CityReads│Review of The pivot of the Four Quarters
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Review of The pivot of the Four Quarters
David Harvey reviews The pivot of the Four Quarters by Paul Wheatley from a perspective of materialism and proposes an alternative hypothesis.
David Harvey. 1972. Review of The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 62(3), 509–513. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562302
Baruch Boxer.1972. Review of The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 62(3), 513–514. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562303
Picture source: Paul Wheatley, 1971.The Pivot of the Four Quarters, Aldine.
About the Book, The Pivot of the Four Quarters
In his book, The pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City, Professor Paul Wheatley analyzes the evidence for the origin of Chinese cities in a comparative framework. In so doing, he brings an impressive array of philological tools to bear on a question of consuming interest. Was there a common set of generative factors which was responsible, as well, for the definition of urban form throughout the ancient world?
His conclusion is that the nearly coeval rise of ritual-ceremonial complexes in seven primary urban areas "is symptomatic of the emergence of a new and qualitatively distinct level of sociocultural complexity which,. . . is essentially urban in character."
The Pivot of the Four Quarters contains two parts, or five chapters. It begins with two lengthy chapters on "The Genesis of the City in China" and "The Diffusion of Urban Life in Ancient China."
Both are masterful syntheses of a diffuse literature which relates to the study of ancient Chinese society and culture, and Professor Wheatley gives ample evidence here of his unusual facility with sinological methodology. He draws extensively up on the growing corpus of archeological and literary research findings to show, quite conclusively, how a nexus of distinctively urban settlement types emerged in the Middle Plain as early as the Shang era (?1751-1111 B.C.) in response to basic structural changes in society and economy. With equal perspicacity, he then traces the spread of these early urban forms during Chou times (?l 122-221 B.C.) throughout what is now the entire North China Plain and the central Yangtze basin.
The second half of the book, which views the ancient Chinese city in comparative perspective, is dominated by a long chapter on the nature of the ceremonial center and two short concluding chapters on "The Urban Character of the Ceremonial Complex" and "The Ancient Chinese City as a Cosmo-Magical Symbol”. Here,the author seeks to substantiate his hypothesis that, despite cultural differences, ceremonial complexes in six areas of primary urban generation and four areas of secondary urban generation had common functional and morphological features.
The ideal structure of the capital
David Harvey's Review
Its immediate subject matter is the origins of urbanism in the North China Plain, and to shed light on this Wheatley marshals and sifts through evidence from the archaeological record, from literary and epigraphic sources, to try to reconstruct the history of urban origins in the Shang and Chou dynasties. The work is therefore a scholarly contribution in early Chinese historiography and ought to be reviewed as such. On another level, Wheatley seeks an interpretation of the relationship between the earliest forms of Chinese society and urban origins. This interpretation draws upon a conceptual basis established in the work of numerous scholars working in a variety of disciplines. The interpretation of the evidence in the light of these concepts is therefore an important facet to this work. On yet another level, the work looks outward from the evidence and interpretation regarding urban origins in China, to the evidence compiled by numerous scholars concerning urban origins in other regions which Wheatley tentatively accepts as being regions of primary urban generation-Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley, Meso-america, the central Andes, the Yoruba territories of southwestern Nigeria. At this level The Pivot of the F our Quarters must be read as an essay in comparative urban origins. At yet another level, the work may be regarded as an essay on the very nature of urbanism itself.
Since my current interest lies in the study of contemporary urbanism, I shall examine the work as an essay on urbanism in general.
At the moment of transition from non-urban to urban forms of social organization, Wheatley appears to suggest a religious movement, a conceptual change, dominated. Almost immediately (or concomitantly) secular forces intervened to help sustain the new form of social organization. A redistributive economy and a rank society replaced an egalitarian society based on reciprocity in exchange. An "effective space" was created within which a surplus could be extracted for the support of the central bureaucracy, the effective space being created through various political, social, and economic instruments of religious authority. These and other forces were brought into being to sustain the brittle structure of nascent urbanism. The interpretation is compelling, the evidence is marshalled in impressive fashion.
Alternative hypotheses of urban origins are considered-ecological, demographic,and technological explanations, various explanations which focus on mechanisms such as trade and commerce,warfare,and irrigation) which induced social differentiation-only to be dismissed each in turn as not being consistent with the evidence( pp. 349-62). A religious transformation wins out as being the explanation which is most consistent with the evidence. But is it? And if so, how and why did this religious transformation occur?
Wheatley's conclusion is open to challenge. Any competing hypothesis must be made consistent with the facts as Wheatley presents them or new facts introduced. It does seem possible to me to design a competing hypothesis which is equally consistent with the facts as Wheatley presents them. My own perspective is to seek a materialist interpretation along the lines hinted at by Marx in his Grundrisse.
Economic transformations invariably give rise to transformations in consciousness and a change of ideology is necessary if a new mode of production is to come into being. If the movement that brought urbanism into being was a shift from an egalitarian society (primitive communism) with an economy based upon reciprocity to a rank society based upon redistribution (a shift which Wheatley documents as contemporaneous with the exercise of religious authority), then it would not be surprising to find a concomitant religious transformation which would place its imprint upon the physical manifestation of urban form (with its emphases upon sacred and profanes pace, symbolism of the cosmic order, and the like).Wheatley indicates the functional role of the ceremonial center in this materialist interpretation.
The problem with which Wheatley must deal is that these projected images exist in non-urban societies as well as in urban societies. Levi-Strauss( an anthropologist whose work Wheatley ignores) records the structuring of physical space in accordance with mythological principles among quite primitive groups Ceremonial centers(such as Stonehenge) existed which did not give rise to urbanism. There must be something specific about the cosmic image, therefore,to give rise to a mode of action which produced urbanism. The materialist interpretation would invert Wheatley's interpretation. Possibilities in the realm of social action drew upon cosmic images to sustain new forms of social action. The social transformation that arose in the movement from reciprocity to redistribution was doubtless enormous.
I am arguing that ideology and its attendant symbolisms lie in the superstructure and that movements here must ultimately be explained by a shift in the mode of production. If I am to argue this then I have to counter Wheatley's arguments against such an explanation. Wheatley concedes (p. 268) that urbanism requires the extraction of a surplus. It is useful to concede at the outset that a surplus is always there for the taking, provided some kind of institutional structure and authority can be brought into being to mobilize it. I think that there is no question that the urban centers were responsible for mobilizing the surplus. But the point which Wheatley misses is that although the surplus is there always to be mobilized, the people to produce the surplus also have to be there and to remain there. In other words a necessary condition for the mobilization of surplus is a stable peasantry which will not simply react to attempts to mobilize the surplus by moving out of range. This stability could be explained by an ideological attachment to the religious image projected at the ceremonial center.
But there are other explanations. A stable peasantry would indicate first of all a mode of production among the peasantry which involved the employment of accumulated fixed capital which made migration difficult (permanent field clearances would be sufficient here). It might also suggest certain barriers of movement ( of which terrain might be one) and here the density of population, by cutting down potential sites for re-colonization, could play a vital role. Whatever the reason, it can be argued that a low migration potential among the sub-servient peasantry was necessary if the surplus required for urbanism was to be extracted. In this regard it seems that Wheatley is somewhat less than fair to the idea that it was the existence of a mode of production which permitted the mobilization of surplus, together with the emergence of the redistributive economy, which lay at the heart of the urban transformation. I would argue that this interpretation could be made consistent with the facts as Wheatley reports them.
Much of Wheatley's evidence is of the spatial form variety ( it is necessarily so, of course) and I suspect that this leads him to accept an interpretation of the urban transformation which attaches to surficial movements in ideology and cosmic symbolism, rather than to movements in the economic basis which are far harder to discern. In this regard I am playing Marx to Wheatley's Hegel, but in a matter of this kind there is bound to be controversy over interpretation and evidence. My point is that Wheatley has not refuted the materialist challenge.
This is a magnificent book. It is a rarity in geography.It makes fundamental contributions to our knowledge and understanding of urbanism. Anybody seeking an understanding of urbanism will from henceforth have to deal explicitly with Wheatley's work.
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