Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece.

• Author: Brindley, Erica
• Position: Book review

Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece. By YIQUN ZHOU. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. x + 373. $95.

Flipping through recent scholarship that compares ancient China and Greece, one will notice that much of it involves philosophy, intellectual culture, and the social structures of the elite. (1) Yiqun Zhou's Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece provides a unique contribution that addresses areas hitherto largely ignored by this comparative scholarship: human solidarity, gender relations, the public and civic spheres, and ancestral cults and hero worship. Her book is an insightful account of social relations in the two unrelated cultures as expressed in convivial contexts in literature and other textual sources during the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. Not only does Zhou deftly shed light upon distinctive or outstanding characteristics of each cultural sphere, she discusses her chosen texts with such finesse and hermeneutical rigor that she is able to elevate the discourses on social relations in each respective culture.

In Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations, Zhou contends that the main difference in social relations between the two cultures stems from the ancient Greek idealization of the spirit of equality and agon, or rivalry and competition, that helps define Greek extrafamilial social ideals, as opposed to the logic of zong fa (Lineage Law) that helps undergird Chinese social relations. In every set of comparisons that Zhou makes, she usually concludes with the same abiding distinction between the cultures: the ancient Greeks aimed to transcend family and kinship bonds in an idealization of the public sphere, so that friendships or relationships of all kinds are celebrated precisely as achievements of equality and distinction. On the other hand, the ancient Chinese (i.e., the early Zhou) aimed not for equality or competition and distinction in the public sphere, but for harmony within the patriline, as constrained by hierarchies of familial power.

This is an acceptable and interesting distinction to make, even if it reinforces common stereotypes associated with each culture. After all, there is hardly a scholar of China who will argue that Zhou culture was not influenced strongly by its powerful patrilineal ideals and rituals, stemming from certain interpretations of the ancestral cult. Similarly, for the case of ancient Greece, there is a...