Public lecture: Dr. Li Xiang, "Institutions of Local Propaganda in Han China and Imperial Rome" (11.12.2024)

The Department of Sinology welcomes all students as well as everybody who is interested to Dr. Li Xiang's (University of Würzburg) public lecture on "Institutions of Local Propaganda in Han China and Imperial Rome". The lecture will be held on December 11th (18:00 st) in room 17 (Philosophiegebäude).

Abstract:

A uni-centered model limits scholars’ approaches to local elites in Late Antiquity. It defines such people as spokesmen of the imperial government, underestimating their autonomy in information production. This talk challenge the model by investigating how local elites in Han China (ca. 206 BCE–220 CE) and the Roman Empire (ca. 27 BCE–476 CE) built their propaganda organizations—which can be considered the prototypes of today’s information institutions, and how these organizations cooperated as an informal power coalition beyond the formal structure of state bureaucracy. Three types of such local organizations are discussed: ritual management, advisory, and philanthropic institutions. These institutions propagated the values of specific elite parties by using a series of patterned language derived from local history and culture. As the institutions collaborated as information nexuses, they provided a pool of language materials from which individual elites chose the topics and concepts they intended to discuss. An informal structure of local propaganda thus developed, which constantly negotiated with the imperial center.