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The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. By ROEL STERCKX. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2002. Pp. ix + 375. $92.50 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).
"This book examines animals in early China, not the animal that forms the object of study for the zoo-historian, archaeologist, fabulist, or literary critic, but the perception of animals and the animal world as a signifying exponent of the world of thought. . . ." So begins the introduction of this well-researched study of the place of animals in the intellectual history of the Warring States and Han period (roughly 475 B.C.-A.D. 220). Although he is aware of other approaches to the study of animals in ancient China, the author is determinedly textual. In this respect, he has done a responsible and reasonably thorough job of examining the available early writings that discuss animals directly or allude to them indirectly, as through metaphor. He especially deserves credit for paying due attention to the relevant manuscripts that have been archaeologically recovered within the last three decades (e.g., those from Mawangdui, Yinqueshan, Shuihudi, Guodian, and Fangmatan). Indeed, the newly found sources, which are contemporaneous with the periods that constitute the focus of this investigation, often provide fascinating information and valuable insights that were missing in the previously available classical and canonical texts, whose extant editions actually date from significantly later periods.
Roel Sterckx writes very much in the vein of his mentor, Mark Edward Lewis, whose justly admired Sanctioned Violence in Early China was published in the same series by the same press a dozen years previously. Lewis's earlier monograph, en passant, raised many of the questions about animal imagery in the Warring States and Han periods that Sterckx examines in greater detail and depth in the present work. Both Lewis and Sterckx mine the classics, the philosophers, and the historians to build an argument about the place of violence and of animals (these two themes often intersect) in early Chinese thought. Both also make good use of literary sources, especially the rhapsody (fu), in illuminating bestiality, the hunt, and related topics. After unburdening himself of the large tome entitled Writing and Authority in Early China (again the same series and same press,...