Panel 1 : Animal Allegories and Imagery

Animals, Dreams, and Altered States in Medieval Narratives

Rebecca Doran

University of Miami

Dreams appear from an early date in Chinese narratives, where they serve, among other roles, as a mode of prophecy or supernatural communication, a window into the human consciousness, and a motif that blurs the boundaries between different realms or states of being. In an important subset of dream narratives from the medieval period, animals occupy a variety of functions as narrative actors or symbols. This paper examines narratives, mainly from the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Tang, in which animals either appear as key symbols in prophetic dreams or communicate with a human through the medium of a dream. The latter category often involves a situation in which animals seek mercy from humans, for example, animals that appear to a dreamer to request that the dreamer refrain from eating them or release them back to the wild. The paper considers which types of animals tend to be associated more closely with which types of prophetic dreams, as well as how the presence of the animal influences the way in which the dream is interpreted. On a broader level, the paper probes the role of animals in the multilevel traversal of boundaries (between human and non-human, between different realities or realms of existence, and so on) that is characteristic of dream narratives overall. 

From Hunted Prey to Symbols of Life: 

Historical and Mythological Rabbits in China and Japan

Anne Schmiedl 

Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nürnberg

This paper focuses on the rabbit (or hare) in China and Japan. It analyses the many different connotations that have been assigned to it by human observers and the different roles it has been associated with in historical contexts and mythological sources. 

Firstly, the paper gives an overview of historical rabbits in early Chinese sources. As seen in Shang-dynasty images and oracle bone inscriptions as well as in early Chinese texts, rabbits served as sacrificial animals and hunted prey. As such they were perceived in a ritualistic, sacrificial setting, and in the context of food.

The paper then focuses on the rabbit in Chinese and Japanese mythology. As one of the Chinese zodiac signs, the rabbit was and is embedded in a system of cosmological, correlative, and classificatory explanations. Furthermore, the rabbit holds an important place in mythological stories and fairy tales in China and Japan. Here, the rabbit appears in different allegorical iterations. The rabbit acts as a messenger of the gods, is connected to ideas of medicine and fertility, and is seen as an emblem of the moon – and therefore life that overcomes death.

The paper connects to the overarching theme of the workshop, “boundaries”, in two different ways. Firstly, it shows how the rabbit overcomes boundaries between the historical lifeworld of China and mythological literary representations. Secondly, it shows how the mythological rabbit overcomes geographical boundaries, moving between China and Japan, and how it gains new allegorical connotations during this process.

How To Earn Your Stripes: The Practice of Tattooing Animal Motifs on Human Skin and Its Social Implications in Ancient and Premodern China

Raffaela Rettinger

Julius-Maximilians-University 

Animals have had an immense influence in shaping human societies. While humans often define themselves as superior to other living creatures, they also seek to copy them or profit from their abilities. In traditional Chinese writings, animals have been used as metaphors for human behavior and they have been given different moral understandings. 

These perceptions of animals are not only reflected in elite writings, but also become visible in the subcultural practice of tattooing. Skin can be seen as a border zone between the social world and the self. It protects and conceals; it fascinates and can potentially be dangerous. Tattoos reflect this negotiation by making the invisible self graspable. 

While there have been studies on tattoos in China as a punitive tool to shame individuals within society, the more ‘positive’ aspects of individual tattoos have been largely overlooked. It is within a mostly military subcultural context that we can find references to men decorating their body with pictures of animals, such as tigers, dragons or, often in connection with poetry, a variety of birds. 

The practice of tattooing animals on human skin is not unique to China, however, the choice of which animals were deemed desirable and the moral and societal concepts that such bodily markings represent, differ from culture to culture. 

In my research, a special focus will lie on the moral and socio-political implications of animal tattoos, the choice of animals for such bodily markings, and their perception by both like-minded peers in contrast to the scholar elite that viewed tattoos and tattooed men as both shameful and threatening to their social order.

Panel 2 : Defining Animals 

“Without a Dog to Bark at Night in Warning”: Dogs in the Creation and Patrolling of Boundaries

Kelsey Granger

Cambridge University

Dogs in early and medieval China were used to guard property, often being situated at entry-points to bark should an intruder arrive. The barking of dogs, in turn, became a metaphor and a marker for the very concept of security. Dogs were used to patrol a range of physical borders – be they political, private, or diplomatic. So too were dogs enjoined with superhuman levels of perception, able then to guard more abstract boundaries concerning moral, heteronormative conduct. 

This talk will first explore the ways dogs were used to create and patrol boundaries through anecdotes drawn from the histories and Taiping guangji. Then, I will introduce the startling case of the lapdog, the first pet in Chinese history. The Tang-era development of lapdog-keeping shows a stark re-evaluation of the meaning of a dog’s bark, enjoining the lapdog with a very different task: to announce the arrival of a man into female-occupied spaces.

Touching then on the creation of political, social, and sexual boundaries, this talk situates the dog as an important threshold creature enmeshed within the very conceptualisation of these different spaces.

Silkworm-Human Relations in Middle Period Chinese Buddhism

Stuart H. Young

Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, USA

In middle period China, silk was the fabric of Buddhist monasticism.  Silk enmeshed Chinese Buddhist monastery environs, institutional economies, and literary discourses concerning discipline and ethics, material production and consumption, and human relations with nonhuman entities and environments.  Chinese Buddhist texts were written on silk; bound, wrapped, and tied in silk; and replete with discursive traces of silk and its other-than-human producers: wild and domesticated silkworm caterpillars and their divine delegates.  This paper examines how silkworms emerged through these sources as willful, agentic, moral subjects, as the kin of humans and deities, and as bodhisattvas themselves.  In Chinese Buddhist writings, silkworms embodied core Buddhist cosmological, soteriological, and social principles, concerning samsaric rebirth and karmic causality; the bondage of householder life; lay-monastic distinctions and interactions; the nature of the mind and consciousness; and others.  What, then, did it mean to for human beings to kill silkworms, to boil them to death for their silk?  Some Buddhist authors lamented this miserable fate of silkworms, while others attempted to ban silk from monastic uniforms.  But on the whole, Buddhist silkworms lived to die for silk.  Like humans, their lot was to suffer for their blind desire, or else to gratefully embrace their inevitable destruction as means to allay the suffering of others.  Either way, silkworm caterpillars offered uniquely entomic paths to Buddhist liberation in middle period China, forged through deep entanglements between human and entomic modes of samsaric existence and sociomaterial production.

Crawling Across Representational Mediums and Taxonomic Classifications:

Insect Subjects in 16^th century Paintings, Manuscripts, and Printed Books

Daniel Burton-Rose

Wake Forest University

The proposed paper focuses on Chinese-language knowledge of insects in the dynamic sixteenth century. In this period commercial vitality, innovations in woodblock printing techniques, and a peripatetic literary culture enabled curiosity and erudition to manifest in a wide array of textual production centered on the natural world. The paper first identifyies a corpus of textual knowledge about insects, then interrogates two boundaries in tandem. One boundary is insect subject matter that crossed between genres—primarily fine arts, natural history, pharmacopeia, and philology—and the mediums of manuscript, woodblock print, and painting. The other boundary is the shifting taxonomic definitions of the concept of chong 蟲 itself. Attention to genre and medium controls for the way in which the deployment of ostensibly similar information and images to different audiences with varying intentions has implications for the continuum between representational and actual insects: i.e., insects in the cultural imaginary as potentially distinct from biological realities about insect morphology and behavior that remained constant whether or not people noticed or understood them. Attention to definitions of chong—both implicit and explicit—get at the distinctiveness of the category that would later be conflated with Class “Insecta” as determined by Linnaeus in 1758. As both representational subjects and objects of empirical inquiry, the only constant with insects is that they did not stay in place.