殷墟出土青铜礼器铸型的制作工艺

前言作为商代晚期的都城,殷墟也是商代后期青铜铸造业最重要的基地,遗址内出土有大量陶范、芯、模,熔铜、盛铜器具,制范、铸后清理所用工具,以及相关的遗迹、遗物等。这些出土资料为我们了解殷墟青铜器生产的工艺流程,印证或是修正以往关于某些技术细节的猜测和假说,提供了重要的依据。     

唐淮南大长公主墓志所反映的唐代历史问题

淮南大长公主墓志是目前发现的形体最大、铭文最长的一盒唐代公主墓志,具有重要的历史和文物研究价值.本文在对淮南公主墓志考证的基础上,对墓志中记载的太平公主、唐睿宗李旦等重要历史人物及著名音乐家王长通的有关史事进行了梳理论证,对墓志所反映的武则天"以周代唐"的重大历史事件以及唐代的礼仪风俗、宗教活动、音乐文化等也进行了较充分的论述.     

周公摄政与周初政教关系初探

周公摄政导致了周初二王并存的局面,而二王并存的实质是国家政权和教权的分离。周公是周代初期的巫史领袖,并于武王后期开始执掌教权,由于不能和政权明确分开,引起王族的猜疑。周公为此迁居东都洛邑,并致力于制礼作乐,目的是使政教分权更加明晰化,造成了一次意义深远的社会制度和思想化的革命。     

祭祀仪式“反结构”的“不完整倒置性”——基于上果村壮族“祭太阳”仪式的讨论

云南西畴县上果村壮族"祭太阳"仪式在"反结构"阈限期内具有"不完整倒置性"现象。在上果村的传统文化和村民生活结构中,"祭太阳"仪式的"反结构"具有生活的逻辑性和合理性。"祭太阳"仪式中男性与女性"不完整倒置"的反结构现象蕴涵了上果村传统地方知识、壮族两性文化和仪式结构功能共同支配下的稳定性与流动性。     

再论东汉吐舌镇墓兽

吐舌镇墓兽流行于东汉峡江地区,除峡江外又以南阳襄阳地区所出最为集中,本文对这两地的吐舌镇墓兽进行了梳理。通过与南阳画像石中灵怪形象的对比,认为两地均继承了巴楚鬼神崇拜传统的一些因素,具有相似的文化背景。南阳襄阳突出的交通区位优势也是镇墓兽在此出现的重要原因。同时指出吐舌镇墓兽在南阳襄阳地区主要流行于大中型墓葬中,这反映了峡江与中原地区在东汉时期可能存在着较为密切的互动。     

汉代皇帝宗庙祭祖制度考论

西汉初,叔孙通采撷先秦古礼及秦制,确立汉朝皇帝宗庙祭祖制度。其中既不乏沿袭传统的因素,也混杂有当时不同地域的文化,还有出身于庶民阶层的汉统治者所熟稔的民间俗文化的因素。汉武帝以后,儒学在思想意识和社会生活领域中的主导地位逐渐确立。儒家若干典籍记载的所谓周代天子祭祖礼制,对汉代皇帝修订宗庙祭祖制度,产生了深刻的影响。不过,两汉时期皇帝宗庙祭祖制度,与儒家典籍的相关记载以及若干儒生的诠释相比,二者并不完全吻合,而是前者依据现实需要,对后者多有变通,由此导致制度本身时刻处于调整、变化的动态过程之中。     

Sit,Cook, Eat,Full Stop: Religion and the Rejection of Ritual in Auhelawa (Papua New Guinea)

ABSTRACT The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of ‘custom’ in favor of a practice of ‘Christian custom’ in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper examines the way people view custom and its Christian alternative. It argues that the basis for Christian forms of mortuary feasting is a shift away from thinking of feasts in terms of reciprocity and towards thinking of them in terms of traditional customary rules. In this context, active church members have begun to represent the absence of markers of custom as itself a marker of an alternative Christian custom. I argue that this reformulation of the relationship of custom and change is meant to give concrete form to the value of Christian individualism as the basis for sociality. The paper then concludes that in order to explain historical changes in ritual systems, the study of ritual needs to examine ritual in relation to the values that underlie it.     

Intimate Consumption and New Sexual Subjects Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the transformation of sexual meanings, attitudes, norms, and practices surrounding depletion and pollution across decades (1974–2010) among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In the premodern village, all sexual intercourse, whether with boy‐initiates or women, was ritualized and ultimately controlled by the men's secret society. Intimate consumption refers traditionally to a symbolic complex of beliefs, concepts, emotions, and ritual experiences involving sexuality, bodily health, social relationships, and gendered politics. But it also covers sexual anxieties corresponding to the transfer and loss of bodily fluids via the perceived depletion and pollution of self and body. For adult men, the sense of intimate consumption requires repeated substance replenishment and purification. Intimate consumption made oral and vaginal sex highly rule‐bound, taboo laden, and intensely regulated in terms of the meaning, scope, duration, and intended goals of sexual exchange. Pacification, colonization, out‐migration, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of decades instigated social transformations that challenged and wore down this system of sexual regulation. Thus, the transition from ritual to non‐ritual practices, i.e., more individualistic sexual relationships, highlight narratives of change in the Sambia sexuality. With the demise of ritual initiation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the appearance of HIV and SikAids in the Sambia Valley, explicit ritual sexual techniques were no longer socialized. Modernity (in the sense of a set of policies, attitudes, and rules introduced through institutions such as the government community school) and SDA church sociality influenced both the pace and form of this sexual transformation. Among the greatest changes was the expansion of female agency and sexual autonomy, and personal decision‐making vis‐à‐vis especially marriage and also romance, courtship, and sex. Notably, oral sex, once universal and mandatory, largely disappeared from Sambia intimate relations. Today, spousal intimacy reveals a different set of more ‘modern’ meanings and behaviors compared to two generations ago, e.g., more mutualistic and companionate. Intimate consumption remains a worry for certain Sambia young men and women today however, influenced in part by the rise of the HIV pandemic, mobility, and the absence of normative narratives of sexuality in villages and town settlements. This creates public spaces wherein new sexual subjects have emerged in the villages and urban settlements within the Sambia Valley and in settlements throughout PNG.     

Buddhist temples and ancestral halls: The reconstruction of native official rituals in western Yunnan

Abstract

In the process of abolishing the native officialdoms of southwest China, the Ming court justified its actions by citing violations of ethical and ritual principles. During the Zhengtong 正統 period, offices of native officials in Heqing 鶴慶 were abolished and replaced with an office for centrally appointed imperial officials. These imperial officials turned Buddhist temples into Confucian schools and attacked local beliefs regarding living Buddhas. At the same time, local Confucian scholars advocated orthodox ritual in the name of doing away with improper ritual practice. In response, nearby native officials began cautiously handling political issues, and sought to legitimize the foundations for their status by conducting rituals in the classical Confucian tradition. The author examines the history of Lijiang 麗江 and Menghua 蒙化 Prefectures in Yunnan 雲南 and discusses how their native officials used the statuses of ancient nobles as they sought to establish Confucian rituals and temples corresponding to their status within the Ming bureaucracy. Several strategies are identified, including (a) building Buddhist temples, ancestral halls, and official shrines; (b) transforming mythical figures into protective deities by creating mountain and river rituals that conformed to ritual orthodoxy; and (c) establishing official genealogies and using textual methods to incorporate clan myths and legendary lineages into orthodox historical narratives, thereby strengthening the superiority of border native official lineages. By analyzing a series of actions of native officials in this process, the author explores the cultural strategies adopted by native officials to safeguard their prestige and local interests.     

A Mid Upper Palaeolithic Child Burial from Borsuka Cave (Southern Poland)

During the excavation in the Borsuka Cave site (southern Poland), extraordinary materials were obtained for the study of the Mid Upper Palaeolithic (MUP) settlement in the region. In layer VI, six deciduous teeth of a modern Homo sapiens infant were discovered together with 112 pendants made from the teeth of European elk and steppe wisent or aurochs. The teeth appear to belong to a 12‐ to 18‐month‐old child. The sex of the child cannot be determined. Diagnostic features of the teeth and the fact that they all represent the same developmental phase suggest that they belong to a single individual. In this paper, we put forward a number of alternative explanations for why only a child's teeth and numerous pendants were deposited in the late Pleistocene sediments of Borsuka Cave, for example, natural factors (carnivore activity), human habitation, existence of a pendant workshop in the vicinity of the cave and intentional burial. Although no traces of a burial pit were encountered, intentional burial, the oldest known from Poland, is indicated by the presence of human remains together with numerous ornaments and absence of ‘domestic’ finds, such as lithic cores, debitage and tools. An unusual presence of a larger number of pierced teeth of large herbivores in a child burial is noticeable among assorted mortuary practices recorded in MUP Central Europe. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.