IAC Culture Talks Series 2 Lecture Two: The Civilisation of China’s Southlands by Professor Anne McLaren (Catch up Online)
This event was held on Thursday 17 April 2024
Abstract
The country that we call “China” is built on the foundation of a vast empire close to the size of Europe that spans radically different climatic and environmental zones. Populations in these different zones developed distinctive languages, customs, cuisines, and ethnic identities. Over the millennia, these different ethnic zones largely retained their own unique identities. Archaeological discoveries in the late twentieth century have demonstrated that the development of China was not unidirectional as once thought but multiregional. There were significant civilisations to the south and west of the Chinese heartland that developed earlier than the first known dynastic states based near the Yellow River.
The focus of this talk is on the culture of China’s southern civilisation. One of the most significant divisions in Chinese space is the massive Yangzi River, which rises in the uplands of Sichuan and flows towards the eastern coast. To the north one finds the sites of the earliest known dynasties, the so-called “cradle” of Chinese civilisation, based around dryland agriculture. South of the Yangzi River lies a well-watered region of uplands, rivers, and rice cultivation. According to the classical tradition, sedentary agriculture was brought to the “barbaric” southlands by historic figures from the civilised north. However, recent archaeological work has established that the region south of the Yangzi has zones of sedentary culture and permanent settlement at least as ancient as those found in the north. In the late twentieth century, ethnologists investigating ritual practices came across a belief in a feminised rice spirit, as commonly found elsewhere in monsoonal Asia. This is a new discovery as this belief system was previously held to be unknown in China. It also pointed to strong commonalities between the southlands of China and rice-growing communities of Southeast Asia.
In my own research I have investigated the implications of recent discoveries for our understanding of the long narrative songs (or folk epics) sung by rice cultivators in the paddy fields of the Lower Yangzi Lake Tai region. These songs and folk epics transmit cultural memories of an indigenous southern source for rice growing, a faith system based around a feminised rice spirit who embodied the transplanted bride, and a belief in the power of song to ensure fertility in the rice fields. The “ritual technology” of rice cultivation underpinned the agricultural strength of the Lower Yangzi delta, which for over a thousand years has been the most prosperous in China. The songs and folk epics remain today as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of this region and a reminder of the multiethnic nature of the former Chinese empire.
About the Speaker
Anne McLaren is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Professor McLaren taught Chinese language and culture for two decades at the University of Melbourne until her retirement. Her major field of expertise is China’s popular and performance culture, including storytelling, songs, folk epics, and theatrical traditions from the imperial era to the late twentieth century. Her most recent book is Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture (Cambria Sinophone Series, 2022). This book is the first study in English of the songs and folk epics of rice-growing communities in the Lake Tai region of China. These songs were only discovered by ethnographers in the late twentieth century and offer a unique insight into the belief systems and symbolic culture of Wu-speaking village communities from imperial times to the late twentieth century. The songs and folk epics are now regarded as important examples of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the region.
Anne McLaren has also published another volume on Chinese regional culture, Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). This book is a pioneering work on the oral and ritual culture of Chinese women. Another work deals with Chinese performance culture in the Ming dynasty (Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables Brill, 1998). She has also published two volumes on the status of women in China: Chinese Women Living and Working (Edited: Routledge, 2004) and Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture (Monash Asia Institute, co-edited with Antonia Finnane, 1999). Her recent memoir, Slow Train to Democracy: Memoirs of Life in Shanghai, 1978 to 1979 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020) offers insight into China’s democracy movement at the start of the reform era.
