Shang Dynasty

On December 4, 2024, news broke that a lone gunman had assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive officer, Brian Thompson, outside the company’s headquarters.1 The killing itself was shocking, but what unsettled many observers was the wave of sympathy that quickly coalesced around the perpetrator—donations, online tributes, and statements of support that revealed a raw seam in America’s collective experience of health care.2 This dramatic act of killing is entangled with the dark trajectory in the devolution of the marketized healthcare industry in the United States: normalizing traumatic acts of takings, with increasingly unsustainable industry practices justifying the suspension of pre-existing taboos concerning the sanctity of life and the boundaries of wealth transfer.3 ...

[box type=“note”]Fig.1, Bronze ceremonial axe (Yue / 钺) from middle to late Shang period, c. 1400 BCE ~ 1000 BCE, symbol of state power. Excavated from tomb M1 at the Sufutun site, currently part of the Shandong Museum collection. [/box] Human sacrifice refers to the practice of ritual killing of human beings as offerings to divine patrons, ancestors, or other superhuman forces. While the phenomenon of ritual human killings have been present in many societies throughout history [1], the types of human sacrifice that were practiced by ancient Chinese and pre-Colombian Mesoamerican cultures, which were exceptional in terms of the sheer number of people sacrificed, the frequency at which it was done, and the high degree of formalization of their sacrificial rituals. Large-scale, systematic human sacrifice functioned as important political and religious spectacles in Shang dynasty.[2] ...