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Eusocial Divine Agency: Ants in Late Imperial Morality Books
School of Chinese Scholar Seminar
Eusocial Divine Agency: Ants in Late Imperial Morality Books
Abstract:
Ants are one of the most numerous and pervasive categories of insects and occur in most terrestrial habitats. They are easily observable by the naked eye and clearly abide by hierarchical distinctions in complex societies. This lecture considers how these distinctive elements of ant biology and behavior were perceived in China from the medieval through the late imperial period. It does so by examining tales featuring ants.
The first such tales to appear were anomaly accounts, which defined the normative by managing oddities. These stories were then disseminated and expanded upon in the profuse genre of religious publishing commonly termed morality books. The human authors and compilers of such tales employed them as evidence that an impersonal heaven rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked. In contrast to most other non-human animal subjects in these tales, ant often occurred as a multiplicity; they provided a means to manage the volume of other lifeforms to whom the reader was exhorted to be attentive. There was also a clear understanding that ants, like people, construct built environments and have a legitimate expectation to be able to inhabit them without disturbance. This resonance between human and myrmecological residences reflected a mutual intelligibility as social creatures.
The corpus of ant tales is read in tandem with late Ming accounts of ant diversity and morphology, foremost of which are Li Shizhen’s Comprehensive Materia Medica and Tan Zhenmo’s The Carving of Little Creatures. Simultaneously concerned with direct observation and cosmological organization, these works determine the extent to which ant complexity could be perceived in late imperial China.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Daniel Burton-Rose is Department Director of Humanities and Social Sciences and an Assistant Professor of History at Wenzhou-Kean University. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University in 2016. He is the co-editor, with David A. Bello, of the anthology Insect Histories of East Asia (University of Washington Press 2023) and the author of Conversing with Spirits: Prophecy and Spirit-Writing in Qing Conquest China (under contract with University of Hawai‘i Press). He serves as the Senior Editor of the journal Asian Medicine: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Medicine (Brill), for which he co-edited a special issue with Yi-Li Wu titled “African American Contributions to American Acupuncture,” and has contributed to a range of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including Daoism: Religion, History and Society, Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, Journal of the History of Biology, Journal on Religion and Violence, Korean Journal for the History of Science, and T’oung Pao.
