Structural Analysis in the Context of Ancient Chinese Text and Culture

Abstract This essay is an introduction to an anthropological treatment of the Zhouyi . Instead of insisting that the Classic of Changes be treated by identifying issues that arise in recent EuroAmerican philosophy, a methodology is suggested that is based on distribution of items within the whole text or corpus, thereby enhancing our understanding of their categorization and classification properties, and that treats both graphic and dynamic aspects, both form and text; the method looks for patterns within the writing and attempts to place this text in its cultural context as a highly sophisticated Bronze Age symbolic instrument, the heritage of many thousands of years of Neolithic development, in a society that maintains age graded sets. Thus this anthropological exploration is not doing philosophy in the terms that are familiar to us, but rather is focused on textual thought as a kind of social action.