Politique et rituel dans la Chine ancienne by Gilles Boileau (review)

Do not start this book by reading the conclusion. You will find there some well-expressed, unobjectionable, but utterly conventional ideas about the nature of ritual and politics, and about the indispensability of the former for the practice of the latter. Granted, that linkage was a central subject for reflection by early Chinese thinkers, especially those of the Confucian tradition; but this subject has been amply covered by Sinologists. The originality of Boileau’s book, such as it is, will reveal itself only to those willing to delve into its opaque mess of detail. Boileau’s strength lies in his pointillistic remarks—often insightful, occasionally arresting—on specific text passages, as well as in his passionate engagement (albeit highly selective and sometimes wrong-headedly polemical) with previous scholarship. A close reader will find something of interest in every one of the six chapters. On the other hand, anyone attempting to discern a clear line of argument—whether within each individual chapter or in the book as a whole—will likely come away frustrated.

Politique et rituel is a digest of several decades of conscientious reflection by a mature scholar. Boileau stands in a line of anthropologically minded French Sinologists—descended from Marcel Granet (1884–1940) and represented in our time by Jean Lévi (b. 1948)—who have pursued a vaguely structuralist view of Chinese culture as a systemically coherent whole. Like his predecessors, Boileau, though once an archaeology student at Peking University, pursues this quest mainly on the basis of texts, and also like them, he sometimes cannot resist the temptation to mix texts of different time-depths to clinch an argument. While there is thus some chronological overlap among the chapters, the book as a whole nevertheless quite effectively brings out changes over time, starting from the Shang with their oracle-bone inscriptions and ending with the unification of the empire under the Qin and Han.

The first chapter, “The Question of the wu in Archaic China,” is on spirit mediums (wu 巫) in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions and pre-Qin texts. It tackles the infinitely contentious issue of shamanism. Following Roberte Hamayon, an eminent specialist on Siberian ethnography who contributed an appendix to this book (pp. 433–448), Boileau demonstrates that the wu were—unsurprisingly—very different from Siberian shamans. He concludes that Chinese “shamanism” is a figment of Sinological imagination. But one cannot help noting two conceptual problems: First, Boileau reduces his discussion of Chinese “shamanism” to the occurrence of the word wu and its immediate cognates; one should consider that phenomena answering to some definition of “shamanism” (though perhaps not such a narrow one as Hamayon’s and Boileau’s) may have existed outside that lexical field. Second, the salience of the politico-religious phenomenon in early China that the late K. C. Chang (using the definition of Mircea Eliade)¹ designated as “shamanism” is not in dispute: namely, that royal legitimacy rested on the king’s performance (whether or not in a state of trance) of rituals of communication with deceased ancestors that involved symbolic travel up and down an axis mundi. In other words: rather than highlighting a disagreement of substance, Boileau gets bogged down in a stale debate over the use of words.

Chapter 2, “Water, Stone, the King, and the Alliance,” focuses on nature deities, an understudied aspect of early Chinese religion. Starting with oracle-bone inscriptions and continuing on to later documents, Boileau links the cults of mountains and rivers to other structural elements of Shang and Zhou culture, such as gender relationships, the performance of kingship, and the concluding of alliances. Even though Boileau peppers his discussion with citations of Western works (the Bible is a special favorite), the allusion to Norbert Elias in the title of chapter 3—“Sacrifice and Cuisine in Zhou Rituals: The Process of Civilization and the Politics of Ritual”²—seems unintended. In connection with...