Abstract
In this article, I show that women are depicted in the early Confucian texts not primarily as undertaking household duties or nurturing children but rather as partaking in rituals of mourning and ancestor worship. To make the argument, I analyze, besides the more philosophical texts like the Analects and the Mencius, texts known as the “Five Classics,” which describe women in their social roles in much more detail than the former. What women’s participation in rituals reveals, I contend, is that the domestic-political distinction does little to illuminate the philosophical vision offered by the early Confucian texts. Relatedly, while women’s involvement in communal religious rituals has also been noted about early Greece, the political import of such participation is even more pronounced in the Confucian case. Specifically, I show that, by embodying intergenerational continuity, the mourning and ancestor rituals that women partake in are foundational to the Confucian state.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 90-119 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | Political Theory |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2024 |
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: research for this paper was made possible by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies Program in China Studies, and the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. I have also benefited from a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Zhejiang University—I am thankful to Dingxin Zhao for making it possible—and from time spent, in 2017–2018, at the University of Oxford, including at the Blavatnik School of Government. I thank two reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions and the Political Theory editors for reading the paper closely and providing very thoughtful guidance. I also thank Emre Gercek and Jinxue Chen for research assistance. I have benefited from a Farrell Fellowship, courtesy of the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, and the research work undertaken by Yurui Wu. I am also grateful to Mary Dietz, Kevin Mazur, Michael Nylan, and Wendy Pearlman for their suggestions and feedback on drafts of this paper. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the APSA 2020 meeting and the APT 2020 conference, as well as to the Global Antiquities group at Northwestern University and to the Center for Ethics at the University of Toronto. My twin little women, Nadia and Salma Amine-Mazur, accompanied the whole process of writing this article, first kicking, then cooing, then babbling, then giggling, then singing, making it fun and putting it all in perspective. The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: research for this paper was made possible by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies Program in China Studies, and the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. I have also benefited from a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Zhejiang University—I am thankful to Dingxin Zhao for making it possible—and from time spent, in 2017–2018, at the University of Oxford, including at the Blavatnik School of Government.
Keywords
- Confucianism
- domestic-political distinction
- public-private distinction
- rituals
- women
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- History
- Sociology and Political Science