Blood, flesh and bones: Kinship and violence in the social economy of the Late Shang

The Shang dynasty has occupied a central place in both Chinese history and archaeology of the last century. As the earliest period in China for which there is near unanimous agreement on the presence of "state" societies, the Shang period has also figured prominently in archaeological discussions of social complexity.; However, in framing historical development in terms of movements from kinship to bureaucracy, sacred to secular and religion to philosophy, traditional accounts of Early China have embedded Shang history in Enlightenment teleologies while avoiding the issues of how "belief' and authority are produced through historically situated social-economic practices and institutions. Moreover, recent comparative analyses of early polities have tended to shoe-horn the Shang polity(ies) into categories derived from other societies without adequate regard or understanding of the historical particulars of the physical, practical and discursive constitution of Shang society and world.; Eschewing backward projected teleologies or content-free generalizations, I argue for a study of the past in terms of the many braided relationships between social practices and the constitution of being and world. After critically reviewing recent theory on early polities and its application to China I present an up-dated account of North China in the 2nd millennium B.C. and through a synthetic analysis of archaeological, epigraphic and transmitted textual evidence sketch an outline of the socio-political landscape of the Late Shang. Reconstructing Late Shang practices of authority and their material bases, I focus on sacrifice, warfare and burial in their role in the constitution of social identity and hierarchy as intersecting practices of kinship and violence.; Based on these analyses I argue that the Late Shang world was ceaselessly ordered through domesticating practices based on communal violence, ancestral construction and sacrifice, recursively (re)producing, through differential participation in these practices a hierarchy of being that stretched from sacrificial victims to deified ancestors and the high god Di. Moreover, with place and identity experienced in terms of hierarchical relationships of kinship and patronage, social obligation and political authority were produced through universal participation and investment in a radically inegalitarian social economy of kinship and violence.