The Animal and the Daemon in Early China.

• Author: Mair, Victor H.
• Position: Book Review

By ROEL STERCKX. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2002. Pp. ix + 375. $92.50 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

"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...." So begins the introduction of this well-researched study of the place of animals in the intellectual history of the Warring States and Han period (roughly 475 B.C.-A.D. 220). Although he is aware of other approaches to the study of animals in ancient China, the author is determinedly textual. In this respect, he has done a responsible and reasonably thorough job of examining the available early writings that discuss animals directly or allude to them indirectly, as through metaphor. He especially deserves credit for paying due attention to the relevant manuscripts that have been archaeologically recovered within the last three decades (e.g., those from Mawangdui, Yinqueshan, Shuihudi, Guodian, and Fangmatan). Indeed, the newly found sources, which are contemporaneous with the periods that constitute the focus of this investigation, often provide fascinating information and valuable insights that were missing in the previously available classical and canonical texts, whose extant editions actually date from significantly later periods.

Roel Sterckx writes very much in the vein of his mentor, Mark Edward Lewis, whose justly admired Sanctioned Violence in Early China was published in the same series by the same press a dozen years previously. Lewis's earlier monograph, en passant, raised many of the questions about animal imagery in the Warring States and Hun periods that Sterckx examines in greater detail and depth in the present work. Both Lewis and Sterckx mine the classics, the philosophers, and the historians to build an argument about the place of violence and of animals (these two themes often intersect) in early Chinese thought. Both also make good use of literary sources, especially the rhapsody (fu), in illuminating bestiality, the hunt, and related topics. After unburdening himself of the large tome entitled Writing and Authority in Early China (again the same series and same press, 2002), in which he thoroughly exorcises the ghosts of pure textuality, Lewis has lately begun to make more extensive and better use of non-textual materials, as in his study on "Dicing and Divination in Early China," Sino-Platonic Papers 121 (July 2002). With this excellent, multifaceted piece, Lewis may be said to have laid to rest the ghost of unrepentant textualism. In his latest presentations, Sterckx also seems to be making moves in the direction of going beyond strict adherence to written sources. In the volume under review, however, his primary devotion is to the text, despite the evocative illustration of a "Man Hugging a Bear" from the tomb of the Han general Huo Qubing (d. 117 B.C.) on its cover. (This rubbing, incidentally, was made by the distinguished art historian, Lawrence Sickman, and is owned by another specialist on visual culture, Ann Paludan.) Sterckx's defensive posture with regard to visual culture in the present work is both odd and unnecessary. He acknowledges (p. 12) "the richness and diversity of pictorial material documented in tombs," but goes on to assert that this "had led scholars to neglect the scrutiny of texts." This is not really true, since the emphasis in Sinological studies of the past century and more on all aspects of the culture of early China has been overwhelmingly textual, and--with few exceptions--it is only within recent decades that scholars have begun to pay serious attention to visual materials. The challenge facing scholars of this generation and the next is to take full advantage of both textual sources and visual materials.

Before turning to a discussion of what Sterckx has achieved in The Animal and the Daemon, I wish to stress that data drawn from material culture can often be used to clarify ambiguities or solve problems raised by textual accounts and descriptions. For example, Sterckx can only find the term "foodstuff dogs" (shi quan) attested from Tang times, but the pattern of cut marks on canine bones and deposits in refuse pits are direct evidence that the early Chinese consumed the meat of dogs. I shall return to the issue of non-textual sources near the end of this review.

There are three main themes in the book: (1) the people of early China showed little interest in determining ontological boundaries between species; (2) where divisions may be discerned, they are not sharply drawn, resulting in few fixed categories or species distinctions; (3) the importance of human observation of the animal world. The evidence that is brought to bear in the elucidation of these three themes is viewed from four perspectives: that of the animal world as a textual category; the interrelationship between humans and animals; relations among different types of animals; and supernatural or "strange" aspects of animals.

In chapter 1, the author asks what an animal is in contrast to human beings and other things in the world. He stresses the importance of the sheer act of giving names to animals and ordering those names. Sterckx asserts that these denominating procedures amounted to a means of political and intellectual control. What he discerns, however, is a galaxy of names rather than a zoological system of structures and types. Yet chapter 3 reveals that the early Chinese did attempt to synthesize their views on animals by classifying them according to "blood and qi ['material energy']." Their taxonomies derived from correlative thought involving yin and yang and the five phases instead of from classification of structures and functions. Through a process of tuilei (extrapolation or induction), the animal world was linked to other...