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Readings (password protected: contact Roderick_Campbell@Brown.edu for access)
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
Joukowsky_Institute@brown.edu
Who or what is human? How do regimes of violence and their changes over time construct and reconstruct their objects? The Shang and Qin dynasties, though separated by nearly 1000 years of socio-political development, stand out as remarkable for their violence. The forms and logics of that violence, however, were vastly different. Moreover, in the linkages between changing political formations, moral worlds and attendant hierarchies of being and caring, transformations of violence in early China reconfigured conceptions and practices of “humanity” and “community”. Although from one perspective early Imperial China’s civilization, in forgetting its ancient foundations on human sacrifice, appears as the triumph of a “civilizing process”, from another it could be seen as the growth of an apparatus of systemic violence on an unprecedented scale. In exploring transforming regimes of social violence and their variable constructions of humanity in ancient China, universal notions of “the human” as an ontologically given category will be problematized.