Physical Culture and Primitive Characters: A Comparative Study of Body Philosophy Based on Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Dongba Characters
Comparing Oracle Bone script and Dongba script, Wu Haitan, Chen Xiuqing, and Ji Liu find that both writing systems derive a large share of their characters (roughly 18% and 22% respectively) from depictions of the whole human body, reflecting a shared "humanist spirit" in early character creation. The two diverge sharply in orientation, however: Oracle Bone characters overwhelmingly depict the body in profile -- bowed, kneeling, submissive -- reflecting a Yin-Zhou ideology of "the people as root," in which the individual was subordinated to a rigid, class-stratified slave society. Dongba characters, by contrast, overwhelmingly depict the body frontally with limbs outstretched, reflecting the more egalitarian "person as root" outlook of the historically nomadic-pastoral Naxi, whose looser tribal social hierarchy and comparatively higher status for women (rooted partly in frog-totem fertility worship) diverged from the rigid class structure of Yin-Shang China.
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