The slippage inherent in applying a methodological approach like biography, which clearly derives from literary genre and metaphor, has rankled some anthropologists. 2 But it was Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things (1987), particularly Ivan Koptyff’s contribution, “The Cultural Biography of Things”, which ushered in a new phase of interdisciplinary studies focused on investigating the “lives” and “movement” of inanimate objects in human culture and society. Anthropologists had long recognized that under certain circumstances objects, especially precious objects, could be strongly anthropomorphized and accorded individual names, gender, personalities, life histories and volition. This project is inspired in part by developments in social and cultural anthropology over the past thirty years, which have had a great influence on literary and cultural historians, including in the East Asian field. It is part of a larger project called “The Literary Life of Things”, which attempts to sketch a broad history of the principal strategies and genres for animating the inanimate in the Chinese literary tradition. 3 Steiner Christopher, 2001, “Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Borde (.)ġThis essay 1 emerges out of an effort to bring together two longstanding research interests of mine – the study of ghosts and the study of the relationship between material culture and literature.2 See Tilley Christopher et al., eds., 2006, Handboook of Material Culture, London: (.).1 For their help with sources and discussions on this topic with me, I am deeply grateful to (.).Même s’il arrive que l’un des objets évoqués dans ces contes soit intact, c’est qu’il peut alors être envisagé comme relique isolée d’un passé révolu, et, en cela encore, être investi de la capacité proprement fantomatique à exercer une hantise. Nous montrons que ces objets de la vie quotidienne, en ayant perdu toute valeur d’usage dans la sphère d’activité humaine, sont, à leur façon, « morts », et que c’est pour cette raison même qu’ils sont capables de nous hanter à la façon de spectres. Beaucoup de ces contes ont en effet pour protagonistes des ustensiles cassés, usés, ou délaissés. Une lecture attentive de ces récits suggère que, au terme des histoires, la révélation de l’identité réelle de l’objet métamorphosé ne dissipe pas totalement le résidu d’étrangeté qui entoure les aspects mystérieux de la vie posthume des choses. Nous montrons ensuite comment certains contes de la dynastie des Tang emploient ces matériaux pour bâtir des récits où l’on voit des objets capables de se métamorphoser et de s’animer. Nous commençons par retracer brièvement l’histoire générique et stylistique de textes de la littérature chinoise où des objets se voient prêter identité ou voix: les contes-devinettes, les poèmes dédiés aux choses, et les biographies d’objets. Even when an object in one of these tales survives intact, it can be seen as a fragmentary relic of a vanished past, and again in this way possesses a ghostly potential to haunt.Ĭet essai s’attache à explorer une notion consubstantielle à la nature du fantôme, qui, à la fois métaphoriquement et littéralement, est une chose inerte qui s’anime ou se ranime, en replaçant le phénomène spectral dans le contexte plus large des histoires d’objets inanimés capables de prendre vie. The essay argues that by virtue of having no further use-value in the human world, such implements are effectively “dead,” which is one reason they can haunt like ghosts. Many of these tales revolve around broken, worn-out, and abandoned utensils. A close reading of these stories suggests that there is an uncanny residue of the secret posthumous world of things that the solution to the object’s identity revealed at the end cannot entirely dispel. I then show how certain Tang dynasty tales of shape-shifting implements incorporated these genres as building blocks to bring these objects to life. This essay explores a central concept in our understanding of a ghost, taken both literally and metaphorically as the animation of someone dead and lifeless, and places it in a larger context, namely the enlivenment of inanimate objects. The essay briefly traces the basic genres and techniques through which things are given voice and human identity in Chinese literary history: the riddle, the ode on things, and the object-biography.
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