Ann B Waltner

REVIEW ESSAY: BUILDING ON THE LADDER OF SUCCESS: THE LADDER OF SUCCESS IN IMPERIAL CHINA AND RECENT WORK ON SOCIAL MOBILITY

Abstract One of the most distinctive features of traditional Chinese society is that it was governed through a bureaucracy recruited by civil service examinations. The examinations, which tested the candidate on his acquaintance with and interpretation of classical texts, were open to all but a small minority of the population categorized as “base”—actors, sons of prostitutes, and the like. The examinations, in theory at least, offered the humblest peasant the opportunity to rise and join the ranks of the ruling classes. Success in the examinations meant first of all access to office. But a man who had been successful in the exams, who had obtained a civil service degree, attained more than the potential for bureaucratic office. The degree itself was a mark of prestige and a talisman of power in traditional Chinese society. The proposition that the examinations in fact served as a conduit of social mobility—that the myth of social mobility was paralleled by the reality of social mobility—has been examined...

Performing Matteo Ricci: The map and the music

Abstract ¡Sacabuche!, an early European music ensemble at Indiana University, under the direction of Linda Pearse, together with Huang Ruo, Ann Waltner, and Qin Fang, designed a multi-media program focusing on the sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, taking as the focal point Ricci’s 1602 map, which we call “Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music.” We used music, images, and text to create a layered performance, which we premiered in Beijing in December of 2010. This article describes the program and the logic behind some of the artistic decisions we made.

Young Women, Textile Labour, and Marriage in Europe and China around 1800

This chapter explores young women’s transition to adulthood in select regions of China and Europe from the mid-seventeenth through to the mid-nineteenth century and concentrates, in particular, on young women’s household and non-household labour (especially in the production of thread and cloth) as they move through the life-cycle transition from daughters to wives and from a natal to a marital household. The time frame of the chapter encompasses periods of important commercial and technological developments in textile production and marketing in both Europe and China and allows us to focus on an underexplored dimension of parallels and divergences—namely, family, gender, and generational relations. We also compare the apparently different relationships to labour and commodity markets experienced by young women in the two regions.

Teaching about Chinese Women's History using Legal Sources

Some of the drawbacks of using legal sources in teaching about Chinese women’s history are doubtless similar to drawbacks in using legal sources for any society—if you read too many legal sources, you and your students will come away convinced that murder and mayhem are the order of the day in a society which was, after all, mostly peaceful. The very different nature of the Chinese legal system from the Anglo-American legal system produces another sort of difficulty—the legal systems of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties were not interested in protecting rights, they were interested in producing order. This is a concept that is worth unpacking with students—if a status senior abused a junior (say if a father-in-law raped a daughter-in-law) the law will intervene because his acts are damaging to social or political order, not because he has violated her rights. Certain aspects of the Chinese legal system, like torture, appall modern sensibilities; it is important to work with students so that they understand that the legal system was highly articulated and committed to notions of fairness. None of these are insurmountable problems; legal sources, especially casebooks, remain one of the most valuable sources on everyday life in China, and there are now substantial materials available for classroom use. Several recent developments in the Anglophone study of Chinese law of the Ming and Qing periods have made it clear just how rich legal sources can be for the study of women and gender in China. The opening of archives and the rediscovery of casebooks has been accompanied by translations of primary sources and increasingly sophisticated analyses of legal cases, which not only contextualize the sources in terms of the operation of the legal system but which look at them as texts which have their own kind of logic. The opening of Chinese legal archives beginning in the mid-1980s has led to a substantial rethinking of the field of Chinese legal history. This new work has led us to understand the complexities of the relationship between codified law and law in practice and has overturned some of the old stereotypes about Chinese law and society. Several of the most important recent monographs based on this new archival research, including Janet Theiss’s Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (University of California Press, 2004) and Matthew Sommer’s Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000), make it clear that courts were seen as a recourse for people who believed that they had been wronged. They also make it clear that Qing China was fraught

Telling the Story of Tanyangzi

This article examines issues of concealing and revealing by looking at writing about Tanyangzi (1557-1580), a young women religious teacher who was the daughter of Wang Xijue. The article examines the production of the chief source about her life, the Tanyang dashi zhuan, which appears in Wang Shizhens Yanzhou shanren xugao, and concludes that the biography was the result of a collaboration between Wang Shizhen and Wang Xijue. The biography recounts Tanyangzis religious development, including her visions of visits to the Queen Mother of the West, and culminating in her ascending heavenward and attaining immortality on the ninth day of the ninth month in 1580. The article looks at works written to promote the teachings of Tanyangzi as well as works written to discredit her. It concludes that her disciples (including her father) who wrote about her wrote to claim control of the story from her detractors. Silence would, in this case, not have served the interests of her privacy. The article further argues that the religious work of Tanyangzi meant that ordinary rules of privacy did not apply-her work as a religious teacher demanded that she make herself visible and available to a community of believers.

BREAKING THE LAW: FAMILY VIOLENCE, GENDER AND HIERARCHY IN THE LEGAL CODE OF THE MING DYNASTY

AbstractLegal codes are a rich source for a social historian who is interested in theways a society imagined itself. The legal code of Ming dynasty China(1368–1644) offers one approach to the study of the traditional Chinese family. While the Code does not represent the sum total of Ming law, it is adocument of great importance in both reflecting and shaping Ming ideas about the functioning of an orderly society. In this essay, I am particularlyinterested in reading provisions of the Code which treat domestic violence as a way of illuminating concepts about gender and hierarchy.

Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276.

In her study of medieval Chinese lay practices and beliefs, Valerie Hansen argues that social and economic developments underlay religious changes in the Southern Song. Unfamiliar with the contents of Buddhist and Daoist texts, the common people hired the practitioner or prayed to the god they thought could cure the ill or bring rain. As the economy rapidly developed, the gods, like the people who worshiped them, diversified: their realm of influence expanded as some gods began to deal on the national grain market and others advised their followers on business transactions. In order to trace this evolution, the author draws information from temple inscriptions, literary notes, the administrative law code, and local histories. By contrasting differing rates of religious change in the lowland and highland regions of the lower Yangzi valley, Hansen suggests that the commercial and social developments were far less uniform than previously thought. In 1100, nearly all people in South China worshiped gods who had been local residents prior to their deaths. The increasing mobility of cultivators in the lowland, rice-growing regions resulted in the adoption of gods from other places. Cults in the isolated mountain areas showed considerably less change.