![]() These correspond to perceived absolute natural kinds, but maintain a relational character dependant on the salience of metaphorical and metonymic relations at different scales. This transition between metaphoric and metonymic relations is a function of scale, and is reflected in the Yijing’s correlative categories. Adopting perspectives from cognitive linguistics and anthropology, this symbolic manipulation allows unknown situations to be understood metaphorically via the hexagrams, and then metonymically incorporated into a natural category of cosmic circumstances. This is revealed through a focus on the hexagram images as two distinct but interrelated forms of analogy, as human constructs for symbolic manipulation and as empirical descriptors of cosmic circumstances. These apparently discordant properties can be reconciled by paying due attention to the role of scale. On the one hand, they appear to be defined relationally, but on the other they purport to describe everything in the cosmos in terms of fixed principles. The exact nature of these correlative categories continues to inspire debate. The canonised Yijing had a decisive influence over the development of so-called “correlative cosmology” in China’s early imperial period, presenting the cosmos as knowable through sixty-four hexagrams and classifiable according to eight trigrams. The gendered logic of classical Chinese thought with its emphasis on a dynamic relational balance and transformative reversibility between the categories of the masculine and the feminine is distinguished from rationalizing Western tendencies that either essentialize social-cultural gender roles as an unchanging natural fate determined by " natural " biological sex or conceal gender under the guise of masculine-oriented claims to a nongendered universality and neutrality. On the one hand, Chinese cultural and intellectual traditions have been interpreted as having a greater appreciation of the significance of gender and the feminine than standard Western forms of thought. ![]() Chinese philosophical and cultural traditions have become part of contemporary interpretive conflicts over the meaning of gender and the relative social status of women and men. We consider how gender and nature have been conceived in relation to the Yijing and its potential and limits for addressing questions of gender, the environment, as well as issues of the interconnection of gender and ecology articulated in ecofeminism. This chapter traces the shifting roles of gender and the changing character of nature in the Yijing. ![]()
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