PDF《A History of Chinese Letters and》

4 Material and Symbolic Economies: Letters and Gifts in Early Medieval China* Xiaofei Tian This essay examines a group of letters in early medieval China, specif?ically from the turn of the third century and from the early sixth century, about gift giving and receiving. Gift-giving is one of the things that stand at the center of social relationships across many cultures. The gift imposes an identity upon the giver as well as the receiver.

1 It both produces social relationships and afff?irms them;

it establishes and clarif?ies social status, displays power, strength- ens alliances, and creates debts and obligations. This was particularly true in the chaotic period following the collapse of the Han empire at the turn of the third century, often referred to as the Jian'

an 建安 era (196C220), after the reign title of the last Han emperor. At such a time of social disintegration, gift-giv- ing practices―along with feasting, a powerful social institution that brought people together and reinforced the values of fellowship and civility―consti- tuted material and symbolic exchanges that fostered bonds, rebuilt hierarchi- cal structures and reconstituted the community. Modern gift theory was largely initiated by anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872C1950) in the early twentieth century, and has subsequently become a subject of interdisciplinary inquiry in f?ields as diverse as anthropology, soci- ology, economics, folklore, history, and literary theory. The greatest contribu- tion of Mauss was to situate the apparently simple exchange of gifts within a complicated network of social rules and obligations and to show that reciproc- ity is a key aspect of gift-giving, which operates as a process of exchange and circulation.2 Derrida extends the idea of reciprocity and argues that, since all * The draft of this paper was read at the Workshop Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in China at the University of Colorado at Boulder in August

2012 and, in part, at the Medieval WorkshopatRutgersUniversityinMay2013.Ithanktheparticipantsof theworkshopsandmy discussantattheMedievalWorkshop,ProfessorMeowHuiGoh,forquestionsandcomments. 1? Schwartz, The Social Psychology, 2. 2? Mauss'

s most famous work is Essai sur le Don, Forme et Raison de l'

?change dans les Sociétés archa?ques, translated by Ian Cunnison into English as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. For use by the Author only | ?

2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

136 Tian For use by the Author only | ?

2015 Koninklijke Brill NV gifts implicate the recipient in social obligations, a true gift must not appear as a gift, or it would not be a gift at all: For there to be gift, there must be no reci- procity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.

3 Derrida'

s argument about the impossibility of the gift draws attention to the gift'

s aggressive nature: in that it implicitly demands a return, a gift is just like an insult or a blow. Indeed, some- times a gift itself serves as an insult: in the early third century, the minister of the Shu-Han kingdom, Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 (181C234), once sent the gift of female clothes to his nemesis Sima Yi 司马懿 (179C251), the Wei commander, in a desperate efffort to challenge Sima Yi to military action;

Sima Yi'

s refusal to f?ight proved the best return gift because it matched Zhuge Liang'

s present in its ill intention.4 To study gift-giving is therefore to study the process of exchange and circulation in which an object takes on additional value, economic or sym- bolic or both, besides its use value. Theexchangeof lettersinmanywaysevokestheexchangeof gifts.Toaddress a letter to someone implicitly carries with it a request for timely response and reciprocation, and epistolary conventions create a complex system of rules and constraints that def?ine and maintain social relations. Furthermore, a letter itself is also a material object. As Antje Richter states in her ground-breaking study of epistolary culture in early medieval China, The materiality of letters is more pronounced than that of many other genres.