There will be a graduate students coffee hour with Prof. Hymes at 10:30AM in the Paul Padilla Reading Room (Bunche Hall 6265).

Public talk by Prof. Robert Hymes starts at 4pm in Bunche Hall 10383. 

The collections of poetry and shorter prose writings called wenji (literally “collected writings”) that middle-period Chinese gentlemen (or their descendants) preserved for posterity have been rich and often crucial resources for the study of social, cultural, intellectual and literary history. Less has been written about what they don’t tell us. My talk will explore Song-dynasty collected writings’ silence or near-silence on three cultural artifacts that we have other reasons to know were ubiquitous in Song elite society — toilet paper, documents of family division, and “god money” (paper facsimiles of money used in sacrifice to gods, ancestors, or the dead); will propose a reason for the silences; and will argue that similar near-silence or complex reticence, for similar reasons, is detectable on another topic: epidemic disease, and gentlemen’s vulnerability to it.

Robert Hymes’ work focuses on the social and cultural history of middle period and early modern China, drawing questions and sometimes data from cultural anthropology as well as history, and using the methods of the local historian to study elite culture, family and kinship, medicine, religion, gender, and (currently) the changing role and form of Chinese social networks from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen and Way and Byway won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on pre-1900 China in their years of publication.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies