128 research outputs found
The Overseeing Mother: Revisiting the Frontal-Pose Lady in the Wu Family Shrines in Second Century China
Located in present-day Jiaxiang in Shandong province, the Wu family shrines built during the second century in the Eastern Han dynasty (25â220) were among the best-known works in Chinese art history. Although for centuries scholars have exhaustively studied the pictorial programs, the frontal-pose female image situated on the second floor of the central pavilion carved at the rear wall of the shrines has remained a question. Beginning with the womanâs eyes, this article demonstrates that the image is more than a generic portrait (âhard motif â), but rather represents âfeminine overseeing from aboveâ (âsoft motif â). This synthetic motif combines three different earlier motifs â the frontal-pose hostess enjoying entertainment, the elevated spectator, and the Queen Mother of the West. By creatively fusing the three motifs into one unity, the Jiaxiang artists lent to the frontal-pose lady a unique power: she not only dominated the center of the composition, but also, like a divine being, commanded a unified view of the surroundings on the lofty building, hence echoing the political reality of the empress motherâs âoverseeing the courtâ in the second century during Eastern Han dynasty
Post-capitalist property
When writing about property and property rights in his imagined post-capitalist society of the future, Marx seemed to envisage âindividual propertyâ co-existing with âsocialized propertyâ in the means of production. As the social and political consequences of faltering growth and increasing inequality, debt and insecurity gradually manifest themselves, and with automation and artificial intelligence lurking in the wings, the future of capitalism, at least in its current form, looks increasingly uncertain. With this, the question of what property and property rights might look like in the future, in a potentially post-capitalist society, is becoming ever more pertinent. Is the choice simply between private property and markets, and public (state-owned) property and planning? Or can individual and social property in the (same) means of production co-exist, as Marx suggested? This paper explores ways in which they might, through an examination of the Chinese household responsibility system (HRS) and the âfuzzyâ and seemingly confusing regime of land ownership that it instituted. It examines the HRS against the backdrop of Marxâs ideas about property and subsequent (post-Marx) theorizing about the legal nature of property in which property has come widely to be conceptualized not as a single, unitary âownershipâ right to a thing (or, indeed, as the thing itself) but as a âbundle of rightsâ. The bundle-of-rights idea of property, it suggests, enables us to see not only that âindividualâ and âsocializedâ propertyâ in the (same) means of production might indeed co-exist, but that the range of institutional possibility is far greater than that between capitalism and socialism/communism as traditionally conceived
- âŠ