This session explores the nexus of ritual, religious belief, philosophical ideas, and literary representation. With two papers on premodern Chinese thought and literature and two on modern China, it seeks to elucidate the connections between concepts that run through the work of anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and literature. Rather than asserting that there is a monologic “tradition” that continues to percolate through the modern era, the four papers herein illustrate the complex and multifaceted quality of Chinese discourse, a constellation of various strands including Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Marxism/Maoism, and Modernism. This session provides a multivalent consideration united by the question of ritual and representation. It is interdisciplinary with perspectives from religious studies, philosophy, literary studies, and anthropological theory. It therefore is fitting that it is a co-sponsored collaborative session submitted jointly by the TC Anthropology and Literature and TC Religion and Literature Forums. Despite the discursive mosaic that informs ritual and representation, there is no question that Chinese thought and literature is suffused with ritual language and structure. Its importance cannot be overstated. The session is moderated by Michael Hill whose current work compares Chinese and Arabic literature, situated at the intersection of religion and literature.

Mengyi Xun’s paper on changes in the ritual system with the rise of neo-Confucianism in the Song dynasty both personifies the transformations that occurred in the processes of sacrificial ritual in medieval China and presages the modern critique of this trend which advanced stricter gender divisions than those in place in early China. Citing the example of Gao Mei, an imperial ceremony involving both the emperor and empresses, Xun shows how the notions of heaven (tian), way (dao), human nature (xing), and destiny (ming) were tied to that of rite (li) in a taut network of thinking and coded practice. In so doing, she describes how this revival of stringent ritual norms were established systematically.

The sort of Confucian revival ritual depicted in Mengyi Xun’s paper is complemented in interesting ways by wholly different rituals, inspired by Daoist religious practices, as set out in Tyler Feezell’s paper on “retreat” (zhai). Feezell’s research indicates that Tang dynasty emperors requested that Daoist priests perform for them intricate rituals of retreat known as “pacing the void” (buxu) in an effort to assure the well-being and prosperity of the imperial family and dynasty. Feezell’s account brings us from the world of austere ritual into poetry, with examples from classic poets Dai Shulun and Liu Yuxi. He also adds a musical dimension by explaining how ritual expression is enacted rhythmically to forge a soundscape that enlivens the poetic experience.

Xun and Feezell lay the groundwork for the exploration of ritual and narrative in the modern era taken up by Lauren Parker and Christopher Lupke. Scholarship on Maoist Era literature generally has fallen into one of two camps: anticommunist lamentations on the limits of socialist realism, epitomized by CT Hsia, and leftist encomiums of revolutionary fervor exemplified by Jaroslav Prusek. Drawing on anthropological theory and religious studies, Parker’s refreshing reimagination of canonical narratives such as The Song of Youth and The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River opens up a new hermeneutic vista. Parker deploys the anthropological work of Gavin Flood and Charles Orzech on ritual to demonstrate how Maoist Era authors crafted liturgical subjects, employing revolutionary literature in the induction of readers into the realm of the revolutionary hero.

The situation was much different in post-Mao China when less ideological authors retooled the narrative material of the revolutionary era for carnivalesque ends. Lupke sees a gradual return to emblems of traditional Chinese culture that once again became an object of fascination. He offers an analysis of how methods of ritual practice and belief have penetrated the representational apparatus of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s classic novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The narrative features a reviled landlord who is tortured to death but then reincarnated. A boisterous hybrid of Chinese Buddhist morality drama, veneration of Confucian kinship values, and Rabelaisian-styled picaresque, the novel is one of Mo Yan’s most distinctive instantiations of what the Swedish Academy in praise of Mo Yan called “hallucinogenic realism.”

Taken together, these four papers display the fact that philosophical and religious concepts of ritual have long informed the lyrical and narrative expression of Chinese literature in ways as dynamic in the medieval era as they are today. These disparate forms of ritual unequivocally reveal that the Chinese intellectual tradition is as variegated as it is long.