Thematic Introduction
Anthropology originated from the West's search for the "other" and the "barbaric" and "primitive" as a mirror image of itself, and later became a mature discipline with fieldwork as the core under the nourishment of ethnographic methods. With the increasing convergence of people's lives under various civilization systems, anthropology can no longer ignore the focus on the economy that affects the lives of all human beings. What role does the economy play in people's lives? Do the principles of the price mechanism of economics apply to "uncivilized" societies? What is "Stone Age Economics"? Are people exchanging gifts just out of rational calculations? Can a solidarity economy in which wealth is collectively owned and shared by groups be realized?
As one of the most famous academic debates in the history of anthropology, the "formalism-substance debate" has left a divided consensus and a diversified disciplinary exploration path for the branch of economic anthropology. Is the party is over in economic anthropology? So to speak. However, economic anthropology has left many perspectives on human socio-economic activities from a holistic socio-economic perspective, which has allowed the field to remain alive and well, drawing new branches from old trees.
In this issue, "China Studies in Economic Anthropology" will follow the key words of economic anthropology given by Chris Hann, and sort out the important documents in the history of economic anthropology with the problem awareness as the guide. From the first to the seventh article, it constitutes a "stone from other mountains" to the awareness of the basic problems of economic anthropology. From the eighth to the nineteenth chapters, they focus on the themes of livelihood patterns, work, consumption, gifts, trade and markets, money and barter, credit and debt, property rights, globalization, socialism, moral economy, and households. Criteria for selection: Based on the discussion formed by solid empirical materials, fieldwork is used as a method, and the research object focuses on Chinese society.
The last article of this special topic concludes with Mr. Fei Xiaotong's reflection on "people's anthropology", which is also the cultural consciousness of "what anthropology" needs to be considered when economic anthropology needs to respond to the emerging new economic phenomena to get out of the "substance-form" controversy.
Ye Renjie, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy of Nanjing Normal University, mainly engaged in the research of European philosophy, the history of Western political thought, and contemporary literary theory.
summary
The beginning of Western economics was classical political economy, and the subsequent economic concepts all began at this moment, but "economy" does not fully cover all the historical meanings of "economy". Pocock, Foucault, and Yao Yunfan each use different threads to connect the conceptual evolution. The birth of political economy has gone through the home economics of ancient Greece, to the trinitarian doctrine of Christendom and the doctrine of natural rights of Quenet, and the change in the meaning of the concept corresponds to the constant change of its field and management form: from the management of the family, to the order of nature, and finally to laissez-faire economic governance.
keyword
Housekeeping; Jingshi; economy
1. From the family to the economy and the people
Western modern economics originated from the classical political economy born in France and United Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which is also a very important node of modernity: not only does it mean that in jurisprudence, property is transformed into the concept of ownership, but the center of the classical natural law tradition is reformed into individual rights, laying the foundation for the development of capitalism; Moreover, it means that the political order under the rationality of the state is transformed into a commercial society, and economics and its related statistics have become the means and ends of national governance. The assumption of rational homo economicus is still the precursor of homo economicus as a way of life since modern times, and it indicates the further transformation of commercial society into civil society. The understanding of economics as the knowledge and even the way of life of the people is used in the context of post-studies, which began with classical political economy. But the question is, why is the economy relevant to politics?
"Economy" undoubtedly comes from the ancient Greece word for home economics (oikonomia), which etymically consists of the family (oikos) and the ritual law (nomos), from which Plato and Aristotle distinguished between home economics and politics, respectively. Plato detached ritual law from the real political realm on two levels: first, nature (physis) takes absolute precedence over ritual law, and the principle of politics should be natural justice rather than customary etiquette; Secondly, "nomos" comes from "nemein", which means to occupy a certain amount of land for farming and animal husbandry, and the related "nomeus" refers to the pastoral domain, and "nomos" originally means the pastoral leader established the ritual law by occupying the land. In The Statesman, Plato questioned the validity and eternity of pastoral legislation, and even if the pastoral work did require it, the realm should be confined to a smaller religious or religious community analogous to the family, and far less important than the legislation of the philosophers. Aristotle's distinction between the two was even more far-reaching, with Politics emphasizing that domestic economics and politics correspond to completely different types of autocratic rule (arche despotike) and political rule (arche politike). Although housekeeping meets the basic needs of life in order to become self-reliant and participate in political life, the two should not be confused. Thus, both home economics and politics are subordinate to completely different realms for both Plato and Aristotle.
In 1615, the France playwright Antoine de Montchrestien first used the term "political economy" in his Traicté de l'oeconomie politique. But Pocock argues that the tension between economics and politics was first manifested in the United Kingdom in the 17th century. The modernists, represented by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, etc., advocated that the economy should dominate politics, talk about morality from the perspective of human desires, and talk about justice from the point of view of people's possession of things·. The two later argued in different terms of businessman and patriot: one side transformed the political relationship into that of creditor and debtor, while the other side lamented the moral corruption of the former. Historically, the former developed the moral philosophy of the mercantile society and the modern natural law, withstood the challenge, and thus constructed the classical political economy of the United Kingdom.
The 18th-century France Enlightenment philosophers were also involved in this controversy. Rousseau could neither accept the corruption of virtue by commerce, nor did he understand ownership as natural, because all human rights come from contracts, and the result is the integration of the economy into politics and civil society. This is reflected not only in Chapter 9 of the Social Contract on Property Rights, but also directly in Rousseau's entry for the Encyclopédie on "Economy" (Economie ou oeconomie). Rousseau begins by continuing Locke's critique of patriarchy, arguing that housekeeping is fundamentally different from civic governance rather than proportionately enlarged, with the former deriving rights and duties from natural dictates and having no property rights to children and fathers, while the latter derives from the contract of equal members, and everyone has property rights. The public economy (l'économie publique) is equivalent to governance (gouvernement), which is the heart of the state, and its relationship with sovereignty lies in the fact that the latter is the legislative power and the former is the executive power. The governance of the economy, as the middle of the ratio between the sovereign and the subject, needs to operate according to three rules: for the sovereign, it needs to obey the law that represents the public will; For its subjects, it requires the exaltation of patriotic virtues and the protection of the poor to achieve social justice; Finally, it is possible to protect everyone's property for the public good.
Although Rousseau considered himself to have inherited Aristotle's discourse on the family to the polis in the first volume of Politics, it is clear that he had completely reversed the natural legitimacy of classical politics and set off a second wave of modernity. For Aristotle, housekeeping is the presupposition of the political personality, and the political personality itself is naturally justified. Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that housekeeping could only be confined to the natural family and had nothing to do with unnatural politics, while the economy was only in the realm of politics. Therefore, from the perspective of Pocock's "ancient and modern controversy", the birth of political economy is a subversive leap from the realm of the family to the opposite - the realm of politics.
There is also a gradual reading of political economy, that is, political economy has in fact spread from the realm of the family to the wider realm. The history of the so-called gouvernementalité in Foucault's lecture on Security, Territory and Population is the history of housekeeping and economics connected by "conduite". In Foucault's view, there are two important nodes: first, the "oikonomia psuchon" of the early Greece church fathers refers to guiding the Christian soul to salvation, and the scope of housekeeping shifts to the realm of each Christian's soul, which expanded into their secular life in the 16th century with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; Second, at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, it stepped out of Christendom in two directions, in the private sphere, the philosophy represented by Descartes opened the guidance of truth to the self, and in the public sphere, the state rationality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed to a new stage, that is, the polizweistaat, the concept from Germany is the best counterpart in France is "political economy". Foucault argues that the core of the birth of political economy is the physiocrat's focus on population, which not only encompasses the family, but also includes each individual in the scope of governance through demographics, fertility and mortality rates, vaccination, and other technologies.
The picture shows Foucault's Security, Territory and Population, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2018 edition.
Yao Yunfan's 2020 book The Sacred Man and the Sacred Housekeeping, on the basis of continuing Foucault, outlines a different thread through the interpretation of Agamben, thinking about the expansion of the field of housekeeping from the perspective of rhetoric. First, the Stoics used housekeeping in a figurative sense in the regulation of the power of the mind, which Cicero and Quintilian further transformed into rhetorical terms, referring to the rhetorical technique of choosing words and sentences aimed at persuading others, which was then inherited by the Christian holy housekeeping as a persuasive guiding device, becoming "a practical action that arises by resorting to the persuasive goal of 'faith' with the help of language."
The picture shows Yao Yunfan's "Sacred Man and Sacred Housekeeping: A Study of Agamben's Political Philosophy", Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2020 edition.
This thread strives to unify the ideas of Foucault and Agamben through rhetoric, which not only continues Agamben's vision of the past and the present, but also understands housekeeping as Foucault's guidance. But the rhetorical perspective obviously cannot explain the birth of political economy, so in The Sacred Man and the Divine Housekeeping, there is a rupture, the conceptual change from Greece to the Greece Church Fathers is understood as persuasion to guide the development of craftsmanship, and from the Latin Church Fathers to Physiocratism is understood from the perspective of order, the former closer to Foucault and the latter closer to Agamben.
In fact, although Agamben inherited Foucault's theoretical vision, he completely bid farewell to Foucault in terms of ideological construction. In the last two sections of this paper, we hope to first explain the first conceptual shift of housekeeping in Christendom with Agamben's framework, and further supplement the philosophical thinking and political discourse of the physiocrats represented by Quenet, so as to understand that the birth of political economy is the second conceptual shift with continuity.
2. The Grace of God
Agamben's historiography of the meaning of "oikonomia" does not emphasize its rhetorical significance, although the etymology refers to housekeeping, but the more common usage in ancient Greece comes from Xenophon, a technical term for "orderly management of various parts", which is used by both medicine and Stoics. In other words, in ancient Greece, housekeeping had already overflowed into the domestic domain. Aristotle's distinction between the political rule of the politis and the autocratic rule of the family (arche despotike) has not yet been encroached upon, and it is still only a technical term applied in a figurative way to different fields, understood as "management", "arrangement", etc.
Paul uses the term "oikonomia" in the same way in his epistles. As an apostle, he considered himself an oikonomos entrusted by God to undertake the work and tasks of spreading the gospel and placing the plan of salvation. Thus, the phrase "oikonomia tou mysterious" in Ephesians 3:9 refers to Paul's work of governing the mystery of God, his Logos, and "mysterious" is only the second case of the object. Paul's use of the term has its own context, as the ancient Christian community had already used the word oikos extensively to refer to the Christian community, even coining terms such as oikosmegas (polis) and political housekeeping (oikonomia politike). But rather than extending the concept of housekeeping to the entire city-state, they equate the Christian community with the family, and the idea of housekeeping (oikonomia) develops neither political nor theological connotations.
But as the Trinity became a central issue in Christianity, the meaning of "oikonomia" was radically changed by the Latin Church Fathers. First, Latin godfathers such as Tertullian directly equated "oikonomia" with the Latin word for "arrangement" (dispensatio), and the original meaning of "housekeeping" has gradually been replaced by an extended meaning in the Latin world. Second, as the Greece Church Fathers transferred the term "oikonomia" from Paul to Christ Jesus, referring to the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus under God's arrangement, the term gradually became associated with the Trinity question. Latin church fathers such as Hippolytus and Tertullian inverted Paul's "oikonomia" as "the mystery of oikonomia" and "the practice of God itself becomes a mystery." The mystery refers to the advent of Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God to rule over the world for the general salvation of creation, and thus God became the sole monarch of the entire world. In this sense, housekeeping has been completely withdrawn from the realm of the family and transformed into the governance of the world, and its more appropriate Chinese translation should be "Jingshi".
The problem, however, is that Jesus Christ could not have ruled over many creatures as autocratic as the head of the household, not only because Jesus Christ will only come a second time in the Messianic hour, but also because if he paid attention to every creature in the same detail as the head of the household, God would appear too condescending and humiliating, even to the point of blasphemy. But if God governs according to universal laws, then there is a danger of becoming deistic. Nor does this mean that God's life was transformed into the inner guidance of the individual in the long Middle Ages, after the early Latin Pataras, which was first revealed in Scott and others in the late Middle Ages. Therefore, from housekeeping to the world, not only the meaning of the word has shifted and the field has expanded, but the form of management has also changed, and the core of this is the divine grace (pronoia).
In pre-Christian times, the Stoics used the metaphor of housekeeping to illustrate that the charisma of the gods is like a meticulous housekeeper who governs everything in the world, and the relationship between things has an inevitable fate. Alexander of Aphrodisia, on the one hand, commented on Aristotle that the gods could not take care of every small thing, and on the other hand, emphasized that the relationship between things is contingent, so that it is necessary for the charity to give order.
Christianity also adopts the framework of charism and order to consider the relationship between contingency and necessity in the world. In the case of Aquinas, in his view, God as the first cause gives form to all creatures as inevitable and subordinate to the divine order (ordo ad unum principium), but the mutual movement of all things according to the second cause is contingent and subordinate to the order of relations (ordo ad invicem). In order to avoid chaos in all things, God's rule is necessary. But God's rule does not mean that he will surrender to himself and govern creation in a transcendent outward way, but through a combination of general and special charisms. Specifically, universal charism refers to the universal law set by God, while special charism refers to the creation that has a natural nature of God in itself. It is through the natural nature of creation, which can be compared to the nature of God, that the mutual movement between them has an inherent inevitability, forming a tight chain of cause and effect, and is able to return to the divine law of universal charism. Thus, God's world is not the direct intervention of the God of the first cause in the realm of the second cause, but the construction of the inner natural order of the creatures in the realm of the second cause according to their natural nature.
This is where the importance of the Trinity is revealed. Christ Jesus is physically identical with God on the one hand, and on the other hand, he is born into His natural nature, which is human nature. But the humanity of Jesus Christ was not created and ultimately returned to the divinity of God. In this sense, the incarnation and ascension of Christ Jesus is a sign of the extreme unity of universal and special charisms. The divine humanity of Jesus Christ, the mediator of the Second Cause, ensures that the interrelations of the Second Cause can be unified within itself.
Through the concept of charism, Christianity not only extends the world from the domestic realm of domestic economics to the world or nature, but also means that its form of management is also engaged in the intricate arrangement of management into an internal natural order in which the universal and the particular are combined, and all things operate according to their natural nature. As Agamben puts it, God's world is essentially "to clarify the natural nature of all things and to let them work," which is only one step away from the political economy of physiocratism.
III. Quenet's Evidentiality and Natural Rights
As the source of political economy, the core of the "gouvernement économique" emphasized by Quenet, the representative of physiocratism, lies in the "laissez-faire" (laissez-faire) similar to that of Christendom. This refers to "grasping all things at the level of their natural nature [...] On the basis of this reality, it is tried to serve as a support and function for the parts to function in their relationship with each other [...]. In the lecture "The Birth of Biopolitics", Foucault further uses the framework of the régime de vérité (truth mechanism) to explain that the premise of "economic governance" is to understand the intrinsic complex nature of the economic governance mechanism, that is, the knowledge of truth in the fields of society, markets and economic circulation with verifiability. In this sense, the autocratic rule of the head of the household in ancient Greece is transformed into the enlightened despotism of economic truth in physiocratism (despotisme éclairé), a specific truth that is evident rather than monarchical in governing economic governance, and the political economy of physiocratism is essentially the physics of economic order.
François Quesnay (French: François Quesnay, 4 June 1694 – 16 December 1774) France economist, leader of physiocratism and pioneer of the system of political economy.· Known as the "Confucius of Europe". [Source: Wikipedia.com]
Agamben pointed out that this was Quenet's inheritance of a theological legacy. If the German Baroque period was to confine God's creation order to the court and politics, then Britain and France were to transfer God's economic order and its form of administration to the economic realm of society. But in fact it is not necessary to attribute too much credit to theologians such as Maleburnz for this shift.
Quenet's contemporaries sought to explore the psychic nature of the natural order. Carl ·Linnaeus used the term "natural classic" in his 1749 Specimen academicum de oeconomia naturae (Specimen academicum de oeconomia naturae) to refer to "God's dispositionem of the things of nature so that all things in nature are oriented towards a common purpose and for the benefit of one another". Our minds are able to perceive and receive all things, the evidentiary nature of nature is self-evident, and the job of human beings is to classify and name them. Buffon, a fellow naturalist, went a step further than Linnaeus and believed that evidentiary does not come from nature itself, but from man's ability to grasp the natural relationships between them.
It was around 1753 that Quenet befriended Buffon, and it was around the same time that Quenet ended his career as a physician and began to philosophize about vision. In 1736, the physician Quenet wrote Essay physique sur l'économie animale (Essay physique sur l'économie animale) to show that harmony within the human physiology is part of the natural order of God's charism. But with his association with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Quenet was drawn into the controversy of France intellectual circles. At that time, the France Newtonians, represented by Voltaire, violently attacked the Cartesians represented by Fontenelle, who believed that the first philosophical foundation of Descartes was meaningless conjectures and hypotheses, and that the truth of science should depend on experience and experiment, while the latter believed that Newton's theory of gravity envisaged a non-existent existence, going back to before Descartes. In order to unify the two positions, neo-Cartesians such as Buffon and Diderot moved towards materialism, which not only abolished the mind-body dualism of Descartes, but also attributed Newton's gravity to the properties of matter, while also reducing the theistic color of both sides. Quenet also tried to reconcile the two sides, but in very different ways.
In 1756, Quenet wrote an entry for the Encyclopedia entitled "Probative". On the one hand, explicit "comes from an inner observation of our own feelings [...]. Clarity refers to a certainty that we cannot deny ourselves, just as it is impossible for us to deny the feeling of the moment." The reason why the innate idea of the subject (Descartes) and the universal idea of God (Spinoza) are not evident is that the relationship between ideas and individual objects (les liaisons) is not constructed. Claire & distincte senses are able to first discern the individuality of objects, and then, through the causal intermotion of individual objects, the mind is able to clearly grasp the properties of objects, such as size, weight, etc. In other words, demonstrativeness, although it is in the senses, comes from the motion relations formed between the objects.
On the other hand, Quenet, although he criticized the theory of ideas with feeling, did not support empiricism or mechanism, but insisted on Descartes' mind-body dualism. Quenet believed that we cannot know the object itself, but only the individuality of the object and the relationship formed by its mutual movement. The question, however, is that if the body and mind cannot interact with each other, how can the mind grasp the causality of the motion between objects, even if the motion between objects is causal? The motion between objects is essentially driven by God as the first cause, and the "powerful, intellectual, and directive" first cause also gives the human being a perceptual, rational active form, which connects the two realms of body and mind, and enables one to acknowledge causality from God. Quenet transformed the first and second causes into the first and second demonstrative, or as the light of reason (les lumieres de la raison) and the light of nature (lumieres naturelles), with the former laying the foundation for the latter. But because human beings are passive in their sensory faculties, they cannot know what the first evidentiality is, but can only recognize the second evidentiality. If the necessity of the medieval contingent second cause realm comes from the passage of the first cause, then Quenet's epistemology emphasizes the recognition of necessity through active intellectual forms.
The first explicit proposal is for practical purposes. According to Quenet, in the natural order, the will (les volontés) has the "essence of feeling", and that there is a conflict or benefit between the sense and the sensual being, so that the sensual being can produce a sense of liking or disliking, which is a passive will, and there is no difference between humans and animals in this respect. But the similarity of sensory faculties does not imply the unity of natural nature, and man is endowed with "the power of intention, freedom, and moral determination" while being endowed with the form of active reason. Quenet distinguishes between two different kinds of intentional forces, or natural motives, one is the passion-driven (affectifs) motivation that is consistent with the animal, and the likes and dislikes are only due to physical superiority and disadvantage (au bien & au mal physiques), but the active intellect allows humans to discern good and evil in the moral order rather than in the natural order, and with this instructive motive, the will rises to free will (libre) for the purpose of moral good arbitre）。 In other words, from the foundation of the second evidentiary to the first evidentiality, Quenet made the leap from the epistemology of the natural order to the practical realm of the moral order.
How to understand the goodness and free will of the moral order? This concerns Quenet's doctrine of natural rights, which marks a whole new level of his late thinking. Quenet argues that philosophers debated issues such as liberty and justice because they failed to realize that these concepts related to natural rights were essentially dependent properties rather than absolute entities. Although both parents and children have natural rights in the family, if the parents do not leave any property after their death, then the children have no natural rights. Thus, it is not not, as Rousseau argues, that natural rights exist in a political society opposed to the natural family, but are attached to property as an entity.
Does this mean that Quenet's natural right is similar to Hobbes's natural right to possess everything driven by desire? Quenet also refuted this, saying that natural rights are "the power of man over what is appropriate for his use" and that the word "fit" defines the extent of the property to which each person is entitled, on which there can be justice. But "appropriateness" does not come from artificial positive laws such as contracts, but from the explicit acknowledgment of eternal natural law by the light of reason.
Natural law has two levels. The first is "the law of all physical events in the natural order which is most clearly beneficial to man." The center of the natural order is neither the salvation of God in the Middle Ages nor the epistemological causality of the entry, but the good of mankind (l'intérêt). It is in his best interest for the natural order to establish by this criterion the relations of all things and to distribute what man ought to possess, and to be able to clearly know and acknowledge this. However, the scope of the division of the natural order still stays at "ought", not the actual possession of man, so the natural law also needs a second level, that is, the moral order, which means that man must not only recognize, but also conform to the law of physics. Specifically, it is the establishment of natural rights by the physical possession of property within the limits of human labor and distribution. Thus, in Quenet's view, in natural rights, the natural order must be combined with the moral order, and although the former logically takes precedence over the latter, without the latter, the former is only empty talk.
On the other hand, moving from acknowledgment to action, Quenet clarifies the meaning of free will in more nuance. True free will lies in motivation, which is a combination of the above two motives. Passion-driven (affectifs) motivation is based on physical superiority and inferiority, and the light of nature makes human beings admit that physical superiority and inferiority are based on human interests, so that human beings are naturally inclined to physical good, not because man's natural desire is to seek advantage and avoid disadvantage, but because of the natural nature of the natural order. At the same time, man is endowed with "the power of intention, freedom and moral determination", and the guiding motive from will to free will means that man achieves moral good by active labor and distribution in order to practice what he recognizes as the range of possessions that are beneficial to him. In this sense, free will is the will to act that presupposes recognition.
Thus, Quenet rewrites the epistemological meaning of the natural order into a practical one. The natural order distributes the scope of property in the interests of human beings, but this natural order remains in the realm of what should be, and in order to make it a reality, man needs to take actual possession of property by virtue of his free will, through labor and distribution, to practice the natural order as a moral order, and to realize his natural rights. The transfer of the natural order into the moral realm of politics marks the transformation of the "economic world" with creation as the core into the concept of political economy.
On this basis, we can further understand the two principles of economic management of physiocratism: laissez-faire operation and emphasis on agriculture.
In the first place, although the natural order is a moral order with property at its core, it does not mean that man can prescribe it, and its immanence also makes it impossible for a transcendent God to intervene. Of course, this implies a future possibility towards natural theology, modern natural science, and even the way of life of contemporary homo economicus, but we should pay more attention to the political significance of its time. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Quenet held important positions in the state and was very close to the monarch, and his position also allowed him to maintain a certain distance from the encyclopaedists, and to be more cautious on the issue of enlightenment. Thus, he borrowed the doctrine of rights, which had become the spirit of the times, to defend absolutist kingship: the sovereign, as God's agent in this world, did not mean that he wanted to intervene directly with the order, but that he wanted to maintain the glory recognized by his subjects and let it run freely.
Second, the emphasis on agriculture in Quenet's political economy is not the same as the emphasis on agriculture in ancient Greece, and the monarchies that value agriculture are completely different from the ancient agricultural states. Chief among the three classes in the table is the productive class, which actually produces products through agricultural labor. This primacy is not only due to the importance of agricultural activity for the accumulation of state finances and personal wealth, but also because the productive class exemplarily demonstrates natural rights, that is, the perfect combination of natural and moral order. Thus, this agrarian state, which does not realize the rights of nature in the form of popular sovereignty, is the most stable in Quenet's view.
Aftermath
From home economics to economic and economic concepts, not only the semantic field has changed from family to nature to politics, but also the form of management has also undergone tremendous changes. In contemporary times, the economy has lost its political and moral connotations, and has been used to describe an efficient and rational way of life of self-management, and economic principles have even become the shackles of every daily action, which seems to be more deeply rooted and silent than the iron cage of capitalism. The outline of the conceptual process in this essay abruptly ends in Quenet's political economy, not only because of academic resources and space constraints, but also because it hopes to present the development of the concept in the pre-modern era, and to show the part of it that is obscured by modern meanings.
〇This article was originally published in China Book Review, Issue 2, 2023. For the convenience of reading and layout, some notes and references have been deleted in this article, please refer to the original text if necessary. Unattributed images are from the original source.