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702 A M E R I C A NA N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 ,
through the networks established from practicing
guanxi. In other words, Yang needed to participate in
guanxi, and the participation itself became her re-
search topic. As such, a new dimension is added to
participant-observation in the practice of ethnography.
This excellent book is a must-read for students
and scholars of China studies. For comparative schol-
ars as well, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets offers an al-
ternative perspective to theorizing about subjectivity,
power, and modernity. The only possible addition that
readers like myself may wish for is perhaps a compan-
ion how-to manual so that our work might speed along
on a less jarring road.
Suspended Music: Chime-BeUs in the Culture of Bronze
Age China. Lothar von Falkenhausen. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1993.481 pp.
Su ZHENG
Wesleyan University
What can we learn from the music bells of Bronze
Age pre-Imperial China (ca. 1700 to 221 B.C.)? This
question has fascinated the archaeologists, historians,
scientists, art historians, philologists, music histori-
ans, and composers both in and outside of China since
the sensational archaeological discovery of the set of
65 chime bells, along with a large collection of various
musical instruments, from the tomb of Marquis Yi of
Zeng (d. ca. 433 B.c.) in Leigudun, Suizhou, Hubei prov-
ince in 1978. As one of the most recent attempts to
provide answers to the question, von Falkenhausen’s
remarkable interdisciplinary approach has not only
brought new insights to Chinese music history but
contributed significantly to our broader understanding
of the political systems and their cultural implications
in ancient Chinese society.
Though focused on the Zeng bell chime, in his
study von Falkenhausen consistently locates this ex-
traordinary discovery in the context of the develop-
ment of Chinese musical bells throughout the entire
Bronze Age, providing the readers with a comprehen-
sive survey on the subject. The author’s effort can be
seen in the exhaustive listing of thousands of speci-
mens of musical bells, their archaeological sites, and
their tone measurements, contained in the books four
lengthy appendixes.
In decoding the rich messages contained by the
chime bells, von Falkenhausen constructs his presen-
tation along a path moving from the social-political
framework t o detailed examination of chime bells’
physical properties and their evolution and distribu-
tion, which is then followed by the consideration of
musical performance and musical theory, as well as
their political meanings. The first part of the book con-
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tains three chapters grouping together several themes:
cultural, social, and economic factors of the musical
bells (chapter l), the descriptions of physical and
acoustic properties of the bells (chapter S), and the
techniques of bell casting and tuning (chapter 3). The
second part (chapters 4 and 5 ) presents a general sur-
vey of the history of the bells, their origins, their typol-
ogy, and their distribution from the central region to
the peripheries, while special emphasis is given to the
invention of two-tone bells. The last section of the
book addresses musicological issues: historical per-
formance practices indicated by the Zeng bells, the
sound and the tone measurements, and contemporary
tone theory suggested by the Zeng inscriptions.
While based extensively on the Chinese archae-
ological sources, von Falkenhausen’s book neverthe-
less marks itself as part of the Western intellectual
tradition by situating the technical, raw material in the
web of political and sociocultural history of the early
Chinese society. As the core symbol for social rank
and authority, bells, von Falkenhausen argues, “em-
bodied an intimate linkage with the ideological super-
structure, and its performative enactment through rit-
ual” (p. 66). Furthermore, close study of Zeng
inscriptions reveals that the correlative cosmology,
perceived by the scholars of Chinese music as a funda-
mental concept in Chinese musical thought, accumu-
lated continuously over many centuries before the
founding of the Chinese empire in 221 B.C. and was
actually still in the formative period in pre-imperial
China. As an ethnomusicologist, I fmd the book is yet
another excellent example of how studying music can
be valuable t o broader inquiries of historical and an-
thropological concerns. Von Falkenhausen’s careful
documentation and skillful textual criticism lead to a
thought-provolong interpretation of contemporary po-
litical structure and reconstruction of the history of
Chinese musical thought, which, in my opinion, are the
most valuable contributions of the book.
Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order
of the People’s Republic. Susan Brownell. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995.393 pp.
D. M. ANDERSON
Sichuan Union University
This exciting new book could have been written
only by Susan Brownell. A former nationally ranked
track and field athlete in the United States, Brownell
was uniquely qualified to conduct what became ethno-
graphic fieldwork on a university track team in Bei-
jing. However, she does not write a memoir of her
athletic experiences as “the American girl who wants
to win glory for Beijing” but uses her own experiences