Re-Presenting Sacrifice: Cosmology and the Editing of Texts

47 RE-PRESENTING SACRIFICE: Cosmology and the Editing of Texts Angela Rose Zito university of Chicago Emperorship in traditional China included the fundamental idea that the ruler be the most effective and necessary human component of the cosmos. His actions were supposed, by his own Imperium and by his subjects, to constitute the universe within which all vied for relative status and power.* In this paper I would like to discuss the issue of how cosmological power is delineated and appropriated by considering the Emperor's symbolic means and resources for constituting kingdom and cosmos. For present purposes, these means are first Grand Sacrifice (dasi j^ ^ ) then, 1? or rites, and finally the editing process by which ritual texts were created. This paper is a portion of a project on Grand Sacrifice in the eighteenth century. It is a cultural history and I have borrowed methods worked out by *The original version of this paper was presented as part of a panel on "Cosmology and Power in China" at the 1983 Association for Asian Studies annual meeting. 48 anthropologists whose preserve "culture" has been for some one hundred years. During this period the nineteenth century view of culture grounded itself in imagined universale. In reality these were the standards of western Europeans. Recently the perspective has developed that "culture" is found only in specific historical circumstances. Anthropological theory seemed compatible with the historian's attempt to explain the meaning of particular institutionalized structures of power, and able to contribute to the dialogue concerning the interplay of culture and- society . Particularly exciting was what Milton Singer described as "cultural theory's tilt toward semiotics" or the theory of signs. An early and clear statement of this theoretical shift can be found in Ward Goodenough's short essay "Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics." Goodenough writes that culture is not a material phenomenon but rather the organization of things, people, behavior and emotions as signs of something else. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them... To one who knows their culture, these things and events are also signs signifying the cultural forms or models of which they are the material représentât ions. Yet, Goodenough is careful to point out that it is only through the materiality of signs that the abstraction of process which he calls culture is accessible to the analyst. A sign is a particular material thing (a color, a pot, an animal, the weather) that, besides existing as 49 part of one reality, acquires meaning, that is, stands for something else, and so refracts or reflects another reality. Grand Sacrifice was a cultural performance, a display of signs in many media (visual, tactile, and auditory) and as such is susceptible to semiotic analysis. Complicating this task, however, is the incontrovertible . fact that the historian faces not a sacrifice itself, but rather texts that are guides to its performance. (Of course, strictly speaking, such is the problem in general for any historian who inevitably encounters not "events" but their record.) In this paper ritual texts themselves are treated as signs and the question of their production, as part of the creation of sacrifice within the discourse of U , is the portion of the problem that I address in detail. GRAND SACRIFICE In Imperial China, people thought the world included Heaven as well as all that was beneath. The common phrase tianxia 9t^ , usually translated as "sub-celestial," meant, in popular usage, the world of humankind. Notice, however, that the phrase signifies the perceptible, ming €)^ , 50 or earthly world by shifting our attention and naming the imperceptible Heaven ( tian ^ ) and, by extension, the unseen (you ¿éi ) world of spirits. The world of people is described using Heaven as its reference point. "Sub-celestial," while a literally correct translation, misses this important shift of attention and, paradoxically, excludes Heaven. The phrase would seem, actually, to indicate that the visible (ming 9^ ) and invisible (you ^j ) were conjoined in a single unity, and hints that Heaven was its most important component. Not only from the vantage point of the Throne was Heaven thought to be most important. "The Heavenly Kingdom...