Lineage Histories in Early Chinese Historiography
David Schaberg (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA)
Friday, May 9, 12:00 pm
Royce Hall 306
Global Antiquity is pleased to invite you to its final Faculty Lunch Series talk of the 2024–2025 academic year. Lunch and refreshments will be served at 12:00 pm followed immediately by the talk and discussion. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!
Abstract: Compiled around 300 BCE, Zuozhuan is an annalistic history of interactions within and among Chinese states during the years 722–463 BCE. It offers a wealth of detail on political, ritual, and military events of these centuries and on the people involved. Yet, the text’s way of presenting its material can make it challenging to follow the careers even of individuals, let alone long family lines, and much scholarly work has gone into reconstructing the basic facts of genealogy for the leading lineages of major states. My present project builds upon this genealogical work and considers lineage histories as such. As if tracing the threads in a weave, I provisionally isolate individual lineage narratives in Zuozhuan, supplement that selection of material with evidence from other sources, and then read each account as in some sense coherent and integrated, exploring both the generic features that lineage histories have in common and the distinctive themes and aims of specific lineages’ accounts. This approach has a basic usefulness as a way of presenting and clarifying the complicated long-term dynamics of lineage and court politics in the period’s network of regional powers and city-states. In philological and historiographical terms, too, comparing the narratives of different lineages in Zuozhuan may help us understand how Zuozhuan’s omnibus account relates to the cumentary and oral accounts that were no doubt transmitted within the lineages themselves. Of special interest are narratives reflecting lineages’ success in a court context notionally governed by rules of “ritual discipline” (li). For the purposes of this presentation, I offer examples from accounts of three closely related lineages whose rivalry defined the history of Lu, Confucius’s home state, over two centuries.
About the Speaker
David Schaberg is Professor in Asian Languages & Cultures and past Dean of Humanities at UCLA. He has published articles on early Chinese literature, historiography, and philosophy as well as Greek/ Chinese comparative issues. He is author of A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (2001), which was awarded the Association for Asian Studies 2003 Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies (Pre-1900 Category) and translator, with Stephen Durrant and Wai-yee Li, of Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan (University of Washington, 2016), which won the Association for Asian Studies 2018 Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation. His most recent work addresses changing accounts of Spring and Autumn period history.