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Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 2 |
< Back Antiquarianism or Primitivism? The Edge of History in the Modern Chinese Imagination Sarah E. Fraser Northwestern University Late Qing Dynasty (late 19th c.-early 20th c.) interest in the past and its relics was followed by a massive archaeological effort during the 1920’s-1940’s predicated on comprehensive fieldwork and excavation. The Anyang digs, which began in 1927-1928 are the most impressive effort in the movement to uncover the past from the ground using a ‘hands-on’ approach in post-dynastic China. Under Fu Sinian’s directive to “dongshou, dongjiao”—a call to get out of the libraries and archives and mobilize historical investigation through fieldwork, many regions were excavated during this period including Shandong Neolithic sites, Henan bronze-period tombs and capital cities, and Gansu Silk Road remains, etc. But this effort to ascertain the physical dimensions of China’s past through archaeological techniques, was accompanied by anthropological, linguistic, and ethnographic explorations as well. During the mid-minguo period (1912-1949) inquiries that may best be termed ‘folk’ were directed particularly at the border or frontier regions in the south- and north-west where ethnic and linguistic difference prompted Academica Sinica researchers to ask questions such as "What constitutes the Chinese experience culturally, materially and linguistically”? "Where do we investigate the traces of the past?" "What were the cultural centers and edges of the former empire?" A simple answer is that in bronze cultural areas in the eastern Yellow River Plains, researchers saw the origins of the Chinese experience—constructed as the roots of a 20th c. tradition linguistically and sociologically if not artistically. Here one might term these efforts as antiquarian or archaeological. Extensive post-excavation research practices involving the copying and deciphering oracle bone and bronze text codified veneration on the order of sacred classic texts left by ancestors. Regions in the south and west, always seen as frontier during the dynastic period, were more of a puzzle. Archaeological digs were not attempted in the frontier in the early 20th c., but extensive surveys of material culture, physical anthropological difference between groups, religious practice and temple architecture were. Research was conducted on not in the ground, the evidence of primitive culture without sophisticated roots that might be excavated all too evident in agricultural systems, tools, and hand made textiles. One might straightforwardly describe the minguo research of these border zones as a search for the primitive—a celebration of a pre-or early historic cultural states in which clues could emerge that would not define Chinese culture per say, but help identify contributing factors to what made China unique. These attitudes and approaches, of course, must be seen against the backdrop of the heightened sense of comparison with European and American cultural models which infiltrated China through many mechanisms, most problematically the International Settlements on the eastern seaboard and along the Yangzi, where power struggles challenged notions of a Chinese modernity that could be distinctly Chinese and technologically competitive. With a range of cultural experience from the primitive to sophisticated stretching to the Bronze Age to the present, the relevance of a diffusionist model of cultural expansion for China could finally be dispelled. Resisting an easy answer to explaining practices at the center and periphery as searches for the’ antiquarian’ and the ‘primitive,’ instead I want to explore these as like practices cast along a great range of efforts in the quest for national identity. I argue that these cultural inquiries may be considered most productively not as separate and diametrically opposed epistemological inquiries, but as archaeological and anthropological excavations informed by anxiety about national identity in China’s first non-imperial state in the early 20th c. |
