The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317382478
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2016-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

21

Chinese Taboo

Amy He Yun

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD, UNITED KINGDOM

入竟(境)而问禁,入国而问俗,入门而问讳(《礼记》 )

Ask about the prohibition upon entering a land,

the customs upon entering a country, and

the names to be avoided upon entering a home.

(Liji or Book of Rites)

Introduction

Why are chopsticks called kuài in Chinese? Why do etiquette books advise us not to give clocks as presents in China? And why are tourism promotional slogans such as Wǒ-kào-Chóngqìnɡ and Yī-zuò-jiào-chūn-de-chéngshì criticized for transgressing common decency? The key to answering these questions lies in the notion of taboo and related concepts such as euphemism. In principle, anything can be taboo, including persons (e.g. pregnant women), acts (e.g. incest) and things (e.g. blood), for example. This chapter, nevertheless, aims to provide an introduction to Chinese taboo, past and present, including taboo words and expressions, euphemisms, motivations, functions and means to avoid punishments and sanctions for taboo violations. In what follows, I first contextualize this article by delineating the key concepts, historicizing the milestones of Chinese taboo development and reviewing very briefly relevant literature, in a somewhat streamlined and simplified form. Then, after outlining the structure of this chapter, I proceed to present Chinese taboo in detail.

Central to this chapter is the concept of taboo, which is the prohibition or restriction of an action based on the belief that such behavior is too sacred and consecrated, obscene and dirty, dangerous, accursed and unlucky or immoral for ordinary individuals to undertake. Linguistic taboo is accordingly defined as the total or partial prohibition or restriction of the use of certain words, expressions and topics on the basis of the aforementioned belief. Another core term is euphemism, referring to circumlocutionary usage of language in which an inoffensive or pleasant term is substituted for another that is thought to be coarse, painful, unpleasant, derogatory or unlucky (Hughes 2006; Rawson 1981). Euphemisms are in a constant state of flux: Some die away soon after being created while others last for centuries and develop into unconscious ones. Like taboos, they are variously motivated, for example, by fear, kindness, good taste, politeness, and political correction or commercial ‘deception’. Then, to mention in passing, the opposite of euphemism is dysphemism, which, by and large, is tabooed. These definitions allow me to sketch the prominent stages of Chinese taboo development and to give a suggestive overview of the literature.

Taboo is such an extremely ancient phenomenon in China that words tabooed at a certain point in history total 987 (Y. Wang 1997). Nonetheless, there is broad agreement that most basic ideas about it were shaped in the Zhou dynasty that ruled ancient China for almost a millennium (Chen 1997[1928]). Among other historical texts, taboo is discussed most insightfully in the Wujing, ‘five classics’, the main part of Confucian canon, for example, in the highly quoted passage from the Liji provided at the outset of this chapter. This is partly attributable to Confucius’s effort to zhèngmíng, ‘rectify names’, ultimately to restore the social hierarchy of the Zhou. In the Qin–Han empires, the hierarchical nature of taboo, particularly name taboos

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