In our first Talking Animals feature, we interview Keith Knapp about his research on moral animals in early medieval China. His work has covered the role of the animal world in Confucian argument, animals as moral exemplars in filial narratives, and most recently the role of birds and bears in imagining life and death in Jiangnan.1
Keith Knapp is Professor of East Asian History at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of early medieval China (220-589). He is the author of Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China and the co-editor of both Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographic Guide and the Cambridge History of China, Vol. 2: The Six Dynasties, 220-589.
Hi Prof. Knapp! Thank you for being our inaugural guest on Talking Animals. To start, what first inspired you to include animals in your research?
I never imagined that I would do research on animals. However, as I did my dissertation research on filial piety stories, I discovered that some filial exemplars were animals. After I published my book on filial children, Selfless Offspring, I decided to write a paper on filial and virtuous animals.
In your latest publications, you’ve been exploring the morality of animals in early medieval China. Could you summarise your findings so far?
I have mainly been exploring how Confucian writers viewed animals in the early medieval period. What I have discovered is that their view of animals was complex. On the one hand, reflecting older Confucian traditions, they believed that animals were morally unimportant and inferior to humans. After all, Heaven and Earth made mankind in their own image. On the other hand, though, through their close contact with the natural world, early medieval Confucians also thought that many types of animals lived morally upstanding lives and could even serve as exemplars for humans. In my most recent animal-related publication, “People are Special; Animals are Not: An Early Medieval Confucian’s Views on the Difference between Humans and Beasts,” I show this complicated view by noting that, when the Confucian He Chengtian 何承天 wants to refute the Buddhist idea of karma, he turns to the animal world. He argues that geese who are vegetarian and refrain from taking the lives often end up on the dinner plate, whereas swallows who daily take countless insect lives are beloved by people. Even though he denies that humans and animals are equal as sentient beings, he concludes that the same logic that applies to animals must apply to humans, thereby equating humans and animals.
What is something surprising you’ve come across while studying animals in Chinese history?
I was surprised by how important animals were in the lives and thoughts of premodern Chinese people but how little research had been done on them. As a result, in 2003 I organised the panel “Inborn Virtues? The Cosmic Grounds for Ethics in Premodern China” at the annal meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, which entirely consisted of papers about Chinese animal tales. The paper I presented was “The Naturalness of Filial Piety: A Study of Filial Animal Tales.” The Association for Asian Studies kindly gave us a large room which could probably accommodate 100 people, but only ten attended. That surprised me too – that, at that point in time, Sinologists had little interest in the role animals played in the Chinese past.
Wow, that marks over twenty years of interest in Chinese animals! Is there a resource or theory you’ve found particularly helpful in your work?
I watched a Ted talk by Frans de Waal that talked about animals having a sense of fairness and empathy. That affected the way I viewed the moral lives of animals and led me to read his The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society alongside Marc Bekoff’s Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed. I applied those insights in my 2019 chapter “Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Confucian Thought.”
And what animal-related questions are you aiming to answer in your research next?
Right now, I’m combining my interest in material culture with my interest in animals. As a result, I’m trying to figure out why spirit jars (hunping 魂瓶), which only existed for a short period of time (1st century CE to the early 4th century) and only in Jiangnan, are decorated with so many figurines of animals. The animals most frequently portrayed are birds and bears. I have already published an article on why birds are so numerous on the funerary jars. Now, I’m writing about the jars’ bear figurines. I’ve concluded that bears figure so prominently because they reflect the beliefs of Jiangnan’s aboriginal peoples who believed that bears were spiritual creatures who ensured human’s prosperity and well-being.
Finally, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
I have now done so much reading on bears that I think I would want to be one. Bears are very human-like. Their diet, expressions, and moods are very much like our own. They live in remote locations, mostly keep to themselves, and are not overly aggressive. In the winter, when not much is going on, they have a good rest. They are also big enough that no one, usually, messes with them!
- See Keith Knapp’s animal-related articles and chapters here:
– “Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Confucian Thought,” in Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 64-83.
– “The Meaning of Birds on Hunping (Spirit Jars): The Religious Imagination of Second to Fourth century Jiangnan,” Azjiske študije / Asian Studies VII.2 (2019), 153-172.
– “The Use and Understanding of Domestic Animals in Medieval Northern China,” Early Medieval China 25 (2019), 85-99.
– “People Are Special, Animals Are Not: An Early Medieval Confucian’s Views on the Difference between Humans and Beasts,” Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 41 (2024), 149-175. ↩︎