Artifacts: Ramming the point

Vanessa Moore

It’s that time of year again where everything gets even more chaotic than usual. The world’s largest human migration is firmly underway as the whole of China gets down to ‘chunyun’, the annual Lunar New Year travel rush. But lamenting the hordes of tourists anticipated to flock to Macau and Hong Kong isn’t what I’m going to devote my column inches to. Actually what’s got me bothered is characteristically something way more philosophical. As CNY approaches, looking at the Chinese zodiac, what animal are we supposed to be celebrating anyway?
As you can’t fail to have noticed in recent weeks, dotted all over the place are stacks of banners, statues and mascots of sheep, goats and rams. What’s more, some New Year gift items look decidedly like a cross between sheep and goats, and sometimes even more puzzlingly, like curly-horned rams. It’s like full-scale androgyny of the wooly variety. And it’s got me downright confused.
As with most things in China, the root of all the New Year uncertainty stems from linguistics. In Mandarin, the word used for ‘sheep’ is ‘yang’ 羊, but the problem is that exactly the same word can frequently be used to describe other horned animals like goats or a rams. It’s all mightily linguistically blurred. So what’s the right description then?
Thinking back to my university days, all this confusion reminded me of American philosopher Saul Kripke’s theory about the philosophy of language. Titled “Naming and Necessity”, he addresses how words come to point to the things in the world that they refer to. Kripke says that names are not fixed by some set of properties that people believe the thing possesses. Instead, our references are fixed through the history of how the name is used in our community. According to the philosopher, an initial baptism takes place when the name is first used. From then the name comes to be linked to whatever object is named. That name is then passed amongst the community of speakers. So it doesn’t matter how the speaker thinks the reference is fix-
ed, i.e. the set of characteristics, but rather it’s the history of the term’s use in speaking that is used, regardless of that person’s ideas about the object.
So philosophical digressions aside, getting back to my pressing real world CNY dilemma, Kripke’s argument applies to the usage of the word “yang” in the mainland. According to an article published by the state-run Xinhua news agency last week, the animal image is open to regional interpretation. “People depict the zodiac animal based on the most common Yang in their region. So it’s often sheep in the north while goats in the south”, expert folklorist Fang Binggui told the news site. So there we have it, it all depends on the community we’re in, right?
Not quite. It only matters if you say it does, and for some people it doesn’t even matter anyway. “This ‘yang’ is fictional. It does not refer to any specific kind (of sheep or goat),” Zhao Shu, a researcher with the Beijing Research Institute of Culture and History, told the AFP agency. So – terrible Shakespearean pun coming up – the news site calls the whole debate a lot of “much ado about mutton”. Ouch.
Adding further fuel to the fire, according to Xinhua, what’s more it’s only us foreigners causing unnecessary trouble in the first place as few ordinary Chinese are even troubled by the sheep/goat distinction. Instead, many people just buy the creature that they see as possessing their own favored qualities. “I’ve seen more goats in zodiac images, but I prefer to buy a sheep mascot, as sheep are more fluffy and lovely,” one Beijing office clerk told Xinhua.
And that’s probably what rings most true. If you value the goat’s energy or the ram’s stubbornness, get one of those. Or failing that, like the guy above said, forget the philosophy. Sheep are just cuter anyway.