内容简介

In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries B.C., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. In this detailed study, the author makes the claim that artifacts are never neutral: as a distinctive possession, each object—through the abstracting function of style—offers a material template for scales of value. Likewise, through style, pictorial forms can make claims about material "referents," the things depicted. By manipulating these scales and their referents, artifacts can shape the way status, social role, or identity is understood and enforced. The result is a kind of "spatial epistemology" within which the identities of persons are constructed. Powers thereby posits a relationship between art and society that operates at a level deeper than iconography, attributes, or social institutions. Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice. This latter development, essential for bureaucratic organization and individual achievement, challenges the conventional opposition between "Western" individuals and "collective" Asians.

作品目录

Introduction : graphic patterns and social order 1

Ch. 1 Style 23

Ch. 2 Terms of craft 47

Ch. 3 Abstraction 65

Ch. 4 Craft 83

Ch. 5 Gov ernment 99

Ch. 6 Labor, invention, and "taste" 111

Ch. 7 Craft and political theory 137

Ch. 8 Ornament and identity 160

Ch. 9 Bureaucracy and agency 188

Ch. 10 The politics of personhood 210

Ch. 11 Patterns, pictures, and fractals 227

Ch. 12 The laws of nature 253

Ch. 13 Nature and society 270

Ch. 14 Identity and possession 297

Epilogue : sources of self 309