Conquest, Concord, and Consumption: Becoming Shang in Eastern China.

Abstract

This dissertation research explores the making of the broader Shang world in the late second millennium B.C. Specifically, I investigate how aspects of the symbolic, social, and natural worlds converged in human interactions with animals, particularly in the realms of food and religious communication on the eastern frontier of the Shang civilization. As animals had symbolic and economic importance to the Shang, my research on patterned variation in animal remains from diverse archaeological contexts informs on status differences, economic conditions, and cultural change in the context of state expansion. While the state may have had an interest in promoting ritual institutions pertaining to its notions of order and legitimacy, local networks of power were often reproduced through simple and unconscious practices of everyday life and rituals. My dissertation investigates diverse aspects of human interaction with animals as potential loci for state reconfigurations of the ritual order as well as loci for parallel networks of power to diverge, subvert, or resist the state claim to centrality in the structure of Shang life. The process of "becoming Shang" can be best conceptualized as reconciling on-going tensions between the state's claim to supremacy and diverse local circumstances.