Introduction

In this short quotation Ingold raises three issues relevant to animals and inequality. First, in returning to the Old English etymology of thing as a “gathering” he suggests that the nature of things is not bounded and atomistic, but rather collective and interconnected. Second, in seeing people in the same terms he implies potential equivalence. Third, in conceiving both humans and things as tied-together paths of growth and movement, he asks us to consider the dimension of time and the potential for transformation. In what follows I explore these themes through a study of Shang human-animal interactions and their relationships to hierarchy.

On Inequality and Animals . . .

Both “inequality” and “animals” make reference to intertwined systems of classification. It has been noted by authors as diverse as Ingold (1988) and Agamben (2004) that definitions of animality are also, by implication, definitions of humanity. Indeed, it could be argued that most cultures distinguish whole ranges of agency, animacy, and potency: from the inanimate, the insect, and the beast through to the sage, the immortal, and the god. The common, organizing intermediary of these categorizations and point of reference is, of course, humanity. Moreover, humanity is generally not so much a point in this spectrum of being as an attenuated and contingent range. The demarcation between god, human, and animal is blurry, shifting, and shaped by local ontologies of order. The very order that justifies and maintains human inequalities also creates the categories that place some creatures below or outside its sphere and others above it. In this view animals are relational terms within hierarchical spectrums of being and agency linked to civilizing orders. If this is so, then rather than seeing animals as a fixed category of bounded things that humans use as resources or instruments of inequality, it would be better to follow Ingold’s lead and see them as shifting nodes of interconnected properties and relationships.

I explore the territory of Shang animals and inequality along a network of linking and diverging pathways. These pathways lead through some of the central practices of Shang world-making. They follow the linked careers and phenomenological metamorphoses of five categories of thing: ren (people), niu (cattle), lu (deer), chuan (dogs) and chema (horse-chariots), through spectrums of animacy, animality, humanity, and divinity.

The Shang

The Shang is an archaeological culture of the Chinese Bronze Age, the second of the “three dynasties” in traditional Chinese history, and a period dating from about 1600 to 1050 BC. The narrative I present here is set in the Late Shang or Anyang period (ca. 1250–1050 BC), in and around the Shang royal center at Anyang, contemporaneously known as the “Great Settlement Shang.” At 3,000 hectares, the Great Settlement Shang was one of the largest urban centers in the world in its time and the center of a hegemonic network of lineage polities that stretched over much of north-central China. The Great Settlement was ruled over by kings who portrayed themselves as high-lineage leaders of an ancestralized religious landscape and who conducted massive sacrifices and daily divination to secure the blessings and avoid the wrath of the ancestors and spirits of the land (Campbell 2007, 2009; Eno 2008; Itō 1996; Keightley 2000; Liu 2004). The Late Shang kings also conducted frequent military expeditions and large-scale hunts, which, along with sacrifice and divination, formed a suite of kingly ordering practices aimed at the domestication of the enemy, the wild, the dead, and the numinous (Campbell 2007; Fiskesjö 2001; Keightley 2000).

Below the Shang kings were lower-ranking members of the royal lineage and the leaders of other, possibly distantly related, lineages that served the king or ruled their own nominally subordinate or openly independent polities (Zhu 1991). Low-ranking members of the various lineages would have made up the majority of the Late Shang population, and, indeed, make up the majority of the over 15,000 burials excavated thus far at Anyang (Campbell 2007; Tang 2004).

Although the exploits of Shang kings are recorded in later Chinese texts, the Anyang period is the first in Chinese history for which we have contemporaneous sources: the 50,000 or so fragments of inscribed royal divination on heated and cracked cattle scapulae and turtle plastrons known as the oracle-bones. The other contemporaneous epigraphic source are the ancestral dedications appearing on some of the ritual bronze feasting vessels that were the pinnacle of Shang technological, social, and religious investment (Bagley 1999; Chang 1983; Wu 1995).

Archaeologically, the Late Shang period is known from over eighty years of archaeological work at Anyang and hundreds of other sites across China. In addition to the palace-temples, royal tombs, and sacrificial pits discovered in the early twentieth century, in the last few decades, lineage cemeteries, workshops, and residential areas have come to light, contributing to a fuller picture of the Great Settlement Shang (Campbell 2007; ZSKY 2003; ZSKYAG 2009).

Ren(Human/Person/Man)

The Shang morphemes designated by the graph ren cover a deceptively large range of uses from a semantically bleached, focus-related counter for “people” (Campbell 2000, 2004), to the neutral term for “man” (in both the gendered and ungendered senses), to a part of the king’s self-identifying epithet, “I, the one man.” The first three paths I would like to follow are of three different types of ren. They begin in different places, converge in the institutions of war and sacrifice, and then radically diverge in their trajectories.

First Pathway

Born as a low ranking member of a lineage in Long, one of the polities that dotted the Central Plains and surrounding regions in the thirteenth century BC, our first actor was a warrior, joining his lord in raids, skirmishes, and pitched battles against other polities and sometimes against the King at the Great Settlement Shang. Successful in battle, our actor gained symbolically and materially, taking heads and captives for the glory of ancestors and lineage. His rise in the marketplace of honor and status was cut short, however, when he was taken captive and brought back to the Great Settlement Shang for sacrifice. As a warrior of the Long Fang he had had a name and had been part of a larger political force, but as a loser in the great social-political arena of Shang war, he had become a nameless captive, then mere sacrificial livestock, interchangeable with, but less valuable than, cattle (Campbell 2007, 2013; Hu 1974; Huang 2004).

If Shang war could be seen as a kind of protean and uncertain game played out at the edge of civilization’s order, a radical (re)negotiation of statuses, relationships, and being, then sacrifice, its complement, can be seen as the renewing and order-bringing completion of the process at the heart of the polity. On one level, enemies were neutralized on the battlefield and then used as sacrificial capital to insure the support and blessings of the unseen and unreliable ancestralized forces of the world, but on another, the reduction process went beyond animalization to symbolic destruction. Whereas animal victims were generally consumed by fire or feast, buried whole or drowned—a giving or sharing of their lives and flesh—the vast majority of human victims were decapitated, fa, a fate apparently reserved for ren—a ritual punishment as much as an offering (Huang 2004).

Our first actor’s pathway leads through the key Shang institutions of war to sacrifice and finally burial, perhaps as an offering in one of the thousands of sacrificial pits in the royal cemetery, as the animus of a major gate or foundation, or as one of the hundreds of decapitated bodies and skulls ritually provisioning a royal tomb (Figure 12.1) (Huang 2004; Li 1977). This pathway is also a series of transformations, from child to kinsman, to respected warrior, to nameless captive, to animalized sacrificial livestock, to symbolically destroyed body, to ritual deposit and animating force. This pathway of ren crosses that of other categories of offering at the locus of elite sacrifice such as niu (cattle), shi (pig), chuan (dog), or yang (sheep/goat) but diverges from most of them thereafter, terminating as ritual deposit rather than passing through the kitchen and the meal to the midden, or the workshop to a new life as a bone artifact.

Figure 12.1. Foundation sacrifice, Anyang, Xiaotun. (From ZSKY 2002:250, image 34.)

Second Pathway

A second pathway of ren originates at a settlement allied to the Shang king. Our actor began life as the daughter of a local leader and, reaching womanhood, became a royal consort (fu)—a link in the web of kinship, marriage, and ancestor veneration that helped hold together the network of Shang hegemony. She was also a special category of ren, being both nü (female) and fu, and was thus afforded lower status in the Shang hierarchy of being by being female (Keightley 1999), but was also raised by her birth and the preeminent status of her husband, the King. Furthermore, by producing male offspring she could rise still higher, becoming perhaps the mother of a king and then a main-line royal ancestress at death—a minor deity—wielding a terrible power to curse or bless the living and their enterprises as their actions or gifts displeased or pleased her (Keightly 2000).

From regional center to the center of the world, this pathway leads out again to the borders of hegemony and the field of battle. Unlike elite women in later Chinese history, Shang fu could and did lead troops to war (Keightley 1999). Also unlike the common warrior of the first pathway, Shang leaders rode into battle on chariots, marking their elevated status and providing some enhanced measure of mobility and protection. Though battle could end the lives or transform the social careers of chariot-riding elites just as easily as foot soldiers, this particular pathway did not end on the battlefield or detour into captivity. Pitting against one another ritual favor, martial skill and aggregate, mechanically enhanced, animal fury, Shang war combined the divine, the human, the animal, and the material in a crucible of violence that dialectically transformed both the defeated and the victors, captives, and captors. Meeting as equals on the field of battle, the captured losers would be reduced to something less than human, the capturing victors elevated to something more. Thus our first and second paths converge on the battlefield and continue together back to the Great Settlement Shang transformed: the second actor’s already-exalted being is further enhanced by mastery over foreign gods and warriors, and the first path, once a link in an ancestral chain, a named and honored warrior, is now an animalized captive who is soon to be consumed for the sustenance of enemy ancestors.

In addition to battle, the path of the fu crosses several other pathways and travels through key elite practices, including divination, sacrifice, and feasting. Though there is no evidence that fu themselves acted as diviners (as the kings frequently did), they shared with diviners the important task of ritually preparing cattle scapulae and turtle plastrons for divination. This act, the transmutation of animal bone into a medium for divining the will of the spirits and ancestors, could be undertaken only by certain potent individuals using only two types of bone: the scapulae of cattle and the plastron of the long-lived and wise turtle (Keightley 1978).

The path of the fu also led through major rituals, where the fu sometimes acted as principal protagonists, placating the ancestors and numinous powers of the land on behalf of themselves and their people (Zhu 1991). Successful sacrifice at once transformed the paths of sacrificial livestock from living animals into food for the gods and ancestors while simultaneously enhancing the potency of the sacrificer and her favor with the divine. Like war, sacrifice was a dialectical machine violently mingling and transforming the paths of being that crossed it—its consummation propelling some participants down the spectrum of animacy and others upward toward divinity.

Our second pathway also leads through the central hub of feasting—whether in honor of the living or the dead—again a comingling of substance and crossing of paths as sacrificial flesh was shared and consumed, ties of obligation and patronage forged, and status reproduced. To be a Shang high elite such as a fu was to be a host and giver of feasts, to own elaborate sets of cooking, serving, and eating vessels made of costly materials such as bronze, lacquer, and ivory—vessels that were the pinnacle of technology and one of the most precious things one could own (Bagley 1999; Wu 1995). Who consumed what with what sort of implements was a crucial arena of Shang being. The paths of high elites like the fu, then, intersected others fundamentally as eaters, especially of cattle, wild game, and perhaps even humans (Fang Hui personal communication, 2010).

In a sense, the path of the fu through war, divination, sacrifice and feasting can be seen in aggregate as a series of events dialectically constructing and consuming animality to fuel its way toward divinity. Through death and mortuary ritual (two more transformations), this apotheosis could be completed. This second path led from high-born nü (female) through marriage to fu (royal consort) through battle, sacrifice, feasting, and childbirth to mu (mother/aunt) through death and burial to deified bi (ancestress)—object now herself of sacrifice (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2. Reconstruction of ancestral temple for a fu (Fu Hao), Anyang, Xiaotun. (Photograph by author.)

Third Pathway

Our third pathway of ren began far to the north of the Great Settlement Shang. From childhood his path was intertwined with horse and chariot; coming to the Great Settlement as a youth, he served a Shang lord as charioteer. Horses and chariots were new to north China in the thirteenth century BC, apparently introduced from the steppe, but their spread was immediate and dramatic (Figure 12.3) (Bagley 1999; Piggott 1974; Shaughnessy 1988). From Shandong in the east to Shaanxi in the west, chariots and horses were suddenly everywhere, transforming warfare and hunting, and setting patterns of elite practice for the next five hundred years. Charioteering and its associated complex of horse raising and care, and chariot construction and maintenance, were neither simple technologies nor native to north China, and thus were likely the purview of nonlocal specialists, at least at first. The association of northern-type artifacts with charioteers and motifs on chariot fittings further strengthens the connection between chariots, charioteers, and the steppe (Bagley 1999; Lin 1998).

Figure 12.3. The afterlife of things: charioteer and chariot in Yinxu site-museum chariot display.

This third pathway of ren crosses the second in hunting and war, paradigmatic elite activities for which the horse and chariot, and thus the charioteer, were necessities. Text such as the Zuo Zhuan depict seventh and eighth century BC charioteers holding high status and enjoying close familiarity with their patrons as valued retainers who held their lords’ lives in their hands (e.g., Duke Xuan, second year), a situation that likely did not differ from that of the Shang.

Going out from the Great Settlement with his master, the charioteer was on the third pathway, which leads again to war and again, in this particular case, to victory. Unlike the fu or other leaders, the charioteer was not a representative of peoples or ancestors, thus his stake in the game of battle would have been relatively smaller and closely tied to his own deeds on behalf of his master. His stake would also have been tightly linked to the total performance of the team of which he formed a part: man, horse and chariot. So closely were these interconnected, in fact—charioteer to horse, and chariot and chariot team to master—that all would be laid to rest together upon death (ZSKY 1994). The master would have his own tomb but the charioteer, interred in a separate pit, would continue to serve in death as in life: inalienable from the horses and chariot with which his life and afterlife were intertwined.

These three pathways of ren (and of course there are many more possibilities) converged and diverged through key social fields, creating for the charioteer a dependent status with entangled aspects of animality, divinity, and human-animal-vehicle. Indeed, if the captive and the consort display trajectories toward different ends of the spectrum of being, the charioteer reminds us that being is distributed rather than atomistic—our world-integrated body-self is part of and dependent on a great many other animate and inanimate things to which we are networked (Latour 1993). Thus it is the fu’s position in relation to the king, to her own lineage, to people subordinate to her and those defeated by her, to the ancestors and gods, to the myriad material media of her exalted status, and not least to the multitude of beings she consumes, that make her closer to divine than animal. The captive’s relationship to others likewise makes him what he is and what he is about to become. With the chariot burial, however, we not only see the possibility of one person serving another as tomb furnishing, but an intimate linkage of man to horse/chariot unit and their aggregate intermingled existence and agency.

Chema(Chariot-Horse)

The fourth and fifth paths, of ma (horse) and che (chariot) are intertwined ones, linked to the third path above but even more tightly associated with one another. So closely are horse and chariot joined with one another that the same counter word, bing, is used for both. In Old Chinese, bing 丙*prjang?, the oracle-bone counter for horses and chariots, is a near homophone of liang 輛 (Old Chinese *b-rjang?), the classical and contemporary classifier for vehicles that derives from the word for “two,” or “a pair”: liang 兩 (Old Chinese *b-rjang?). Graphically, early forms of liang were merely a redoubling of the graph for bing, differentiating it from the reading of bing as a calendrical term (Baxter 1992:272; Takashima 1996:61–63), and emphasizing the sense of “paired thing.” Thus horses were counted in pairs (or chariot teams) even as the chariots were counted as paired things (much like pairs of pants or glasses in English)—horse and chariot were very much seen as a compound entity. What is more, in the language of the oracle-bone inscriptions, only the quantification of humans used counter words in contexts of focus (Campbell 2000, 2004), so that “Qiang-captives, one person” is possible but “bulls, one animal” is not, indicating a higher place on the ladder of linguistic reference/animacy (Dixon 1979; Silverstein 1976). The one major exception to this rule, however, is the horse and chariot, so that “horses, one paired thing” or “chariots, one paired thing” is possible. This is one indication then, that chariots, though inanimate from our perspective, seem to be afforded a higher place in Shang linguistic hierarchies of animacy and reference than cattle, sheep, or pigs.

Shang chariots, much like others found around the edges of the Eurasian steppe (Anderson 2007), were composite creations of wood, leather, bronze, and horse—finely decorated, difficult to produce, and highly prized. They took kings and lords to battle and the hunt; indeed, they transformed these practices with their requirements of relatively flat, open ground and their potential for mobility and display. The royal hunt, for instance, for which there is no evidence before the arrival of the chariot, required the deployment of an army of beaters to drive game into an open area where the chariot-riding elite could dispatch them (Allsen 2006). Though we lack direct evidence for the structure of warfare before the arrival of the chariot, the structural requirements of chariot warfare would have created the form of battle seen in its twilight stages in early Eastern Zhou texts like the Zuo Zhuan: enemy forces drawn up before one another on open fields.

The path of the horse-chariot then, perhaps beginning at the Great Settlement Shang, perhaps, like the charioteer, far to the north, leads to the center and to the heights of honor and prestige. Out again, intertwined with the charioteer, it takes its master to battle, perhaps crossing paths with the consort and the enemy. Unlike the paths of ren, however, victory or defeat on the battlefield would not radically change the status or trajectory of the horse-chariot (providing they came through intact): booty or vehicle of conquest, the status and prestige of the chema would endure.

The terminal stage of the horse-chariot has already been described above: death and burial for the team—prized possession unrelinquished by the passing and ancestralization of the master. Indeed, if our understanding of Shang beliefs about the afterlife are correct (Eno 2008; Hayashi 1993; Keightley 2000), interment was not the end of this path but a transformation into a numinous existence: once a chariot for the living, it would become a chariot for the ancestors (Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4. Chariots of the ancestors: Anyang, Angang steel works. (From Shijie 2008:172, image 52.)

Chuan(Dog)

The sixth pathway is that of dog. In fact there are several paths for chuan. One short path begins at the Great Settlement or somewhere nearby where dogs were raised in large numbers, and then, upon reaching about a year of age, transformed into sacrificial flesh for the ancestors or spirit guards and companions of the recently departed. The paths of those headed for sacrificial use split into two: one led to intact interment in great sacrificial pits, sometimes with other animals, sometimes alone—their spirits perhaps sustaining or serving the ancestors in the afterlife. A second branch led to preparation as food, cooked and served in feasting episodes as the living hosted the ancestors and shared offerings of various kinds. Though it is unclear from the following oracle-bone inscription whether the offering of chuan was to be part of a feast or buried in the ground, the potential scale of royal sacrifice is not in doubt.

Although some were apparently tied and buried alive, the chuan destined for the tomb were generally killed in some way that left no obvious signs on the skeletons, and then were carefully placed in “waist-pits” (small pits below the coffins of the tomb owners). Homologous with armed humans in high-elite-tomb waist-pits (Campbell 2007), these young chuan would serve their new masters in the afterlife as guards and perhaps in the hunt.

Another path of chuan begins in the dwellings of ren—growing up as guards and rat-catchers for their masters. This path might lead out of the settlement to the king’s great hunts, assisting the beaters in surrounding and harrying the hunted into the open where the chariot-riding elites could dispatch them. This pathway, closely intertwined with ren, could also lead to the tomb of the master. These dogs were often older animals (and thus distinguishable from the yearlings), sometimes with bronze bells around their necks (Figure 12.5)—apparently treasured pets. These chuan were often placed on top of the coffin or perhaps on the tomb ledge for larger tombs, sometimes with younger dogs obtained specifically for this purpose. This path was closely intertwined with ren, but it was not ren. Instead a lower-status being became transformed with the transformation of the path on which it was dependent, and it continued to serve its master in the afterlife—structurally homologous to some human servants, but lower in status, and yet distinct from other classes of nonhuman.

Figure 12.5. A dog death-attendant with bronze bell on top of tomb chamber, August 2004, Sipanmo, Anyang. (Photograph by author.)

Lu(Deer)

The paths of lu traversed all the wild places of north China but one particular pathway began far to the southeast beyond the Great Settlement. Lu were one of three main types of deer identified in the king’s hunting divinations, along with an antlerless deer, ni, and deer with prominent eyebrows, mi. Lu are generally identified with sika deer (Cervus nippon), mi with large David’s deer (Elaphure davidianus), and ni with small river-deer (Hydropotes inermis) and/or some kind of muntjac deer (Muntiacus sp.), all of which have been identified from Anyang faunal assemblages (de Chardin and Young 1936; Fiskesjö 2001; Li 2009; Young and Liu 1949). In any case, this particular path begins in the wilderness near the lands of a Shang enemy. As such it was a living embodiment of the wild and potentially hostile powers of the land, the subject of divinatory concern, in addition to being a source of meat, bone, hide, and antler (Campbell 2007; Fiskesjö 2001; Keightley 2000). As lu avoided predators and grew to adulthood, their pathway of being intersected those of the charioteer, the chariot, and the dog on the battlefield of the royal hunt as the Shang king completed his victory over human enemies with a pacification of the spirits of newly conquered lands. With ren and chuan pursuing, the deer of the herd were perhaps caught in the open, along with many other beasts of the forest, between the beaters, dogs, and a ring of horse-chariots with their bow-armed masters (Fiskesjö 2001). On the day of the hunt this particular path was diverted from wild animality to subdued, symbolically charged flesh—evidence of the king’s domesticating potency shared among those privileged to take part in the hunt. Although antler, meat, and perhaps hides were taken back to Anyang (or perhaps a nearer center) for consumption or processing into leather, awls, and arrowheads (Campbell et al. 2011), the head of this particular animal was defleshed and brought back to the capital where a commemorating inscription was carved into it (Figure 12.6), transforming it from an embodiment of wild, dangerous forces, to a subdued and consumed prize, to an inscribed memento of a hunter’s success and favor with the king.

Figure 12.6. Lu: (above) inscribed trophy-deer skull, Xiaotun, Anyang (from Shijie 2008:64, image 22); (below) antler arrowhead from the Tiesanlu bone-working site, Anyang (photo by author).

Aside from trophies like the skull, the path of the now disaggregated lu diverged as its meat was consumed by the hunting elites, the remains of their feasting activities apparent in the variety and quantity of wild taxa discovered in the early-twentieth-century excavations of the palace-temple area at Anyang (de Chardin and Young 1936; Young and Liu 1949), contrasting sharply with the relative paucity of wild taxa in residential assemblages (Li 2009). Antler on the other hand, made its way to several large-scale bone-working sites at the Great Settlement, where, in addition to cattle bone and boar tusk, it was worked into millions of artifacts (Campbell et al. 2011) that were then requisitioned, gifted, or traded to a wide range of consumers. The most common artifactual transformation of lu, ironically enough, were projectile points for use in future hunts, perhaps owing to the greater tensile strength of antler over bone (MacGregor 1985).

There are, moreover, other senses in which lu were intertwined with ren. Wild creatures such as lu were prominently displayed on Shang ritual bronze vessels and in jade, either as motifs or carved in the round. In this, lu shared its place with hu (tiger), si (water buffalo), tu (rabbits), and a variety of birds, as well as mythical creatures such as long (dragons). With the exception of the horse, which appears on bronze knives and chariot fittings of nonlocal “northern-type” tradition, the paucity of domestic animals depicted on ritual media is starkly contrasted with their near-exclusive use as sacrificial victims (Chen Xingcan personal communication, 2010; Fiskesjö 2001). The iconographically shared register with mythical creatures, along with the worship of mountains, rivers, directions, and winds, moreover, suggests a blurry line between the wild and the supernatural for the Shang, and that beyond the limit of the king’s ceaseless domesticating practices of war, hunting, and sacrifice, the world was populated by dangerous and unpredictable beings.

Niu(Cattle)

The last Shang pathway of being I wish to discuss is that of niu (cattle). Whether beginning nearby the Great Settlement, or at a distant locale, the path of niu in late-second-millennium BC North China led nearly inevitably to large settlements and frequently to the royal court at Shang. Small sites and large sites with elite sacrificial practices show a clear distinction in terms of their faunal assemblages: pigs predominate in the assemblages of small sites as they had for millennia before the Shang, but cattle become abundant, even more so than pig by NISP (number of identified specimens) in some cases, and certainly by meat yield in large, elite-dominated sites (Li 2008; Li 2009). In fact, at Anyang, cattle are the largest meat source even in residential areas not associated with elite activities (Li 2009). The paths of cattle depended largely on sex: around their fourth year of life, bulls intersected the paths of high-status ren, and then of gods and ancestors, at the nexus of sacrifice (Li 2009). They were usually offered in numbers of between one and thirty, but occasionally there was a great conjunction and transformation of paths as the following oracle-bone inscription suggests.

The offering sometimes involved drowning, burning, or burying niu (or lao, a type of cattle probably raised in pens) for the sole consumption of the spirits, but more commonly they were killed and used to host the ancestors while the sacrificial flesh was distributed among those present and then, perhaps in turn, further divided among lower-ranking individuals upon their return to their own areas. This latter possibility is supported by the enormous quantity of meat that major sacrifices like the one above would have produced (perhaps as much as 75,000 kg; Campbell et al. 2011) and by the abundance of cattle remains in non-elite contexts at Anyang (Li 2009).

The conjunction and transformation of paths in sacrifice changed all that passed through it. For the sacrificers there was potency and favor gained in successful interaction with the gods and ancestors, whereas the latter received sustenance and their due tribute. For the cattle there was a branching of paths into consumed flesh—mingling with the lines of ren and zu (ancestors) and transforming into bone (the raw material of divination and manufacture) as well as sinew, hide, and perhaps other resources of industry.

Following the path of the bone, it too splits into at least three branches. The first branch, cattle scapulae, led to the practices of Shang oracle-bone divination either of kings in the palace-temple precinct, or, more commonly, of lesser elites across Anyang. By some estimates, 90 percent of the oracle-bones were of the uninscribed, nonroyal type (Flad 2008). Those scapulae destined for royal divination intersected the paths of diviners and fu (royal consorts), who ritually prepared them (Figure 12.7). Once prepared, the scapulae would join turtle plastrons as one of only two media of royal divination through which everything from sickness, childbirth, and weather to warfare, sacrifice, and hunting success were divined (Keightley 1978). These royal oracular scapulae reached out to the gods and ancestors on the one hand and supported the sacred authority of the kings and diviners on the other. Inscribed with the record of the divinations, they were kept for verification and then interred in pits within the palace-temple precinct—numinous artifacts returned to the spirits of the earth, perhaps analogous to the later Houma covenant texts, which were also inscribed and then buried to seal their efficacy (Weld 1997).

Figure 12.7. Niu: (above) inscribed oracle-bone, Xiaotun, Anyang (from Shijie 2008:66, image 7); (below) hairpin from Tiesanlu, Anyang (photograph by author).

Although the scapulae went to diviners, many of the limb bones, mandibles, and, to a lesser extent, ribs went to one of the Great Settlement Shang’s four major bone-working areas. There, the mandibles were made into spades and the ribs into small plaques to decorate horse and chariot fittings or spatulas for elite feasting, whereas the limb bones were largely transformed into hairpins of varying sophistication (Campbell et al. 2011). The paths of finished cattle-bone spades and other tools passed through uncertain exchange mechanisms to find their way into broad circulation. Their paths led to agriculture and construction, where they were facilitators of both corvée and independent labor, and they intertwined with those paths of ren closer to animality than divinity. The end of this path was breakage and discard. Spatulas on the other hand (whether of rib or humerus) were tools of feasting and signs of status. The finest were intricately carved and sometimes inlaid with turquoise or inscribed; the latter are usually made from the ribs of hunted animals like water buffalo, with the inscription commemorating the success of the hunt (Wang 2000). Their post-workshop paths led through the nexus of elite commensal feasting of the living and the dead, a path that, though transformed through death ritual, nevertheless continued in perpetuity in the tomb. Starting from the beginning, this subpath of niu was intertwined with ren of a wide spectrum of being, from lowly herders to high-elite sacrificers to craftspeople and returning again to consuming deities and elite feasters, but now as tool rather than object of consumption.

The path of hairpins (the most abundant product of the bone workshops), or rather the network of pathways, is even more complex as they were exchanged widely through diverse mechanisms, ending up, for the most part, lost or discarded in residential areas (Figure 12.7) (Campbell et al. 2011). These transformed paths of niu took a great many forms and ranged from simple to very complex in design. Their entanglements with various categories of people are even more complex, however, as hairpins do not seem to be part of the “basic package” of Shang burial, yet they occasionally occur with either sex. Although some elite Shang women were buried with matching sets of hundreds of fine hairpins—such as Fu Hao (ZSKY 1980), a “concubine” in royal tomb 1550 (Kao 1976), and a recently excavated, unpublished tomb (He Yuling, personal communication)—low-status burials could have quite fine examples and high-status burials none at all. This branched pathway of niu, then, leads through some still unexplained large-scale exchange mechanisms (or a vast network of small exchanges) from the workshop to Shang women and men of a wide variety of statuses.

Hairstyles, along with headgear and clothing would have been highly visible markers of social standing in a culture that demonstrates both deep-time traditions and contemporaneous concerns with highly ramified social distinctions. The graph for fu, for instance, has been argued (Qi 2003) to derive from the elements for “woman” and an elaborate hairstyle with a hairpin. This path of niu, then, intertwined with that of fu and helped shape her aestheticized social-symbolic self by carrying on this entanglement in the afterlife. If the cattle-bone hairpins she owned were, in an important sense, a part of her social being, then this cattle/artifact-human fusion became an intertwining of animal/thing and deity upon her death and ancestralization: from animal to thing to human symbolic self-extension to prosthesis of deified social being.

Conclusion

In disaggregating Shang things, animals, and people, and following their “paths of growth and movement” (Ingold 2007:5), we discover that the role of animals in inequality is complicated by the mutability of animality, humanity, and divinity. Rather than stable categories, we find ranges of perceived animacy and agency—shifting hierarchical and heterarchical arrangements of things that fundamentally organized the Shang world. Tracing the movement and transformation of people, animals, and things through key nodes of Shang practice, we glimpse a much more fluid and intertwined world, one which our own systems of categorization, reification, and purification (Latour 1993) obscure.