Ritual re-representation and the making of sociality: rethinking elite burials in the Late Shang Yinxu

Previous studies of Late Shang mortuary practices have focused on drawing direct correlations between burial remains and socio-political orders, while neglecting how personhood and social relationships were framed through the treatment of the corpse and its surroundings. In this article, I argue that Late Shang mortuary practices were customs of ‘ritual re-representation’, which I define as a form of bricolage that disassembled and reassembled tokens from ideal ritual ceremonies to re-enact the social existence of the dead in the liminal stage. These tokens were represented through meticulous arrangements of burial contents into distinct spatial divisions. Artefacts placed in spatial arrangements nearer to or farther from the body expressed themes related to the mortal body, decency in ceremonial conduct, moral transformation, capacity for hosting feasts, organising music and dance ceremonies, military authority and mobility. Retainers were placed in spatial orders corresponding to their proximity to the tomb owner during life. Victims were positioned outside the outer coffins, marking a boundary between the owner’s domain and those whose subjectivities were ritually denied. This symbolic structure embodied Late Shang notions of elite personhood, wherein nobles served as focal points within concentric layers of ritual networks involving ancestral practices of food and violence. The mortuary re-representation of elite personhood prevailed from the Late Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age in northern China and played a significant role in social stratification through a ‘sacred’ mode, rather than the non-religious path often assumed in scholarly debates and popular historiography as a defining merit of Chinese civilisation.