本文来源：https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/archaeological-studies-on-gender-in-early-east-asia/6DB6F96EB26FCF515C4F2A27D64AD4CB?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark&fbclid=IwY2xjawG8YGtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXhg5ezSVW6--RayprFfwjYJ8ioDYSLwf6gyjJ1HRNPwUVEqeZ_i2P-Mmg_aem_hBv91BdJWvizgWOG1z6Ohg
Contents
1 Introduction.........................................1
1.1 Overview.............................................1
1.2 Models from the Past and Current Goals.......................................................5
1.3 Sections of This Element..................................................10
2 Current Research..................................................11
2.1 People’s Republic of China........................................................11
2.2 Korea...........................................................22
2.3 Japan...........................................................28
2.4 Mongolia.......................................................39
2.5 Taiwan..........................................................44
3 Thinking Ahead.........................................................53
Bibliography..............................................56
简介
Gendered archaeology in Asia has been studied by archaeologists since the 1990s and scholars have posed questions such as the role and construction of gendered identities in ancient societies. In this Element, the authors review secondary literature, report on to what stage the research has evolved, evaluate methodologies, and use the concept of networking to examine the issues across East Asia, including China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Interestingly, those literatures are not entirely parallel with each other – the authors found, for example, that archaeological investigation was largely bound by national guidelines, by local intellectual traditions, and by changing historiographic interpretations of past events, as well as funding. The complexion of recent studies on gender and archaeology in Asia has often been focused on providing a framework for a grand narrative of each national 'civilization' as the emergence of institutional political structures, including traditional values placed on men and women.
节选
1.1 Overview
The roles of men and women in our societies are observable in everyday life to all of us, but the construction of attitudes toward “proper” behavior for genders is culture-based and has a history that is often elusive, as it is often not recorded directly. Gender constructions are the result of and affected by political, economic, ideological, and religious thinking, the law, urban and rural life, social structure, leisure and entertainment, family life, birth, marriage, death and burial, health, nutrition and food, education, and many other aspects of our lives. These are not always readily observable in the past lives of those unearthed through archaeological investigation.1 As was proposed in 1984 by Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector, archaeology can substantiate sets of culture-specific beliefs about the meaning of masculine and feminine, about the capabilities of men and women, about their power relations, and about their appropriate roles in society (Conkey and Spector 1984: 1). We ask if this idea has guided archaeological research on gender in East Asia.
In preparing this Element, we examined historical and current intellectual concepts that have guided researchers who study gender in archaeology in ancient East Asia. Immediately, we recognized that the characters for sex and gender are the same in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (性別),2 such that distinctions between discerning sex and gendered behavior have not always been sought. Interestingly, the words in Mongolian (and Russian) do mark that difference (sex = секс, gender = хүйс; and in Russian, sex = секс, gender = пол, род) and may be tied to a more complex understanding of social order in literature in these languages (see Section 2.4 on Mongolia). Even though looking for patterns in the expression of gender and learning how that might be preserved in archaeological settings might have been our initial goal, we found that such a focus has not directed most studies to date in East Asia. Discovering and recording distinctive patterns that marked sexes in past burial practice has dominated the research, and that is an important first step, but further advances in the study of gender will require clearer conceptualizations of gender as a socially constructed facet of societies and individuals. An understanding of gender as intrinsically tied to conceptions of fluid and multiple identities, whether national, political, personal, ethnic, cultural, or otherwise, could lead to contextualizing gendered behavior further historically.
Although we searched for and hopefully have found most of what has been published about gender in archaeology across East Asia, we have not found, or do not know how to locate, everything. For instance, following 2004 when the first full set of edited articles on gender in early China appeared in English and then in Chinese (Linduff and Sun 2004, 2006), we documented almost 200 articles published in Chinese. By contrast, we found thirty or fewer articles focused on gender in each of the other countries, whether in local or other languages. In this Element, we concentrate on local language publications while illustrating both the methods and the proposed results with case studies and noting the impact of thinking from outside the region where relevant.3
We report patterns of interest and analysis in scholarship and group research by what we think is the foundational infrastructure of that research and analysis. Even though East Asia was historically and is currently a region comprised of culturally, ethnically, politically, and socially complex societies where gender as studied by archaeologists might lead to quite varied conceptions of social behavior, we found that such understanding has been unevenly initiated across the region. Historical texts, whether contemporary with the early societies on which they supposedly report or not, hold an especially privileged place both in the definition of topics for research and in the interpretation of archaeological data. Those historical texts most often report a uniform view of “proper behavior” for all men and women within a homogenizing notion of the target culture. In addition, archaeological methods vary for the collection of data and most often the focus is not an effort to examine issues of gender. Some scholars make use of ethnographic parallels in their analyses, but these are rarely accompanied by discussions of anthropological theory. Perhaps the most compelling recent change in research methods is the application of newer scientific testing that has led to an understanding of the movement of peoples, family lineages, food, diet, and health disparities across a population, including class, ethnicity, and genders. Those test results are often added to other older styles of historical-culture analyses related to gender. For instance, cranial morphologies and/or typologies are often used to build interpretations of “ethnicity” and “gender” even though other more certain testing methods that determine sex have neither initially nor consistently been applied.4 Assertions about femininity and masculinity have also sometimes been based on contemporary assumptions about gender roles. One such example is the telling of changes in the social order within the Marxist paradigm from matriarchy to patriarchy in late prehistory as applied in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since its establishment. Without archaeological data to confirm female leadership, gendered roles in households, or political positions in prehistoric China, explanations have been recognized as politically motivated to show the emergence of societal inequality and to bolster the necessity for the new socialist order (Shelach 2004).
As we were invited to review “women and gender in early East Asia,” we had to determine what areas and periods we thought should be included and how we might best represent coherent ancient culture regions within them. We have chosen to look at the prehistoric era up to established state-level period societies, in part because these stages have received the most attention in archaeology and gender studies. We define the region in geographic and ethnocultural terms. Geographically, although culturally not entirely distinct from adjacent regions, East Asia consists of the eastern region of the Eurasian landmass and includes the modern states of China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. Often throughout history, the area lay within the Chinese sphere of influence and adopted the Chinese written script and calendar, although each modern nation-state included has aimed to establish its own identity. Significantly, in addition, East Asia borders geographically on Siberia and the Russian Far East to the north, Southeast Asia to the south, South Asia to the southwest, and central Eurasia to the west. To the east is the Pacific Ocean and to the southeast is Micronesia (the Pacific Ocean island group classified as part of Oceania). Over time, mountains, prairies, formidable deserts, mighty river systems and seas, and climate changes have often formed political, cultural, as well as physical barriers to and within the region. Not surprisingly, complex ethnocultural mixes of peoples and societies emerged in antiquity that crossed these geographic areas, and many transregional connections still exist today. We have included notice of such intersections throughout as they figure directly in the formation of societies in East Asia and sometimes importantly in the shaping of notions of gender, but we have not surveyed those areas independently here.
Historically, societies in East Asia have been defined around issues associated with the rise and establishment of state-level polities and their peripheries. Of course, those important historical processes did occur. But prehistoric and early historic culture zones do not easily follow modern geographic or ethno-political definitions, since we know that borders were fluid and peoples interacted not only at the edges of large communities or polities but even within the communities themselves through marriage, trade, and other forms of exchange. We know, for instance, that human cultural, biological, and genomic hybridity was the norm across East Asia as opposed to homogeneity (Pechenkina and Oxenman 2013). Genetically and culturally close communities inhabited the same or neighboring territories, the spaces once occupied by bygone states or empires that were and are often still united by the institutions as well as the political, economic, ideological, and notional ties of the past. The extent to which those legacies continue to influence the life of research today was clear in our survey of the published materials on gender, especially in the review of literature on ethnocultural and gendered life in early Taiwan. Although we know that interactive patterns of behavior existed and binary descriptions cannot adequately reflect the shape of the communities, polities, families, or archaeological recovery, East Asian authors have adhered stridently to report within modern national bounds and ethnocultural units created to advance national narratives.
Related to this nation-based reporting of archaeology, scholarship across the region has been profoundly affected by modern history in East Asia. Having witnessed the breakdown and dissolution of monarchies in China and Japan, social and political revolutions in Russia and China, the demise of colonial holdings, the downfall of the USSR, and two world wars, no part of East Asia was left unchanged. The subject of gender emerged there as in other parts of the world especially after World War II as a focused topic of research in the 1960s and 1970s as part of local reevaluations of social order that led to intensifying civil rights awareness. Increasingly globalized communication and economies worldwide have opened avenues of rapid exchange like never before. Although the results of this history manifest differently area by area, all were affected in some way by these events. For example, contemporary sociopolitical settings have, in our view, deeply influenced the way archaeological data are being understood and interpreted, as has the impact of the history and growth of “feminism” and/or consciousness of gender. And as has recently been reported about PRC female archaeologists (Hein et al. 2023: 559–590), we have noted the role of a growing awareness of and debate around “feminist” movements in the twentieth century across East Asia as one impetus for the study of gender as a factor in archaeological research.
These reflections arose after reviewing the secondary literature from China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Mongolia that make use of archaeological data to reconstruct and interpret gendered actions of the past. Interestingly, those literatures are not entirely parallel with each other, and we found, for example, that archaeological investigation was largely bound by national regulations, by local intellectual traditions, and by changing historiographic interpretations of past events, as well as selective funding for research. Such circumstances have neither easily nor sometimes at all allowed for the study of ancient cultures and societal organization across modern national borders, thus negating a full understanding of the structure of whole ancient societies. This is, perhaps, one of the greatest deterrents to the study of ancient communities in regions that cross current state or even sometimes provincial borders.
Of course, observations of modern archaeologists and historians depend on what has been excavated and reported. Their reconstructions are affected by intellectual traditions brought to the task from each interpreter’s past. Interestingly, we found that we needed to separate historical facts (archaeological data) as documented in excavated materials from reports and efforts that aimed to reconstruct historical knowledge (interpretation). The desire to record vs. the desire to understand and investigate the past varies from report to report. Although the two are not exclusive, they often are not mingled. Our hope is that by reviewing the current state of thinking about gender across East Asia, we can inspire the construction of the consequential historical experience of gendered behavior through which facts can be understood. That might take the form of more synthetic thinking on the part of collaborative teams of holders of specific information ready to be examined through an historical lens or the development of projects that take aim at gendered behavior at the outset. Many scientific tools and much more data are available to the archaeologist today, such that this sort of research is possible. We hope that this Element provides a useful starting point for additional future work in this direction.
编辑：蒋滨远
