Men in mourning: Ritual, human nature, and politics in Warring States and Han China, 453 BC--AD 220

This dissertation treats changes in early Chinese political culture through the prism of three years mourning. Chapter 1 traces ideas about the connection between mind, body, and ritual from the Warring States (453–221 BC) through Eastern Han (AD 25–220). Incorporating medical categories and terminology, Han ritualists elaborated the basic insights of their Warring States predecessors, arguing that the mourning rites were the natural and inevitable expression of human emotion. Chapter 2 treats Warring States and Western Han (206 BC–AD25) attitudes about kinship, as reflected in ritual prescription. Authors of ritual prescriptions believed that considerations of status should constrain expressions of sorrow through mourning. This belief was shaped by the concerns of statesmen about the negative effects of spontaneous expressions of affinity between kin. Chapter 3 analyzes shifts that occurred in the rhetoric of filial piety between the early Western Han and Eastern Han. Whereas official Western Han rhetoric stressed impartial public service, that of the Eastern Han increasingly focused on the body: safeguarding the body, properly disposing the body after death, and fulfilling through ritual emotional needs generated by human nature. Chapter 4 examines the startling attention Eastern Han mourning accounts give to depictions of the mother-son bond. Such attention can be explained in terms of the dominant associations of the mother-son bond: frequently depicted as emotional and private, the mother-son bond came to represent an ideological alternative to the early Han ethos of state service. Chapter 5 argues that the bond of son to mother, more so than that of son to father, or subject to lord, provided a rhetorical and ritual template for client-patron relations. Like mourning for a mother, mourning for a patron became an expression of opting out of state service. Chapter 6 challenges standard views that portray funerary inscriptions as attempts to flatter the social pretensions of paying customers. Such inscriptions also reflected assertions of autonomy from the court on the part of members of the local and political elites. Beliefs about the self, the family, and political association adopted by Eastern Han elites ultimately had a corrosive effect on dynastic authority.