A History of Cultic Images in China

Download or read book A History of Cultic Images in China written by Alain Arrault and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past twenty years, work on the local culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. At the heart of this society is a kind of statuary found nowhere else in China--sculpted images of local people, primarily religious specialists of a wide range, but also parents and ancestors who, according to Confucian orthodoxy, should be represented by tablets, not statues. While the consecration ceremonies of these statues include rites that are common to all China, they are embedded in unique local ritual traditions. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on some 4,000 of these statues and studies them on the basis of consecration certificates inserted in the statues, the earliest of which date to the sixteenth century.