“There is then, just one science of men in time. It requires us to join the study of the dead and of the living”. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (47)
“… there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection.” Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (38)
“… we speak, fluently and profusely, through Time. Time much like language or money, is a carrier of signification, a form through which we define the content of relations between the Self and the Other. Moreover … Time may give form to relations of power and inequality …” Fabian, Time and the Other – (xii)
“Time, as it where, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history”. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (84)
These four quotes frame the issues of time, place, meaning and power that we would like to explore in this paper on the “reception of antiquity”. In the first, Marc Bloch, writing from the perspective of a historian in search of a “science of history” speaks of a single body of techniques and knowledge encompassing all human time and space – felicitously described as a conjoined study of the living and the dead. Nearly three quarters of a century later, the confidence that history can or should be a science has eroded significantly, yet there remains a sense that history is something that can, even must, be evaluated. The joining of the living and the dead poetically suggested in Bloch’s quote, however, points to issues not anticipated by him – for are we not forced to ask, “which living?”, "whose dead?”. Surely the modes of experiencing the relationship between the living and the dead are as various as anything in human life, yet is all historical knowledge not grounded in some sort of relational dialectic between a community of the living and its dead? Halbwachs’ famous theory of collective memory reminds us of the social nature of memory and indeed the past. History, in this light, must be seen as imbricated in larger collective sense-making – fundamentally social and therefore possessing of a locality and a specificity. Fabian’s quote on the other hand reminds that time - the claims of empty, neutral, scientific chronology not withstanding - is a lived medium of social experience: quantifier of pleasure or pain; slave-driver or redeemer; font of hope or despair; as heavy as a mountain or as light as a feather. It can, moreover, through the mediation of power shape relations of inequality, as can place. Indeed, as Bakhtin’s remarks remind us, time and space are not separable, but aspects of a phenomenological whole: places are experienced and made meaningful through the mediation of time; temporal experience is located and emplaced. In what follows we will explore these themes as they are instantiated at Anyang, a key site in the creation of contemporary notions of Chinese antiquity.
In May 2007, in Huayuanzhuang village, Yinxu, a group of amateur dancers from the villages of Xiaotun and Huanyuanzhuang enacted a dramatic imagining of the romance of King Wuding and his most famous consort, Fu Hao. No ordinary performance, the dancers danced for a group of archaeologists, historians and local government officials assembled to pronounce judgment on the “authenticity” of the dance group’s production and so certify it for inclusion in the official staging of Shang history at the Yinxu museum complex, itself the site of a new museum and newly inscribed as a UNESCO world heritage site. As one of the assembled “experts” asked to speak my judgment in turn, I (Campbell) was forcefully struck by both the absurdity of my task and the movingly inauthentic authenticity of the dancers. While quite certain that Shang warriors didn’t possess swords, that Shang music was beyond reconstruction (and in any case would be based on flutes, bells, chimes and drums not a Chinese folk music ensemble) and, that Shang dances probably wouldn’t have had so many socialist-realist elements … nevertheless, it was equally absurd that I, an academic and foreigner, was asked to pronounce on the authenticity of Yinxu villagers dancing the putative ancestors beneath their feet. On the one hand, from the perspective of the empty time-space of scientific archaeology and history, there was very little authentic about the dancers or their dances. On the other, from the perspective of the lived experience of the villagers and their spatio-temporal imaginaries and myths of origin and identity, there could be no more authentic expression.
The paradox of that moment is the subject of this paper: how “antiquity” is not received but rather made and remade in an endless sequence of presents by actors who may make universal claims but are nonetheless partisans of particular times and places - times and places that are never empty, but thickened and enfleshed, charged and emplotted. “Antiquity” then, is a patchwork tapestry of narrative woven from mythologies of origin, identity and meaning. Moreover, it is itself only one particular objectification of time-space among other possibilities. Its textual manifestation drawn from layers of narrative each with its own chronotopical situation of gu 古 “ancient” or xi 昔 “former times” , creating palimpsest “antiquities” anachronistically narrativized into contemporary spatio-temporal imaginary wholes – a “what was” out of fragments of “what is no longer”. It is a central paradox that antiquity lives only in the living yet is composed solely of the dead – dead deeds and dead actors.
While contemporary historians and archaeologists might like to argue for a better, more reflexive historiography, taking each text or artifact as a fragment of a lost chronotope - part of a once totalizing, now fragmentary, narrative of what is no longer – this perspective, of a science of the past, is just another partisan position and, depending on the context, perhaps not the most relevant joining of the dead with the living.
To begin unpacking these issues, let us take, for example, the Shang. What is the Shang? As a thought experiment, imagine there was no mention of the Shang dynasty in the transmitted textual tradition. Imagining the accidental discovery of Yinxu in 1928, what narratives would have arisen about the site, entailing what spatio-temporal imaginaries? Surely it would have been fitted into the great Western myths of the rise of civilization and the first cities current at the time (as indeed it was). An East Asian Ur, without a ziggurat perhaps, but nonetheless with impressive royal tombs - outdoing the great burial chamber in human sacrifice among other things. To be sure it would have been debated whether the civilization represented at Anyang was diffused from a West Asian originary point or was an indigenous development following humanity’s great social evolutionary stages, but the inclusion of Anyang into the universal teleology of civilization’s rise would have been assured. These universalizing spatio-temporal imaginaries had themselves derived from prior Christian teleology, Enlightenment humanistic universalism, 19th century evolutionism wedded to European imperialism and the invention of time that was not a sequence of significant happenings or space that was not an itinerary of significant places. In other words, the world archaeological narrative that Anyang would have been fit into (and indeed was) imagined time and space as a universal, abstract and mostly blank grid into which all events and places could be fit, but nonetheless shaped by an associated mythology of common human origin, social evolutionary hierarchy, and Euro-American rationality.
At the same time, Anyang was discovered at a moment when the Republic of China was seeking to establish its place as a nation state among nation states, and searching for a past that could paradoxically belong to both the universal chronotope of contemporary science and the particular timeless time and precisely circumscribed space of the nation. That Anyang, even without a textual tradition, would have been fit into nationalist mythologies of autochthonic origins, an essential, bounded Chinese identity and a teleological march to the present can be seen from the extension of proto-China into the 6th millennium BCE in Fei Xiaotong’s famous “multiple origins, single body” doctrine (Fei 1988). By this doctrine all archaeological cultures within the borders of the PRC (itself the nationalized boundaries of the Qing empire), and none without, were destined to become part of the Chinese people - a spatial orthodoxy isomorphic with the nation state - now searching for a more precise chronology and originary point with the current government sponsored Three Dynasties Chronology Project (Duandai 2000) and “Origins of Chinese Civilization Project”.
Nevertheless, without the transmitted tradition, though Anyang could still occupy a major site in the chronotope of universal developmental time-space and be important marker on the national road leading from the origin of Chinese civilization to its contemporary form, it could not be the Shang of Zhou conquest, one of the three dynasties referred to by Confucius and Mencius - a time-space imagined and re-imagined for over three thousand years - indelibly part of sequential Chinese literate and folk historical-spatial imaginaries - the setting of 16th century Buddhist child-deity Nezha’s adventures as much as that of Sima Qian’s 2nd century BCE narration of King Zhou's depravities or Wu Ding's virtuous conquests, or the object of the 6th century BCE Book of Song’s dynastic hymns.1 Anyang without the textual tradition would literally not be Shang. What the discovery of archaeological Shang at Anyang did was at once give specificity to a previously vague (and therefore flexible) spatio-temporal imaginary, and place it within the empty time-spaces of scientific archaeology and the nation, all the while absorbing and sublimating the chronotopal palimpsest of the received tradition (of Buddhist spatio-temporal landscapes, of Confucian imaginaries, of Sima Qian’s early Imperial synthesizing and totalizing, but nonetheless profoundly non-modern chronotope) – subsuming it into the bounded, homogeneous spatio-temporal imaginary of the nation. The Shang then, was not received so much as made, and remade – and since the discovery of Anyang, as an inextricable twining of archaeological and traditional textual narratives refracted through the sometimes conflicting chronotopes of universal scientific and national time-space.
To gain a sense of how objectified chronotopes such as “antiquity” are formed from phenomenological fragments let us turn to the issue of archaeology and how it makes its object. In an even more obvious sense than that of historical narrative, archaeological knowledge is a weaving together of fragments: pot sherds, bone fragments, lenses and layers are synthesized in abstract spatio-temporal grids of seriation and stratigraphy in some of the most basic techniques of the discipline. What is perhaps less obvious is the way that archaeological time is a combination of irreconcilable spatio-temporal practices – time-space as point and duration or range (Lucas 2004). While time-space is chiefly experienced as duration, memory is mostly experienced as events – places and times frozen into spatio-temporal snapshots. An analogous process occurs within the archaeological production of time and space. Archaeologists narrativize constructs like the Shang as bounded spatio-temporal entities – things existing over a period of time and within a restricted territory or distribution. They talk of this house or that pot or individual, but what they are presented with, phenomenologically speaking, is a collection of fragments and residues that form palimpsests caught up in processes of transformation that do not cease even in the present (Shanks and Tilley 1987). To say that archaeology constructs its historical objects and narrates wholes out of fragments, however, is only an adequate account if one realizes the fundamental spatio-temporal sense in which this is true. Though archaeology dreams of the placement of every fragment within an exact spatio-temporal grid, in reality time can only be given as a range (usually no finer than generations) and space only record the location of an artifact or feature (when recognized as such, which is another issue) caught in the current of ongoing processes but narrativized as a stable sign of what once was. The floor that once belonged to a house and house to community - only partially recoverable as a lens of discolored soil between other soils - had a (now lost) life history of its own, its deposit formed over a period of time and undergoing irreversible chemical and physical transformations down to the present. Yet to be comprehensible as history in the broad sense, these fuzzy spatio-temporal abstractions must be stabilized in human or institutional time-space and their disparate fragments narrativized into wholes that are nonetheless totalizing fictions entailing specific chronotopal mythologies.
Taking again the example of the Shang, this time as archaeological culture, we begin with an abstraction predicated on an imagined fit between material remains and ethno-political identity, the former’s imprecise spatio-temporal range and distribution re-imagined in the latter as an entity with duration and boundary. In China, archaeological cultures, the building blocks of deep-time chronotopal narratives, whether of the progress of humanity or the nation, are in fact built from the end points in the distribution and then transformation chains of pottery fragments imagined as whole pots (and physically reconstructed as such) and then associated with the humans imagined to have used them. To be spatio-temporally legible in Chinese archaeological practice, however, the fragments must be fit within stylistic periodizations assigning any given fragment to a time-range, which must, in turn, be fitted to the absolute chronology (known only in terms of a range of probabilities) and geography of the modern state. Archaeological Shang then, even more obviously than historiographical Shang, is a totalizing fiction generated within a specific set of spatio-temporal assumptions from a vast skein of inferences and extrapolations translating fragments of differing spatio-temporal modalities into narratives of collective memory and group identity.
If the past is continually made and remade in the present (and in some sense makes and remakes the present), it is also obviously a situated, relational product of potential struggle. The sited, partisan nature of the past becomes obvious when one considers that the past is not just a time, but a place, and, moreover, a place-time that in so far as it is meaningful, stands in some kind of relationship to the imaginer. The case of archaeology allows for a particularly tangible sense of the relationship between spatio-temporal production and its connection to place and personal stake.
Archaeologists not only preside over particularly fragmentary sources of chronotopic production, their knowledge capital is also uniquely based on tangible and relatively non-liquid sources – sherds and artifacts can be removed but context and sites are immobile. This fact creates the conditions for a well-known territoriality in archaeology that has only a figurative correspondence in history. As those who may spend years or decades recovering and assembling the fragments of archaeological knowledge into some semblance of order before the resulting assemblage can be narrativized in human temporal-spatial terms, a desire for control or even a sense of “ownership” of sites is perhaps inevitable. Given that excavation is destruction and that primary data is unique and unreproducible, coupled with the months, years or decades spent physically on site, archaeologists have a perhaps uniquely immanent and tangible sense of connection to their sources.
Anyang or Yinxu, the cradle of Chinese archaeology, is no exception. Indeed, not only are the current dominant archaeological chronotopes of the Shang predicated on the elision or absorption of prior ones, shaped by the overarching mythic time-space of the nation and universalizing science, assembled into total narratives from spatio-temporally incommensurable fragments, they are built from successive generations of archaeological place and sense-making. While one obvious instantiation of this connection is manifested in terms of authority born of experience and ownership of the discursive site –a lifetime of excavation and a vast amorphous reserve of unpublished information grants such individuals a certain inalienable mastery over site and through it, a certain time-space – yet there is also a sense of place and identity manifested in an experience of the site in terms of personal commitment and stewardship, if not actual patrimony. Probably no more eloquent expression of this exists than that given by Yang Bojun, septuagenarian veteran of Anyang archaeology, in a talk given at the 80th anniversary of Anyang’s scientific excavation. Yang implored an audience of younger archaeologists to remember their vocation, to remember their responsibility not only to their country, but to the world, arguing that archaeological Anyang does not just belong to the Chinese nation but to the patrimony of human civilization. Evoking the hardship and sacrifice of previous generations of Yinxu archaeologists, from firefights with bandits and looters in the 20's and 30's, to the upheavals of political movements in the 50’s, and the suffering endured during the Cultural Revolution, down to the contemporary encroachment of developers, Yang underscored that every inch of Yinxu that remains to archaeology has been bought with the blood, sweat and tears of successive generations of Yinxu archaeologists. Not only do archaeologists’ own the authoritative representation of the site then, but they have a solemn duty to preserve it against the encroachment of other interests for the posterity of the nation and the world. This, then, is literally history won from a particular ground by a specific group of men and women, a concrete time-space intertwined with their stories and experiences – at once a site of national and universal chronotopic productions, as well as deeply personal ones. It also situates this stewardship in monumental, world historical time – local, contemporary interests are set against the nation, the world and all of human time.
If archaeologists are part-time residents of archaeological sites with a certain perspective toward it that includes stewardship and a primary sense of its nature as a location of historical production, there are often other, more permanent residents of archaeological sites and their vicinities that have other relationships with time and place. Anyang is such a case.
Anyone visiting Anyang will be struck by the ubiquity of Shang imagery – ancient scripts and Shang bronze motifs adorn the walls of hotels and restaurants, while reconstructed Shang style towers guard the road approaching Yinxu. Anyang is home to the Yinxu museum and park, the Royal Cemetery park, the Anyang Municipal Museum and the National Museum of Chinese Writing. It is perhaps unsurprising that Shang culture is an important element of local identity - even if the understanding of what exactly that entails is murky or at variance with scholarly opinion. For instance, while at a kickboxing school near Yinxu, after learning that one of us was working on a bone assemblage that had come from a nearby salvage excavation, the school’s founder stopped class and lectured the assembled students on the importance of the history beneath their feet. Their royal ancestors had left the earliest Chinese writing on bone and they, as inhabitants of Anyang, should take pride in being the custodians of this treasure demonstrating China’s 5000 years of history. No amount of explanation could persuade her that it was debris from bone tool production that had been found rather than oracle-bones – everyone knows that bronzes and oracle-bones are the treasure that archaeologists seek at Anyang. Irregardless of some fuzziness about chronology and the unlikelihood of any direct Shang ancestry (Yinxu was abandoned for over a thousand years), what matters to locals of this gritty, second-string industrial town is that important things have been found in their backyards – that the local sense of place combines with a cultural heritage of world importance. While other provinces may look down on Henan as poor, dirty and crime-ridden, and people from Beijing or Shanghai sneer at backwards Anyang, this was once the seat of kings, the pivot of the four quarters. Local place-making and historical imagination conflate at Anyang to create a mythological genealogy stretching back to the beginnings of history itself.
This sense of connection to and thus ownership of local history and its material signs is perhaps nowhere stronger than with the residents of Yinxu itself, especially the elders of Xiaotun and Huayuanzhuang - whose villages abut the former palaces of the Shang kings. This fact was powerfully brought home during a visit to the Yinxu Museum when a security guard shouted at an elderly man to get his hand out of a display – a more than three thousand year old fish still in situ in its block of earth and covered on top (but not on the side) by plexiglass. Rather than being abashed at being caught “red-handed” in a grave breach of museum-going etiquette, the old man turned and angrily responded, “I’m a man of Xiaotun aren’t I? This fish came out of Xiaotun earth same as me. Why can’t I touch it?”. Though the farmers of Xiaotun haven’t technically owned the land they work for some time, they have lived there for generations eking out an existence from the same soil that entombs Shang history. Indeed, their forefathers were probably also among those who mined this same soil for buried oracle-bones, bronzes and jades.
Ironically, Shang history, at once a source of pride and erstwhile blackmarket profit, and now temporary, low paid archaeological work, is also a source of financial hardship. Under land development restrictions mandated by Yinxu’s status as a protected site, the villagers of Yinxu have not been able to take advantage of opportunities for economic growth, becoming instead the poorest area in Anyang. Not surprisingly, the villagers have mixed feelings about their relationship to Shang history. Burdened and blessed with a UNESCO world heritage site, the villagers find their time and place out of synch: inheriting agrarian attachments to ancient lands in a world of head-spinning development. Leaving means abandoning land, family and friends, staying means economic stagnation.
For local government and developers, however, Yinxu is an untapped resource. With Yinxu’s new UNESCO world heritage status (inscribed in 2006) and the directive to turn national archaeological sites into parks in the 12th five year plan (2011-2015), there have been no shortage of schemes proposed for turning Shang history into a profit-making cultural resource. Here, for the strategically situated, the chronotopes of economic development, national directive, local pride and ancient history can combine the time-spaces of archaeological park, tourist draw, national historic site and profitable development – if only the right recipe can be found. Antiquity, as a profitable cultural heritage venture, however, can take on some strange forms. One 2008 proposal included a petting zoo and visitor center in the shape of a pyramid – clearly more in synch with the time-space of contemporary Chinese tourism than archaeological or historical Shang.
This is the context in which the Xiaotun Dancing Group performed in 2007. Having formed to take advantage of Yinxu’s new UNESCO status and the tourist revenue that the new status was hoped to bring, the dancers were attempting to stake their claim to a time-space isomorphic with, but troublingly distant from their village homes. Ironically for those living all their lives with the Shang capital literally beneath their feet, their reclamation of Shang space-time required the approval of its archaeological and historical custodians, even as their staging at the palace-temple museum (on what had once been their farm land) required the permission of local government and museum officials – the gatekeepers of contemporary Yinxu’s developmental and administrative chronotope. Although the assembled experts gave their collective approval to the movingly authentically inauthentic Shang Dancers, and the officials their permission, funding, though promised, was never forthcoming. Ultimately, after dancing two hour shows for tourists twice a day through the heat of June, the dancers left the museum having only received three day’s pay. Unable to secure a place in the local government’s developmental plan and failing to successfully find a home in the competitive contemporary Chinese tourist market, the Xiaotun Dancing Group folded in 2008. The village of Huayuanzhuang itself has since been pulled down and the villagers relocated outside of the Yinxu protection zone. If antiquity stands in some sort of relationship with the present – conjoining the living and the dead - in time and place, then it must be admitted that there are almost an infinite possibility of antiquities – and that antiquity is not received, but rather the product of struggle, located in time-spaces as varied as the dead, as singular as home.