Jamming the Anthropological Machine? Human-Animal Relations in Selected Chinese Ming-Qing Literary Works

This thesis draws on one of the key concepts in Animal Studies, the anthropological machine, to cast a new perspective on selected literary works from late imperial China, specifically the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The primary texts are (in running order) The Journey to the West (西遊記, Xiyou Ji, 1592), Strange Tales from Liaozhai (聊齋誌異, Liaozhai Zhiyi, 1766), the trilogy of Sanyan (三言, c. 1621; 1624; 1627), and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義, Sanguo Yanyi, 1522). The burgeoning discipline of Animal Studies has been characterized by a surge of attention to non-human animals, while the thesis’s primary texts offer a wide range of charismatic animal figures. In bringing these animals and their relationships to humans together, the thesis contributes to both the critical research field of Animal Studies and the interpretation of classical Chinese literature.
The new perspective that the thesis offers on Ming-Qing literary works reveals the dominant ideology of the time, Confucianism, to be an anthropological machine, much as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines it. In laying bare the mechanisms of this machine, the thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by showing how its primary texts account for both the twilight of imperial China and the fundamental crisis of humanism. The fabulous animal figures in these texts are not relevant to contemporary popular discourses on animal agency or autonomy; if they receive unprecedented attention, that is because human beings are experiencing an identity crisis. This thesis thus seeks to challenge Western academia’s fashionable celebration of the blurred human-animal boundary, with a particular emphasis on Chinese culture. More specifically, the thesis’s discussion of human-animal relations in a non-European context foregrounds the human exceptionalism hidden within current advocacy for animal welfare. This dilemma underscores the importance of the anthropological machine in present, but also future, Animal Studies, prompting us to view animals through a less humanistic lens and reconfirming that we humans are animals as well.