Han Frontiers: Toward an Integrated View

摘要

The cornucopian flow of excavated materials in the past half century has made systematic analysis of material culture and other aspects of everyday life from religion to ritual and art a daunting task for any period of Chinese history, but in particular for one so dependent upon both material and textual sources as ancient China.~1 Archaeological work conducted on the peripheral regions of China has redefined issues of culture contact along the frontiers of the Han empire, but the sheer quantity of the excavated materials and the dominance of regional models have made systematic analysis beyond territorial or cultural boundaries problematic.~ 2 Moreover, theoretical approaches based on the interaction between competing socio-economic systems, and possibly subordinated to a late imperial and modern perspective that tends to see frontiers in terms of colonial policies stemming from a "civilizing mission," continue to dominate, resulting in attempts to inscribe frontier history within models based on binary oppositions: steppe and sown, Han and non-Han, natives and foreigners, andusually wrapped in quotation marks-"barbarians" and "civilized."~3