New Perspectives on the Old World A Study of the Bird Cult of the Shang People and ‘Totemism’

As part of the five-year partnership between the HKBU Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology (JAS) and the Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS), Russian Academy of Sciences, this collaboration aims to forge a stronger bond between the two institutions, and by extension the two sinological communities, in terms of teaching and research while developing exchange and cooperation opportunities in these areas.

From this October to June 2022, JAS and IOS, together with BNU-HKBU United International College (UIC), will co-organize an online monthly seminar series titled “New Perspectives on the Old World.” Speakers from the three institutes will take turns as keynote speakers and give online lectures. Through this initiative, we will leverage the competitive advantages of the three distinct sinological communities and engage in a series of high-end, cutting-edge discussions in key academic issues in Sinology.

This online lecture series will be kicked off by Prof. Chen Zhi on “A Study of the Bird Cult of the Shang People and ‘Totemism’”:

This article was originally published in Monumenta Serica in 1998, entitled “A Study of the Bird Cult of the Shang People”, and later translated into Chinese. In this article I investigate whether the Shang people's bird worship belonged to the so-called totem belief by cross-reference examination of this phenomenon in canonical literature, archaeological artifacts, manuscript and inscriptional materials, and point out that Shang people's bird worship was actually aimed at the divine cult of raptors, and the “Totem” theory derived from Victorian anthropology was not applicable. From the extant sources, we can deduce that Shang people's bird worship was not of a specific bird, such as swallow and crow, but of a divine bird, an imaginary “Phoenix” conceived as birds of prey in real life. In recent years, archaeological cultural relics found in archaeology have continued to support this theory.

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