Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700

Bibliographic Data

ID19967348
AuthorsJimmy Yu (0000-0001-9653-5517, corresponding author), Jimmy Yung Fung Yu
Year2012
Pages272
Publication date2012-04-27
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueSanctity and self-inflicted violence in Chinese religions, 1500-1700 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844906.001.0001
OpenAlexW604612781
Open LibraryOL25032988M
ISBN9780199844906
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Self-inflicted violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a constituent and sanctioned aspect of the Chinese cultural life. As a category, self-inflicted violence allows us to see scholarly biases that tend to marginalize certain phenomena in Chinese culture while highlighting others. This book brings to light other, larger and more systemic preconceived ideas that attend analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual. It examines a range of practices including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, and ritual exposure and self-immolation, which constitute the four substantive chapters of the book. These practices examined were public, scripted, signaling certain sets of cultural expectations, and highly intelligible to both the person doing the act and those who debated about them. As a distinctive refrain, these practices cut across and run through multiple cultural options, in effect blurring the religious boundaries of Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and popular religions. They were also productive. Performers engaged in them to exercise power and to affect people and the environment, which enabled them to graphically and viscerally demonstrate moral values, reinstitute order, forge new social relations, and secure boundaries against the threat of moral ambiguity. To date, there is no book that systematically analyzes several forms of self-inflicted violence in premodern China under a single cover

Aesthetics · Ambiguity · Art · Buddhism · China · Chinese culture · Order (exchange) · Political science · Power (physics) · Self · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · 16th century · 17th century · Religion · Religious aspects · Religious life and customs · rites and ceremonies · Self-mutilation · Social life and customs · Violence · Violence, religious aspects

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