In his posthumous magnum opus, Scott Davis demonstrates how the compilers of three of the Chinese classicsthe Yijing (Book of Changes), Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) strategically deployed certain motifs and images as structuring elements, thereby melding these texts into a semantic continuum. The authors innovative approach is informed by an anthropological understanding of the social structures and the material realities underlying Chinese intellectual culture during the first millennium BC. The book uncovers the deep underlying structures of traditional Chinese ways of thinking about the world, and it yields important original insights into text production in ancient China.
Scott Davis (1951-2024) received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1992 and pursued his academic career at a number of institutions in Taiwan, Australia, Japan, Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, and the US. Reflecting an unusually broad engagement with traditional Chinese culture in both ancient and modern times, his publications cover medical anthropology, popular religion, ritual and performance studies, and the study of classical texts. He is the author of The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing (Albany, New York: Cambria Press, 2012).
