Chapter 2 - The Monumentalisation of Communal Memories in Eastern Han China, 25–220 CE

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses the formation of collective communal memories and identities during Eastern Han China. Rather than focusing on the cultural memory in its totality and reducing memories formulated by smaller social groups to “subcultures” or “subformations,” this chapter explores the spatial dimension of group memories, that is, the “communal memory” of various social organisations, such as the ancestral memory of the powerful Kong lineage, as well as the collective memories dedicated to individuals and community events. Evidence from Eastern Han stelae suggests that these collective memories could have been monumentalised and maintained for a much longer time than the threshold of 80–100 years. Regardless of modes, however, it is shown that monumentalisation represented a pivotal technique which individuals in different power relations employed to visualise and eternalise the communal memories they sought to uphold.

Keywords: Eastern Han Dynasty, cultural memory, communal memory, monumentalisation, identity, Han material culture

Memory is integral to one's understanding of the past, the present, the future, and the self. At the collective level, memory is a construct whose formation is often rooted in the contemporaneous interests of the social group that creates it. Often the construction of collective memory reflects how a certain group of people use a common past to meet their present needs, such as creating a common identity, achieving a particular political appeal, and hierarchising a desired social order.

The efforts to construct a common past through a shared memory are epitomised by the policies of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE) government. In the wake of the so-called “classical turn” in the late Western Han period (202 BCE–9 CE), rulers and ministers became enthusiastic in actualising the Ruist (儒, which is more widely known as Confucian) ideals. Such passion was exemplified in their attempts to canonise Ruist texts, to reform government organisations – especially high-ranking ministers – based on the Ruist classics, and to institute a new sacrificial system which was supposedly modelled after the Zhou system. In the words of Michael Puett, the late Western Han court called for “a return to the Zhou” and “emphasized returning to the past, favouring restraint, and opposing the grandiosity of the earlier imperial courts.”