In recent years however, the disciplines of anthropology and art history both

reflect the growing influence of post-structuralist approaches and a “performative turn”

that moves away from “ritual systems” or “sign systems” to address the active and

agentive dimensions of both ritual practices and objects. The performative view of ritual

practice has been set forth in the theoretical and anthropological writings of Pierre

Bourdieu, Talal Asad, and Catherine Bell. Notably, Talal Asad has historicized the

concept of “ritual” in nineteenth-century European scholarship, when early

anthropologists approached ritual as a symbolic activity to be decoded for meaning. For

Asad, this modern definition of ritual should not be taken for granted as a universal

82 Irit Rogoff cited in Deborah Cherry, Art History: Visual: Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005),

4.

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framework but as a cultural construct that reflects Western assumptions about the self and

state. Building on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Asad

argued against “reading symbols” in ritual behavior and towards a performative view of

ritual practice as forms of direct action: “Ritual is therefore directed at the apt

performance of what is prescribed, something that depends on intellectual and practical

disciplines but does not itself require decoding.”83 Thus, Asad’s approach redirects

attention from abstracted values or beliefs towards embodied actions aimed at producing

a desired result.

In response to Asad’s argument, Catherine Bell contends that ritual practices

should be differentiated from other practices by processes of ritualization, which she

defines as “a way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of acting in the very

way it does what it does; moreover, it makes this distinction for specific purposes.”84 In

staking out the key methodological implications of such a definition, Bell argued that a

practice-oriented approach to ritual should address “how a particular community or

culture ritualizes” and “when and why ritualization is deemed the effective thing to do.”85

Significantly, Bell’s model stresses an inclusive view of ritual in its lived contexts, as

reflecting “the full spectrum of ways of acting within any given culture, not as some a

priori category of action totally independent of other forms of action.”86 An

understanding of how and why people choose to ritualize certain activities requires an

acknowledgment of the field of options that are available in the first place. Instead of

approaching rituals as “clear and autonomous rites,” Bell points to a more dynamic

83 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam,

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 62.

84 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81.

85 Ibid., 82.

86 Ibid., 83.

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conception of ritual activity as unfolding processes, as “methods, traditions and strategies

of ‘ritualization.’”87

Recent studies in Chinese popular religion have also taken up this performative

view of ritual practice, including Adam Chau’s study of contemporary popular religion in

Shaanbei. Chau argues for a “person-centered” approach that focuses on what he calls

“doing popular religion,” a phrase that captures the active and conscious dimension of

religious practices. Moving away from the “anthropological search for meanings behind

symbols and symbolic behavior,” Chau engages in “a search for the cultural basis

(cultural logic) of social intercourse and cultural performance.”88 In doing so, Chau

critiques the many tensions between ideas and practices as they are played out in social

life. Similarly, in a study that addresses the inexpensive prints of the stove deity 􁄱􀴪,

popular religion scholar Richard Chard reveals the discrepancies between the actual

practices of the stove deity cult and the written scriptures that contain ritual instructions

for worshipping the deity. In particular, the widespread practice of making offerings to

the image and renewing it during the Lunar New Year period is not mentioned in the

majority of the written texts. 89 Chard’s study is a powerful reminder that the repertoire

of embodied practices can often push for a rethinking or reinterpretation of the archive.

With a renewed focus on human agency and diversity in ritual practices however,

these studies tend to downplay or gloss over the specific features and powerful roles of

efficacious sites/objects in activating ritual practices just as they are being shaped by

them. At the other end of the spectrum, a debate has been launched between

87 Ibid., 82.

88 Chau, Miraculous Response, 126.

89 Richard Chard, “Rituals and Scriptures of the Stove Cult,” in Rituals and Scriptures in Chinese Popular

Religion, ed. David Johnson (Berkeley: Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1995), 3-54.

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anthropologists and art historians concerning “object agency,” a notion that foregrounds

the active and performative role of objects in shaping social relations.90 An influential

theory of object agency was set forth in 1998 by anthropologist Alfred Gell, who

challenged Saussure’s linguistic models that treat cultural objects as “sign-vehicles,” or

“texts” to be decoded for meaning.91 Rejecting aesthetic analysis, Gell states: “In place of

symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result,

and transformation. I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather

than encode symbolic propositions about it.”92 Further, Gell rejects the notion of art as a

distinctly separate “visual” language and argues for an analysis of “‘things’ as social

agents” with the capacity to initiate causal events. This action-oriented interpretation of

objects displaces the privileged position of the visual and sets the stage for examining the

different “states of mind” or “intentions” an object may facilitate in certain social settings.

Art historians and visual culture scholars have responded to Gell’s approach with

varied critiques. In a recent volume, Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner have been quick

to point out that other scholars have already addressed the issues raised by Gell, if only

not in the language of anthropology.93 The authors cite Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal as

scholars working in the realm of art history and visual culture studies who do not adopt

the same analogies of art and language used by structuralist anthropologists. They point

to Bryson’s bold challenges to the uncritical adaptation of the “Saussurean sign” for art

historical interpretation, which leaves the scholar in danger of “a perspective in which the

90 Janet Hoskins, “Agency, Biography, and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher

Tilley et al. (London Sage, 2006: 74-84); Robert Layton, “Art and Agency: A Reassessment,” Journal of

the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 3 (2003); Maruska Svasek, Anthropology, Art, and Cultural

Production (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007).

91 Alfred, Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

92 Ibid., 6.

93 Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, introduction to Arts Agency and Art History, ed. Robin Osborne and

Jeremy Tanner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 1-27.

45

meaning of the sign is defined entirely by formal means, as the product of oppositions

among signs within an enclosed system.”94 Like Gell, Bryson is concerned with situating

the work within its immediate social domain and on its own terms: “having relocated

painting within the social domain, inherently and not only as a result of the instrumental

placing there by some other agency, it becomes possible to think of the image as

discursive work which returns into society.”95

Osborne and Tanner also note that despite his critical stance towards symbolic

analysis, Gell is not completely distanced from issues of aesthetics and symbolic

communication in his supporting case studies. For instance, they point to his analysis of

apotropaic patterns, such as Celtic knotwork and labyrinths, which lend themselves to

protecting thresholds, buildings, or bodies by virtue of their cognitive indecipherability or

“enchanting” technologies. Gell describes how these complex patterns are used to attract

demons, who in their fascination, ending up getting “stuck” like insects on a sticky

surface and thus diverted from acts of malevolence. Osborne and Tanner critique this as

an ahistorical and universalist understanding of cognitive processes. They argue that

Gell’s alternative to symbolic analysis is to replace it with “some kind of transcendental

aesthetics” or a “universal perceptual-cognitive basis for visual response” that explains

the ability of certain objects to mediate agency.96

Historians of Chinese art appear divided on the issue, with some scholars

defending aesthetic and symbolic analysis and others adopting certain aspects of Gell’s

theory of object agency. Art historian Jessica Rawson, for instance, has critiqued Gell for

94 Norman Bryson quoted in Osborne and Tanner, Arts Agency, 5 (from Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The

Logic of the Gaze, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983).

95 Ibid.

96 Osborne and Tanner, Arts Agency, 7.

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failing to acknowledge how different cultures might variously construct the notion of

agency as it relates to objects, reflecting different values, beliefs, and worldviews. In her

study of ritual portraits made for the Chinese court under the Ming emperor Shenzong

(1573-1620), Rawson maintains that the ritual power of these imperial objects exists in

multiple social spheres, including the relationship between the emperor and his court, and

between the emperor and the spirit realm. While arguing for a more nuanced view of

agency in these different social spheres, Rawson defends the use of aesthetic and

symbolic analysis as strategies that can be situated and qualified within a cultural context:

“what is missing in Gell’s approach is an understanding that systems of symbols or

iconography, and even traditional methods of painting and carving, are not isolated

systems. They are integrated with, and are maintained in use by, complex and, usually

unquestioned, quite other systems of both practice and belief.”97

In defending the structuralist models that situate Chinese art within shared

systems of belief and iconography, Rawson’s approach reifies the assumption that

meaning can be fixed in the objects themselves. More critically, it is an approach that

places the focus on the representation of auspicious meaning rather than its multivalent

modes of meaning in presentation. Other scholars have used the debate around object

agency to raise new questions and issues concerning the study of Chinese art. Art

historian Craig Clunas, who has criticized approaches that focus solely on aesthetic or

symbolic issues in Chinese art, begins his study of the “visual and material cultures” of

the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) with a chapter on “Time, Space, and Agency in Ming

97 Jessica Rawson, “The Agency of, and the Agency for, the Wanli Emperor,” in Arts Agency and Art

History, ed. Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 111.

47

China.”98 Moving away from issues of symbolic representation and towards issues of

circulation and use, Clunas examines how the timed circulation of many commodities

reinforced imperial time, seasonal time or family time.

In revealing how different notions of time, history, and space could be “handled

and seen” in everyday objects, Clunas situates his discussion of object agency within

their spatio-temporal contexts of circulation and consumption.99 This may include coins

and bowls marked with reign dates that move through different social spheres to enforce

imperial time or auspicious paintings designed for seasonal display during lunar calendar

festivals. In doing so, Clunas stresses the need to keep in mind both the “visual” and

“material” aspects of Ming culture, a strategic move to challenge “a too easy acceptance

of a material past and visual contemporary.”100 In keeping these two “unstable and

perhaps ultimately unsatisfactory categories” in the foreground, Clunas’ research

maintains a critical edge at the interdisciplinary intersection of art history and material

culture studies without reducing all forms of cultural production to the visual and

aesthetic domains.

Clunas’ study brings an important interdisciplinary perspective to the study of

Chinese art history that maps a way forward for addressing the archive and the repertoire

without privileging one over the other. In a separate study on the Ming dynasty painter

Wen Zhengming, Clunas explicitly states his commitment to this task:

I am writing from a conviction that the relations between agents, relations in

which the work is embedded, illuminate the object, but that equally the object

enacts those social relations. In this dialectical engagement neither enjoys

98 Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 21-52.

99 Ibid., 32.

100 Ibid., 14.

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unquestioned primacy. This is Appadurai’s point that methodologically we must

pay close attention to the social life of the actual individual object, even as we

accept that is multiple meanings are not inherent from the time of creation but are

reinscribed on it by its movement through time and between social actors.101

Taking a cue from Clunas, my study advances the notion of a living archive to

emphasize the dialectical engagement between objects and the social practices in which

they are embedded. Many objects are only recognizable as nianhua through their specific

modes of display and use. This includes everyday objects, ads, and posters that are

regularly appropriated for ritual use as nianhua as well as the state collections of nianhua

that continually adopt new prints and paintings under the category of nianhua. A living

archive therefore draws attention to the repertoire of practices that continually shape our

understanding of nianhua. In taking this view, it is possible to critique nianhua as an

unstable category shaped by competing discourses instead of imposing a single

disciplinary lens such as “folk art,” “popular religion,” or “visual culture.”

The notion of a living archive comes with its own risks however. As an openended

and highly suggestive term, it may be argued that virtually any form of cultural

production may be understood as a living archive. What then sets nianhua apart from

other forms of printing or painting? Why is it critically necessary to examine nianhua in

particular, as a living archive? In this study, I am not only deploying this term to avoid

the use of disciplinary lenses and fixed definitions. I will argue that the notion of a living

archive actually allows for a more nuanced understanding of two defining features that

set nianhua apart from other media. The first is nianhua’s attributed power to “pursue the

101 Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2003), 13.

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auspicious, repel the portentous,” a unifying feature that sets nianhua apart from many

other forms of printing and painting. As mentioned earlier, this concept has largely been

studied in terms of visual representation rather than in terms of presentation, circulation,

and ritual use. As a living archive, I will argue that nianhua’s auspicious or portentous

associations are no longer limited to the picture plane; they can be analyzed in time and

space.

A second important characteristic of nianhua is its widespread status as an

ephemeral ritual object. Since existing studies have focused primarily on decoding the