Tag: labor

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hst137

Reflection on Week 11’s Artisans and Craftsmen

I was able to learn from my classmates’ blog posts about the social status and societal expectation of artisans. I would like to clarify my past points. Although artisans were praised and appreciated for their work and the beautiful products they created, they were stuck in their social standing in society. It was very difficult for them to raise their status. There was an unspoken but established understanding that artisans made up their own category of people as “outlandish” as Stephen wrote in his initial post this week. This understanding manifested into the “perfect artisan” concept: artisans should maintain their focus on their own work and not become a part of mainstream society. By establishing and separating a group from others, ultimately the people in the group will not be able to change their status because they are considered the fundamentally different from the rest, the idea of othering.

Things I Learned this Week

  • What makes up the “perfect artisan.”
  • Multiple layers of involuntary labor: indentured servitude, imprisoned labor, conscripted labor, etc.
  • Government rules were established and actually followed, according to historical account, to prevent the exploitation of the common people.

Bibliographic References

Barbieri-Low, Anthony J. Artisans in Early Imperial China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

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hst137

“Artisans in Irons”

The past few weeks, I was fascinated by the unknown craftsmen and potters that created the widely praised and appreciated items. I was excited to dive into the study of convict and unfree laborers and artisans in Artisans in Early Imperial China and their varying “degree[s] of control over work, restriction of movement, restriction of life choices (212).” Ultimately, using unfree workers typically depended on the skill level required for the given task, the potential physical harm of completing the task, and the expected decreased financial loss of commissioners (213).

As I was reading, I was surprised by how the notion of involuntary labor also counted because its inclusion points to the inclusion of many more “unfree artisans,” like the conscripted artisan (zu) (213). In early China, peasants were drafted into civilian and military labor services (214). The government tried to show fairness in terms of length of conscription and number of conscripted artisans, especially during planting periods (218). It was illegal “to conscript more than one registered adult from the same household at the same time” (217). Further evidence indicates that the officials were ordered “to exhaust all other sources of labor (especially convicts) for tasks such as transport duty before mobilizing any peasants” (217). There is clearly a hierarchy among the different kinds of involuntary artisans.

Blog post refers to Chapter 6 of this book. Image source.

Bibliographic Reference

Barbieri-Low, Anthony J. Artisans in Early Imperial China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

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hst137

Bronze and Labor from the Shang Dynasty

I focused on the additional reading about the bronze material used as inscription. In an excerpt from Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, during the Shang era, the technique of casting bronze was unique, complicated, and counterintuitive. Unlike the rest of the world, China created designs by utilizing negative space formed from clay molds, into which the bronze was cast. High artistic and technical skill was required by the artisans of the Shang dynasty. This unusual technique favored the development of a social system, the division of labor. The compartmentalized feature of Chinese bronze casting with many smaller steps supports standardization and coordination with other laborers. I think this division of labor can also be considered in the creation of the Great Wall: many people are involved, and each person has his own designated job to help bring the wall to completion.

Ritual wine vessel, approx. 1300–1050 from Shang dynasty (1600–1050 B.C.E.). China; Henan province. Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, The Avery Brundage Collection.

Similar to last week’s passages, the readings from this week show how the culture of the time period is displayed through the creations of the people. I anticipate this motif to be carried throughout the semester.

Bibliographic References

Hansen, Valerie. “Chapter 1: The Beginnings of the Written Record”. In The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, 18-55. Seconded. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Keightley, David. “Chapter 1: The Oracle Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty”. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600, edited by W. deBary et al. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999.

Horowitz, Joshua. “Literacy in Ancient China”. In People and Their Stuff: A History of China in Objects Now Preserved in North America. URL: http://scalar.tdh.bergbuilds.domains/hst137/chapter-1-the-shang-dynasty

Ledderose, Lothar. “Casting Bronze the Complicated Way” Chapter 2 in Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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