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"Chin, Tamara T"
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Savage exchange : Han imperialism, Chinese literary style, and the economic imagination
\"Explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), a pivotal time when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance markets. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, the author elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Savage Exchange
Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance (\"Silk Road\") markets. Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought. Co-Winner, 2016 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association; Honorable Mention, 2016 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.
eBook
Defamiliarizing the Foreigner: Sima Qian's Ethnography and Han-Xiongnu Marriage Diplomacy
Tamara T. Chin examines how relations between China and the Xiongnu transformed the discourse of China's imperial frontiers during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), and particularly how early Han dynasty political debates about the Han-Xiongnu \"peace through kinship\" (heqin 和親,)treaty shaped Sima Qian's ethnography. She shows that Sima Qian, whose description of the Xiongnu introduced empirical ethnography into the Chinese tradition, represented the Xiongnu from multiple perspectives and drew attention to political bias in Han discussions of the Xiongnu. His portrait of \"Han customs\" provided a comparative ethnography of Han and Xiongnu kinship that exposed the tensions in early Han-dynasty disputes over the meaning of the metaphor of heqin kinship. Later historiography, though modeling itself on Sima Qian's work, lacks both his unease about Han bias and his self-reflexivity in representing foreigners.
Journal Article
Alienation
Modern historians have observed that the married couple social unit took on a new political-economic importance during early Chinese empire. Qin-Han laws introduced the marriage-based house hold as the basic unit of society. Unlike the independent aristocratic polities of the Warring States period, all house holds were subordinate to the Emperor, and were required to register for the provision of taxes, labor, and military ser vice to the state. During the Former Han, tax penalties on unwed women (but not unwed men) and certain forms of co-residence helped to reduce house hold size to around four to six persons, thereby
Book Chapter
Commensuration
According to numismatists, Chinese coins had no “heads” side. Unlike their Western counterparts, the coins bore notations of their weight-value but no pictures. Nevertheless, the tension that the anthropologist Keith Hart describes between money as a token of the issuing state’s authority (“heads”) and its market value as a commodity (“tails”) permeates ancient and modern debates about Chinese money.¹ Emura Haruki’s recent numismatic study, for example, argues that Chinese coinage began among sixth-century BCE mercantile communities for trade across economic and po liti cal borders, and that regional governments subsequently appropriated this medium as an instrument of economic control.² In
Book Chapter
Quantification
Like other forms of Chinese literature, the Han dynasty’s most popular literary genre, the epideicticfu (da fu大賦 “greatfu” or 漢賦 “Han dynasty fu”) includes objects steeped with classical, symbolic determinations. However, this genre’s rhythmic catalogs of exotica remain dominated by lists of unfamiliar or apparently non-symbolic things.¹ Unlike the flora and fauna of theClassic of OdesandElegies of Chu, China’s central poetic traditions, thefu’s individual exotica have not raised the critical problem of figurative language. Instead, ancient and modern readers have generally found the meaning of the things mentioned in thefuin
Book Chapter
Coda
Although grounded in Chinese literary and cultural history, this book began and developed as part of a broader interest in seeing what happens when one takes cross-cultural and connected histories, rather than national history, as the framework for literary inquiry. In this coda I will try to clarify my intention for this book: that is, I hope this work will help to open up a space for early interculturality in approaches to comparative literature and, conversely, that it will suggest avenues for approaching contact historiography from a literary perspective.
Let me begin with material archaeology. Recent excavations of literary and
Book Chapter
Competition
Like the prose-poeticfu, historiography became a medium through which Han writers challenged or reformulated the classical ideal of tributary empire. In the paradigm enshrined in theBook of Documents(“Tribute of Yu”), the ruler’s foreign and domestic subjects symbolically enacted the hierarchical political order through the annual exchange of material tribute. While thefuwas embroiled in the Han politics ofthings(e.g., related to lavish spending, tribute, exotica), historiography introduced a new politics of persons. Both ancient and modern scholars have understood Han historiography as a way of introducing new discursive subjects into Chinese literature. Those groups perceived
Book Chapter