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SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
The Animal and the Daemon in Early China
Explores early Chinese beliefs regarding the animal world and how these informed ideals of sagehood and political authority.
Exploring the cultural perception of animals in early Chinese thought, this careful reading of Warring States and Han dynasty writings analyzes how views of animals were linked to human self perception and investigates the role of the animal world in the conception of ideals of sagehood and socio-political authority. Roel Sterckx shows how perceptions ofthe animal world influenced early Chinese views of man’s place among the living species and in the world at large. He argues that the classic Chinese perception of the world did not insist on clear categorical or ontological boundaries between animals, humans, and other creatures such as ghosts and spirits. Instead the animal realm was positioned as part of an organic whole and the mutual relationships among the living species—both as natural and cultural creatures—were characterized as contingent, continuous, and interdependent.
“With his [Sterckx’s] enormous knowledge … and meticulous arguing … he provides us with a unique work that will remain standard in the field for many years, an immense source of information full of stimulating new insights and interpretations dealing with the subject of the mutual relations between man and animal.” — East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
“…a fascinating study of animals as metaphors for human behaviour and character, as well as of the anthropomorphism of animals thought subject to moral laws and human virtue.” — Archives of Natural History
“Sterckx’s study deserves wide attention, for it broadens one’s perspective of the historical, crossing disciplinary boundaries to suggest a fuller, more complete Chinese universe.” — Journal of Asian History
“This book provides a sumptuous and detailed typology of an important theme in early Chinese thought. It adumbrates the ways in which the animal world was appropriated by the early Chinese to create some of the most fundamental ideals concerning the spiritual, social, and political aspects of sagehood in Warring States and Han China. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which the early Chinese perceived the natural world and how such perceptions reflected on and shaped their views of the human world and what it meant to be human.” — Sarah A. Queen, author of From Chronicle to The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn, According to Tung Chung-Shu
“I know of no other book, either in a European language or in Chinese or Japanese, which provides such a fascinating portrait of early Chinese interpretations of animals. I suspect that it will be a major reference work for everyone who deals with the intellectual and religious world of early China.” — John H. Berthrong, author of Concerning A Comparison of Chu Hsi, Whitehead, and Neville
Exploring the cultural perception of animals in early Chinese thought, this careful reading of Warring States and Han dynasty writings analyzes how views of animals were linked to human self perception and investigates the role of the animal world in the conception of ideals of sagehood and socio-political authority. Roel Sterckx shows how perceptions ofthe animal world influenced early Chinese views of man’s place among the living species and in the world at large. He argues that the classic Chinese perception of the world did not insist on clear categorical or ontological boundaries between animals, humans, and other creatures such as ghosts and spirits. Instead the animal realm was positioned as part of an organic whole and the mutual relationships among the living species—both as natural and cultural creatures—were characterized as contingent, continuous, and interdependent.
“With his [Sterckx’s] enormous knowledge … and meticulous arguing … he provides us with a unique work that will remain standard in the field for many years, an immense source of information full of stimulating new insights and interpretations dealing with the subject of the mutual relations between man and animal.” — East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
“…a fascinating study of animals as metaphors for human behaviour and character, as well as of the anthropomorphism of animals thought subject to moral laws and human virtue.” — Archives of Natural History
“Sterckx’s study deserves wide attention, for it broadens one’s perspective of the historical, crossing disciplinary boundaries to suggest a fuller, more complete Chinese universe.” — Journal of Asian History
“This book provides a sumptuous and detailed typology of an important theme in early Chinese thought. It adumbrates the ways in which the animal world was appropriated by the early Chinese to create some of the most fundamental ideals concerning the spiritual, social, and political aspects of sagehood in Warring States and Han China. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which the early Chinese perceived the natural world and how such perceptions reflected on and shaped their views of the human world and what it meant to be human.” — Sarah A. Queen, author of From Chronicle to The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn, According to Tung Chung-Shu
“I know of no other book, either in a European language or in Chinese or Japanese, which provides such a fascinating portrait of early Chinese interpretations of animals. I suspect that it will be a major reference work for everyone who deals with the intellectual and religious world of early China.” — John H. Berthrong, author of Concerning A Comparison of Chu Hsi, Whitehead, and Neville
385 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2002
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About the author
Roel Sterckx
9 books9 followersRoel Sterckx FBA (born 1969) is a Flemish-British sinologist and anthropologist. He is the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Clare College.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 27, 2021
Some books are very difficult to rate; this is one of them. To begin with, it's very academic. As the Introduction notes, "This book examines animals in early China, not the animal that forms the object of study for the zoo-historian, archaeologist, fabulist, or literary critic, but the perception of animals and the animal world as a signifying exponent of the world of thought in Warring States and early imperial China" (p. 1). In other words, animals are looked at from the viewpoint of those Chinese scholars who lived roughly 476 BCE-300 CE when they were seen "as signifying exponents of a larger cosmic pattern rather than creatures conceived as purely biological species" (p. 241). So if you're looking for what animals symbolize in Chinese art over the past 1500 years, you're better off with my own work (Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery. However, if you are like me, and want to try to understand the roots and bases of some of the imagery later used (in literature as well as art), then this is definitely a work you'll want to own and refer to. An example: the tomb figurines that often depict an animal with deer antlers, sticking out a long tongue, and often clutching a snake. These wooden sculptures have long intrigued Chinese art historians. Are they apotropaic psychopomps or protective spirits or an earth god? Author Sterckx has collected literary examples and other material on how creatures of the underworld are seen (snakes amongst them) that contributes to the discussions scholars have concerning these tomb figures. One of the more fascinating chapters for me was how animals were seen as the embodiment of social values and how animal patterns (both behavioral and physical) were often linked to the human world.
Like many academic books, it's a book to be read when acquired, then shelved to be used as a resource when working on a topic that recalls some of the topics covered. If you're a student of Chinese ancestral animal sacrifices, for example, you'll be pulling this volume off the shelf frequently. Students of Confucianism or those laboring their way through the Chunqiu or Zuozhuan will also benefit greatly from Sterckx' translations and dissection of some of the more obtuse passages.
This book belongs next to your collections of Chinese mythology, ancient Chinese bronzes, and Richard Strassberg's A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the 'Guideways through Mountains and Seas'.
Like many academic books, it's a book to be read when acquired, then shelved to be used as a resource when working on a topic that recalls some of the topics covered. If you're a student of Chinese ancestral animal sacrifices, for example, you'll be pulling this volume off the shelf frequently. Students of Confucianism or those laboring their way through the Chunqiu or Zuozhuan will also benefit greatly from Sterckx' translations and dissection of some of the more obtuse passages.
This book belongs next to your collections of Chinese mythology, ancient Chinese bronzes, and Richard Strassberg's A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the 'Guideways through Mountains and Seas'.
October 13, 2017
This book basically answers one question: Was there systematic studies of animals (i.e. zoology) in ancient China? Throughout the book we get that the answer is a definite "Yes" -- ancient Chinese did spend some efforts on observing and classifying animals, though much less in depth compared to what ancient Greeks and Romans had achieved, as manifested in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia. This doesn't imply that ancient Chinese lacked outsight or disinterested in the nature, rather Sterckx found that Chinese were more attracted by the social and cultural representations interpreted from animals' appearances and behaviours. Animals were therefore studied not for their biological configurations but their appropriateness of fitting into the hierarchical system of Imperial China dictated mainly by Confucian values. For instance, one's status within the imperial court determined which animal should appear on his clothes, with the Emperor being the only person capable of wearing Loong, or Chinese dragon. The implication of different animals can also be observed from a broader view -- say, Chinese classics, which not only contained large portions of discussions regarding animals but also sought to attribute human characters and ethics to every animal, with a famous example being lamb and filial piety, for lambs kneel down when sucking milk from their mothers' breasts -- a natural behaviour interpreted as being pious and grateful towards parents. There were many more classic examples of animals playing the role of humans in ancient China that can be found inside the book.
It is overall an interesting book with a unique perspective, as well as a good source for referencing human-nature interactions in ancient China.
It is overall an interesting book with a unique perspective, as well as a good source for referencing human-nature interactions in ancient China.
August 28, 2022
Apparently I started reading this book more than 9 years ago and then set it down and I can totally see why. This book is just sooo boring and it could easily have been cut in half. The first chapter Defining Animals was a drag. I know this is a scholarly book, but did that chapter have to be that boring? The second chapter was much more interesting. The belief of human officers being connected to animals is interesting as well as the belief that should they negelect their duties the animals in question would disappear (that is an explanation why no more dragons can be seen). But that did not last.
I really wondered how widespread the stuff was that the author talks about here. Plus, this apparently is about the warring States and Han periods, so I wonder even more if this was just something for the elite, especially since no sacrificial animals for commoners were mentioned. And my god, who talks like this? Read this here:
The examples of animal classification encountered so far have shown that the hermeneutic of the animal world in early China tended to blend biological and socioreligious models. Rather than dissociating the biological properties of animals from their social perception, both were taken as complementary.
Does he even still understood what he wrote there? And Oh god!!!! The author talks so much (you could easily cut this book in half) and with so many unneccessary words that I switched to reading the chapter conclusions. And they made it even more clear how superfluous so much of this is, you could have shortened this significantly.
"The animal and territory" conclusion was just dumb. Only this here was interesting to me: While the origins of human culture were viewed as the direct result of the physical or moral conquest of a primitive or bestial order by legendary sages and heroes, patterns derived from the animal world at the same time provided the inspiration for cultural foundations such as the trigrams, writing, and clothing.
And the conclusion of transforming beasts could be summarized with "music can tame them" that is it. That short. The conclusions are already way too long!!!! I really hoped the chapters of Changing Animals and Strange animals would be better, but I had my fears.
Considered how often the author already talked about this or that being a transformation of sorts, I really doubted his statements on what is a transformations. And how could these people believe that animals transform constantly, like hawks into pigeons, or snakes out of something else, when they knew they lay eggs, have they never seen anything born or hatched and did no one ever question this transformation crap?
The only interesting thing was that the book featured way way more human to animal transformation than what I am used to from even the Tang period, and especially Ming and Qing. Is that because buddhism wasn't established yet? And funny, animal to human transformations were much rarer here than I am used to from books about the past of East Asia.
It was good to read something from back then that critiques the whole transformation thing at least a bit, but only in how the phenomenon should be interpreted. And I really wonder what the author means with transformation as giving birth to a wrong species counts as transformation apparently for him.
I can at least give him that he stated this here:
The relative scarcity of sources, both textual and material, which may provide testimony of the ways in which ordinary peasants and village dwellers in Warring States and Han China perceived the nonhuman species suggests that the mentalities reconstructed in this study are likely to reflect the views of those strata within society capable of creating, reading, preserving, and circulating texts.
But apart from small bits like that, there was nothing good about this book.
I really wondered how widespread the stuff was that the author talks about here. Plus, this apparently is about the warring States and Han periods, so I wonder even more if this was just something for the elite, especially since no sacrificial animals for commoners were mentioned. And my god, who talks like this? Read this here:
The examples of animal classification encountered so far have shown that the hermeneutic of the animal world in early China tended to blend biological and socioreligious models. Rather than dissociating the biological properties of animals from their social perception, both were taken as complementary.
Does he even still understood what he wrote there? And Oh god!!!! The author talks so much (you could easily cut this book in half) and with so many unneccessary words that I switched to reading the chapter conclusions. And they made it even more clear how superfluous so much of this is, you could have shortened this significantly.
"The animal and territory" conclusion was just dumb. Only this here was interesting to me: While the origins of human culture were viewed as the direct result of the physical or moral conquest of a primitive or bestial order by legendary sages and heroes, patterns derived from the animal world at the same time provided the inspiration for cultural foundations such as the trigrams, writing, and clothing.
And the conclusion of transforming beasts could be summarized with "music can tame them" that is it. That short. The conclusions are already way too long!!!! I really hoped the chapters of Changing Animals and Strange animals would be better, but I had my fears.
Considered how often the author already talked about this or that being a transformation of sorts, I really doubted his statements on what is a transformations. And how could these people believe that animals transform constantly, like hawks into pigeons, or snakes out of something else, when they knew they lay eggs, have they never seen anything born or hatched and did no one ever question this transformation crap?
The only interesting thing was that the book featured way way more human to animal transformation than what I am used to from even the Tang period, and especially Ming and Qing. Is that because buddhism wasn't established yet? And funny, animal to human transformations were much rarer here than I am used to from books about the past of East Asia.
It was good to read something from back then that critiques the whole transformation thing at least a bit, but only in how the phenomenon should be interpreted. And I really wonder what the author means with transformation as giving birth to a wrong species counts as transformation apparently for him.
I can at least give him that he stated this here:
The relative scarcity of sources, both textual and material, which may provide testimony of the ways in which ordinary peasants and village dwellers in Warring States and Han China perceived the nonhuman species suggests that the mentalities reconstructed in this study are likely to reflect the views of those strata within society capable of creating, reading, preserving, and circulating texts.
But apart from small bits like that, there was nothing good about this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews