Between Materiality and Sanctity: The Social Construction of the Object System in Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals

This article examines how Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals organizes ritual objects into a relational material system. Focusing on ritual vessels, attire, documents, offerings, ancestral tablets, and domestic spaces, it analyzes how their prescribed positions, uses, relations, and trajectories structure ritual practice. Rather than treating these objects as passive accessories or isolated symbols, the article argues that their significance emerges from their coordination with bodies, spaces, kinship positions, and sequences of action. Through this coordination, distinctions of kinship, status, obligation, and ritual role become materially perceptible and practically enforceable. The article further argues that the material organization prescribed in Family Rituals was not merely an expression or representation of Confucian ritual order, but one of the mechanisms through which that order was produced, enacted, and reproduced. By reading these heterogeneous objects as an interconnected system, the study shifts attention from the symbolic meaning of individual things to the material relations that made Confucian ethical and ritual order practicable in domestic life.