Lineages Embedded In Temple Networks
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Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks
Author: Richard G. Wang
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 2022-10-18
In Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks, Richard Wang explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks and the state through their clerical lineages--empire-wide networks channeling knowledge and resources--and by controlling central temples.
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks
Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures. In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as lineages and temple networks) and central state institutions. The first part provides the framework for viewing Daoism as a social institution in regard to both its religious lineages and its service to the state in the bureaucratic apparatus to implement state orthodoxy. The second part follows four cases to reveal the connections between clerical lineages and local networks. Wang illustrates how Daoism claimed a universal ideology and civilizing force that mediated between local organizations and central state institutions, which in turn brought meaning and legitimacy to both local society and the state.
Genealogy and Status
By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China during the Mongol Empire, or Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), Genealogy and Status explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles through their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy. Northern Chinese officials commissioned these steles exclusively to record a family’s extensive genealogy, rather than the biography or achievements of an individual. Tomoyasu Iiyama shows how the rise of these steles demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. In fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China. The evolution of genealogical steles delineates how local elites, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese culture, fully accommodated to Mongol imperial rule and became instead one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia.