong’s view of manuscripts, on the other hand, have the appearance social structure and its cultural implications, and expect- of an established type of miscellany that contains infor- ing that we can situate daybook manuscripts in an origi- mation—hemerological and non-hemerological—used nal setting reconstituted in part from transmitted texts.

1 For my use of the term “the elite” in connection with literacy and manuscript culture, see pp. 103–4 in this chapter. 2 Lunheng, 24, p. 1008 (“Biansui” 辨祟); Kalinowski, 2011a, p. 216.

Wang Chong did not mention “daybook” in the state- Above all, the “popular” can indicate a kind of rela- ment, but elsewhere he referred to the abundance and tion, a way of using cultural products or norms that diversity of “books of day prohibitions” (rijin zhi shu are shared, more or less, by society at large, but un- 日禁之書) and “books of seasons and days” (shiri zhi shu derstood, defined, and used in styles that vary.5 時日之書), which he used as evidence in his refutation of hemerological ideas and practices.3 Wang Chong used Chartier advised historians and sociologists to address the names to designate the literature in general; they did popular culture by examining how social groups in a given not specifically denote the daybook text type for which time and place interact differently with common sets of we have manuscript examples. Note the contrast in the ideas, practices, and artifacts rather than isolating “cultur- statement between the habitual acts prompted by fear al sets defined in themselves as popular.”6 This advice ap- and the conception of a body of knowledge with an un- plies to Wang Chong’s statement, which provides a point certain origin in the past, which I correlate with what we of entry to popular culture in China in the first century. call “hemerology.” Wang Chong addressed both the acts as Wang Chong’s rhetoric was most attuned to the different common custom and the body of knowledge. Unlike oth- uses of hemerology within the elite, loosely defined for ers who, in his view, mistakenly attributed hemerology the moment as anyone who thought of “selecting days” as to sages and “books of heaven and earth” (tiandi zhi shu a body of knowledge. As with other cases of popular cre- 天地之書)—one of his terms for the prophecy literature dulity singled out for criticism in his essays, Wang Chong’s of his day—Wang Chong belittled the acts and the body presentation of the evidence and his refutation were in- of knowledge.4 tended for people like himself, people who appreciated The statement encapsulates the problem of the study an argument and its reasons. For instance, his discussion of popular culture in early China. To begin, although some of gui 鬼 “ghosts and demons” offers seven suppositions in society—let us call them “the elite”—reflected on their that he represents as discrete ideas about gui current in existence in terms of ideas explaining worldviews and the his day but that I read as a rhetorical device for classifying bodies of knowledge formed from ideas, they shared with the ideas, the better to refute them. Contemporary readers other social groups the same existence as measured in of Wang Chong knew how to connect the seven supposi- common attitudes and daily acts. Current work on pop- tions to the common knowledge of the times in a way that ular culture in premodern societies no longer presumes the modern reader does not.7 that the word “popular” in “popular culture” signifies the In regard to the relation between hemerology and ha- divide separating the intellectual, literate elite from the bitual acts in everyday life, the modern reader of Wang world of the folk, or that popular culture by definition was Chong’s Assay of Arguments (Lunheng 論衡) is left to deficient and dependent on the dominant culture of the guess the pattern of variation in society at large from elite. A sociology that deems ideas, practices, and cultural the standpoint of local actors in communities no matter products to be popular in their opposition to elite culture what their social background. Daybooks and daybook- is suspect, and vice versa. In the 1990s, Roger Chartier related manuscripts offer evidence that is more personal: identified the problem and proposed the solution: they are manuscripts that Warring States, Qin, and Han people once held, saw, or perhaps only heard about. They A sociology implying that the classification of social are cultural artifacts, or realia, that were once an active groups corresponds strictly to a classification of cul- part of everyday experience. Their physical characteris- tural products or practices can no longer be accepted tics, content, provenance from tomb and non-tomb sites, uncritically. It is clear that the appropriation of texts, and association with people—the deceased or the local codes, or values in a given society may be a more dis- inhabitants—all provide sociologically significant infor- tinctive factor than the always illusory correspon- mation. The modern reader of daybooks must remain dence between a series of cultural artifacts and a openly curious about the cultural effect on someone’s life specific socio-cultural level. The “popular” cannot of written information collected in one manuscript, from be found ready-made in a set of texts or habits that merely need to be identified, listed, and described. 5 Chartier, 1995, p. 89. 6 Ibid. Chartier applies the term “appropriation” to the uses of dis- 3 Lunheng, 24, p. 989 (“Jiri” 譏日); Kalinowski, 2011a, p. 243. courses and models in specific practices that actualize them across 4 Wang Chong’s understanding of “books of heaven and earth” is social groups, in contrast to other social theorists’ use of the term. more explicit in the second occurrence of the term. See Lunheng, 7 Lunheng, 22, pp. 931–41 (“Dinggui” 訂鬼); Kalinowski, 2011a, 26, p. 1072 (“Shizhi” 實知); Kalinowski, 2011a, p. 199. pp. 272–81.