古代中国和希腊族群祖先谱系研究方法述评

A Review of Approaches to Ethnically Ancestral Genealogies of Ancient China and Greece

古代中国和希腊的传统文献中都保存了不少族群祖先谱系。在对这种谱系的研究中,学者们曾使用了非常不同的方法。这里选择六位具有代表性的学者,对其方法进行比较性的回顾和评估,以期能为该项研究的方法论探索和推进提供某些建议。比较表明,徐旭生和迈尔斯的立场大致相同,他们都把谱系当作对于历史事实的某种记忆来对待。迪勒和顾颉刚则不谋而合地将谱系视为更晚编造的神话,他们均通过调查谱系文本的矛盾和变异来确定谱系被编造的年代和情境。王明珂和霍尔的史学方法与迪勒和顾颉刚的一样,不过前两者均引入了新的人类学理论来阐释谱系在族群认同建构中的功能。后四人的方法更能够合理地解释族群祖先谱系,故应被考虑采用和发展。

In ancient Chinese and Greek traditions there are many ethnically ancestral genealogies, to which scholars have applied considerably different approaches. Here the approaches of six representative researchers are comparatively reviewed and evaluated, with an aim of providing a few suggestions for the development of methodology in this field. It is demonstrated that Xu Xusheng and John Linton Myres took a similar academic stance and treated genealogy as memory of genuine history. By comparison, Gu Jiegang and Aubrey Diller coincidently viewed genealogies as invented myths and, by investigating their textual contradictions and alterations, identified their dates and the circumstances where they were fabricated. John M. Hall and Wang Mingke, while employing the same historical method as that which Diller and Gu had used, introduced new anthropological theories to illuminate the function of genealogies in the construction of ethnic identity. The methodologies of the latter four scholars have proved more reasonable in explaining ethnically ancestral genealogies and therefore ought to be taken and developed.