2013 read #108: Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet.

Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet
Translated by Raymond Rudorff
135 pages
Published 1964; English translation published 1968
Read from August 19 to August 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so I only checked out this book because a) I'm running out of history texts I want to read, and b) I can't seem to find any good Chinese history books that focus on the interesting stuff. Every Chinese history book at my library is about Mao or the Long March or "the making of modern China." Boring, boring, boring. At least the time frame of this little book matches what I would consider more interesting.

Note those publication dates, though. We can't stop here; this is processualist country. If you don't know, processualism was a school of archaeological thought priggishly focused on reductive, materialist explanations and a rather tiresome insistence on rational actors and logical positivism. Don't get me wrong, my professional inclinations still lean toward material factors; the mutual interrelationships of humans and ecology interest me a great deal. If I ever got back into archaeology on a professional, publishing basis, my research questions would draw almost entirely from how human groups and animal populations affected one another in prehistory, and my approaches would be dense with graphs and statistics. But positivist archaeology, and rational actor theory and reductive explanations, are freaking ridiculous. Humans are never rational, and fitting human behavior onto simple cause and effect arrows is hopeless.

This book was a surreal experience after years of reading more postmodern and human-scale histories. I haven't read anything this aggressively reductive since, well, archaeological theory class, when we did our two weeks of processualists. The text is riddled with sweeping causal statements like "From the very beginning, the discovery of alloys must have led to a specialization of [social] functions." "Must have," "doubtless," "many proofs show" -- such definitive statements far outnumber more qualified assertions, even when the claim is based solely on armchair reasoning.

Outmoded theoretical grounds aside, I found myself profoundly disappointed by the lack of substantive supporting information throughout this book -- you know, the stuff that actually makes history interesting. For sheer terseness, this volume even beats that Byzantium book I found so disappointing earlier this year. At least that book named some major figures. Of course, this time period is almost entirely legendary in later Chinese writing, but it would be nice if Gernet had bothered to supply evidence or bases for his reductive conclusions, without endnotes referring back to primary sources in French. As it is, I feel I barely learned anything from this book, which is the true shame of it.