New Perspectives on Xinjiang Kangjiashimenzi Petroglyphs (P. R. China) Volume 8 - Issue 2

Augustin FC Holl^1* and Emma Borjigid Bohm²

• ¹Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, School of Sociology and Anthropology, Africa Research Center, Belt and Road Research Institute, P. R. China
• ²Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, School of Sociology and Anthropology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, P. R. China

Received:April 24, 2023;   Published: May 16, 2023

Corresponding author:Augustin FC Holl, Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, School of Sociology and Anthropology, Africa Research Center, Belt and Road Research Institute, P. R. China

DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2023.08.000283

 

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Abstract

The Kangjiashimenzi petroglyphs discovered in the 1980s by Professor Wang Binghua and popularized by Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball have generated an extraordinary range of interpretations ranging from crude sexual overtone to more sophisticated ritual practices. The interpretation of past visual representations is fraught with theoretical and methodological difficulties, one of the most damaging being the projection of the present into the past. Selecting relevant images supporting the narrative one wishes to craft seems to be the common research strategy. Images or icons tend to be polysemic. This article offers a global iconographic approach to past visual representations that takes into consideration all the variables and parameters drafted by the “image-makers” in a kind of re-enactment of the image-making process. The analysis is articulated on a hierarchical systematics starting with

Abstract| Introduction| The Iconographic approach| Structure of the Kangjiashimenzi Narrative| Conclusion| References|