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Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 (Hardcover)
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Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 (Hardcover)
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In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of
Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and
sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of
practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity
mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation,
arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of
certain cultural expectations. Yu shows how individuals engaged in
acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect
society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging
new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral
ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the
person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it,
regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism,
Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions. Self-inflicted violence
as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or
exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a
groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in
late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic
categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese
religions.
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