Material culture studies

The Antiques Roadshow Archive, a public education project licensed by the BBC and produced by PBS in the US, defines material culture as “in a given community or society, the material objects that people make, collect, and use, which give insight into the beliefs and customs held by that community.”Footnote ¹ The no-nonsense language and the venue of its dissemination speak volumes about the popular interest in collecting and the value of objects as emblems of personal and communal histories. In China, too, viewing, collecting, and studying material objects is a national pastime. The award-winning television program, “Archive of National Treasures” (Guobao dang'an 國寶檔案), began airing in 2004 and quickly became one of the signature programs of CCTV. It is currently being broadcast five days a week during prime-time.Footnote ² Professional historians of China, however, have been slower than the general public in making the “material turn.”Footnote ³

Although a relatively recent endeavor in the field of Chinese history, material culture studies has long been an established and productive specialty among historians of the US, especially of colonial America. As early as 1952, the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Program in American Material Culture was established in Delaware, the extension of a major museum of Americana. A new research building that housed the Winterthur Library and Archives as well as conservation labs was opened in 1969. In partnership with the nearby University of Delaware, the Winterthur offers programs in art conservation, museum studies, and history. It remains a key institution in the development of material culture studies as a multi-disciplinary endeavor today.

The métier of early scholars of American material culture involves identifying, describing, categorizing, and comparing classes of objects, and early studies are organized according to such object categories as household objects or architecture. Historians Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison describe the field as it stood in the late 1970s as composed of three “discrete intellectual streams”: anthropology (including archaeology and folklore studies), social history (including history of technology), and art history (including decorative arts and connoisseurship).Footnote ⁴ As the field matured, scholars broadened their object-centered approach to include texts, or to construe material culture in linguistic terms, as “a text with its own grammar and vocabulary.”Footnote ⁵ By the late 1990s, scholars had come to realize that “objects are good for answering certain kinds of questions but not others, that documents play an important role in augmenting the information yielded by objects, and that things are not necessarily more truthful than other kinds of sources.”Footnote ⁶ Although specialists continue to debate the truthfulness of text versus objects, all agree that “people cannot adequately comprehend the lives of others unless they are prepared to engage the meaning of objects.”Footnote ⁷

Compared to its long trajectory in US history, the study of material culture in the China field has yet to be institutionalized. This slow start is curious. The imperial Chinese empires, as the “Archive of National Treasures” reminds its reviewers every week, have long been known for the sophistication of their material cultures (or civilization, in the parlance of “National Treasures.”) The ingenuity of artisans and the proto-industrial scale of state-sponsored workshops were already evident in the Warring States period.Footnote ⁸ High quality imperial and vernacular objects are well-preserved in museum collections both inside China and outside. That the study of material culture in the China field has been slow in establishing itself may have to do with entrenched habits of professional historians: the privileging of principles (dao 道) over vessels or instrumental things (qi 器), and the insistence on textual sources as the only legitimate evidence for historical research.Footnote ⁹ Instead of timeless truths, the nature of admissible evidence and the basis of judgement about the adequacy of proof in support of a proposition are but conventions that should be subject to periodic reexamination by a rigorous field. It is high time for such a reexamination.

Since material cultures studies in Chinese history is a relatively young field, it is not yet defined by conventions or established “schools.” Individual scholars, from those senior in rank to junior, are engaged in innovative research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.Footnote ¹⁰ When commissioning articles for this special issue, I opted to showcase as much diversity in method and research questions as possible. Jue Guo, an archaeologist by training who works with both transmitted and excavated texts, uses a “cultural biography” approach to illuminate the meanings of a recent sensational archaeological find, the so-called “Confucius Dressing Mirror” from the Western Han tomb of Liu He, the Marquis of Haihun (92–59 BCE).Footnote ¹¹ A second contributor, Jonathan Hay, is an art historian who has published influential works about the theory and practice of paintings, calligraphy, and decorative arts. In his authoritative biography of the tenth-century paleographer, calligrapher, and painter Guo Zhongshu (928–977), Hay relies primarily on extant steles, some of which have been kept at their present site of the Beilin Museum in Xi'an since the eleventh century, to expose and supplement the unreliability, if not ephemerality, of transmitted texts. Thomas Kelly, the third contributor, is a literature specialist whose dissertation focuses on the craft of writing implements as inscriptional surfaces. His study of a late Ming cultural entrepreneur Fang Yongbin (1542–1608), like Hay's, is attentive to the irreducible materiality of writing: words carved on stone, handwritten on stationery paper, or as woodblock-printed handbills are analyzed differently because the meanings they signify are different. The medium is the message.

The fourth essay is by Susan Naquin, a doyenne of social history and popular religion, who is among the first to advocate the study of material cultures in the field of Chinese history. She uses an ecological or environmental approach to examine the distinctiveness of “regional materialities” as a new way to conceptualize local or regional cultures. Last but not least, Yuanxie Shi is a graduate student in museum studies and history. Her study of whitewood figurines from Ningbo, a souvenir for visiting tourists, combines an ecological approach in its interest in local trees with an intense artifact analysis, revealing a global connection of carvers, buyers, and collectors of a genre of seemingly trivial toys.Footnote ¹² If the methods of Guo, Hay, and Kelly are informed by philology, both Naquin and Shi draw inspiration from anthropology, especially ethnography. Relying on fieldwork and interviews with craftsmen as sources of information, the latter illuminate the everyday life of artisans and farmers on the fringes of learned society.

The three material agencies of history: rock! scissors! paper!

Despite the methodological differences stemming from the authors’ disciplinary training and generations, to my surprise the five articles have much in common in their premises and findings, not to mention in their shared commitment to using material analyses to revise entrenched biases or reveal blind spots in their fields or sub-fields. What we are witnessing in the pages that follow are thus the writing of an unfamiliar history of China, with new actors and agencies, as well as new conventions about admissible proof, the nature of evidence, and the style of argumentation.

Allow me to describe the contours of this history in terms of a changing configuration or interaction between three elements or modes of agency: stone (zhi 質, substance or materiality), scissors (qi 器, tools, vessels, or instruments), and paper (wen 文, writing or textuality). As we may remember from our kindergarten days, what makes this hand game so fun to play is its unpredictability and the utopian assumptions of its rules: no one object is inherently more powerful than others; the pliant sheet of paper that is no match for the sharp edges of the scissors can overwhelm a hard rock by wrapping it up, and so on. Depending on the luck of the draw or circumstances, any one attribute can come up on top.

Chinese society, or any society for that matter, however, is not a children's playground. The rules are rigged; conventional value or ideological systems deem some agencies intrinsically superior to others. The Confucian classic Mencius states in no uncertain terms that “those who labor with their brains rule others; those who labor with their brawn are ruled by others.”Footnote ¹³ With this valuation of “head” over “hand,” the craftsmen with their tools (“scissors”) and materials (“rock”) are rendered invisible and illegible in history, history being written as it was (and still is) by scholars. In some quarters of the academy, the textual archive remains the only admissible source of evidence. With this overwhelming discursive advantage of wen (culture, literature, civility), it seems as though the “paper” in Chinese society is not a thin sheet but a thick corrugated cardboard, capable of not only obfuscating the “rock” but also smashing the “scissors.”

The contributors use a range of strategies to diffract—to bend light as it passes around the edge of an object, causing a redistribution of energy—the discursive advantage that writing and texts enjoy in Chinese history and society. The most audacious is Naquin, whose article does not rely on any textual evidence for its argumentation. There are no citations of local gazetteers nor legal cases in the footnotes, archival materials that constitute the métier of the social historian of late imperial China and for which Naquin's earlier works are famous.Footnote ¹⁴ The force of her arguments is based entirely on the material presence of “rock,” or the clay, stone, and iron enfolded in the geological strata of the North China Plain, and “scissors,” or the skills of craftsmen who baked clay into bricks and tiles with which temples and houses are built. In her world, one can enjoy sustenance, religion, and culture without “paper,” but “stone” and “scissors” are the sine qua non of personal, familial, and communal life.

Jue Guo's strategy, although seemingly more accommodating than Naquin's, is no less radical. Texts do constitute important evidence for the material historian, she suggests, but only when they are contextualized, not disembodied. The most important piece of evidence that clinches her argument is a rhymed prose inscribed on a fragment of lacquered wood. In being attentive to the material substrate of words, Guo proposes a method of constructing a cultural biography that is wrought of four equally important elements forming a complete “assemblage”: the person, the object, place, and text. From this perspective, the artificial or heuristic distinctions between “paper,” “rock,” and “scissors” begin to melt away. The three are not in constant battle as in the children's game. In order to fully understand a text, the historian has to be attentive to both the instrument and craft that went into its making as much as its materiality and medium.

This research strategy that is premised on writing as a material and embodied practice has enormous historiographical implications. Recognized as a craft with an irreducible material dimension, writings are no longer texts with transhistorical meanings.Footnote ¹⁵ The circumstances of their coming into existence and oblivion—in real time, concrete places, and engaging bodily capacities that have to be honed—constitute the stuff of history. Kelly's analysis of the handwritten letters of a shopkeeper, which contrast with printed handbills advertising tea by the same writer, allows him to rethink the erosion of status hierarchies in late Ming society, indeed the erosion of conversancy with words as the very basis of social status. But it is Hay who shows once and for all that knowledge about ancient scripts—the basis of Guo Zhongshu's craft as a calligrapher and expertise as a paleographer—is irreducibly material in nature, bound up as it is with the format of and inscriptions on stone steles. Neither intellectual nor abstract, Guo's knowledge and skills are embodied in the stones. Born and lived in the “murderous times” of the Five Dynasties, as an official of a fallen dynasty Guo's life was spared by new rulers who valued his skills in making steles, material manifestations of their political legitimacy. The northern Song antiquarian movement, Hay argues, had its precursor in the mid-tenth century, when artisans such as Guo Zhongshu dedicated themselves to the solidity of stone steles—veritable objects that are at once “paper,” “rock,” and “scissors”—in order “to repair the frayed cord of cultural transmission.”Footnote ¹⁶

China in space; China in time

The best way to convey the productiveness of these five articles is by putting them in conversation with other ongoing research on “rock,” “paper,” and “scissors” in Chinese history. Once we recognize things and instruments as hidden but no less powerful motive forces in Chinese history, we come to a new understanding of the latter's spatial dimensions. China in space appears at once smaller and bigger than its territories. It is smaller because if we follow the trajectories of things, the most important material changes often manifest themselves in intimate, domestic settings, if not on the sensory experience of the body itself, as Susan Mann and Francisca Bray have shown.Footnote ¹⁷ Space is neither pre-existing nor inert. It is through the agencies of things and human action in the course of the everyday that space is made.

China in space also appears much bigger than we had assumed when one follows the lead of S.E. Kile and Kristina Kleutghen, who show how productive it is to place the Qing empire not at the center but at the “edges” of early modern worlds in their recent research on the telescope and other optical instruments,Footnote ¹⁸ or that of Naquin who, in searching for the location of such humble materials as limestone, brick, and metals that went into the building of small temples that dotted the North China Plain, end up animating the deep geological history of the region. If we take materiality seriously, that is, if we attend to the exact material requirements and techniques of how things are made (what I would call an “engineer's approach,” exemplified by Naquin and Shi), the history of things cannot be separated from the history of the environment and ecology. A sense of deep geological time—which, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, is wrought of the vectors of time's arrow and time's cycle—is a productive next step toward revolutionizing the historian's understanding of the China-in-time.Footnote ¹⁹

Hay's study of Guo Zhongshu demonstrates the importance of probing at the edges of conventional understanding of time and space in Chinese history. As a paleographer, calligrapher, and architectural painter, Guo was an artist who transcend modern boundaries of disciplines; he was both Confucian and Daoist; he might have been part non-Han (Shantuo). Guo's importance would have been obscured if the historian had adopted dynastic-centered and Sinocentric lens, as is conventional for research on Middle Period China. Hay shows that it was exactly the multivalent education and mobile life style of such elites as Guo that allowed them to transmit strands of Tang court art and culture to the Northern Song. From this perspective, the politically fragmented Five Dynasties can be re-envisioned as a crucial period of cultural continuities and innovation.

I would have liked to end this section by offering a succinct statement about how recent research on material cultures in Chinese history have revised established historical narratives and periodization, based as they are on political history and an assumption of linear, progressive time. But the present stage of our research does not allow conclusive statements. One observes contradictory tendencies, however: disjuncture between political history and material history in some cases; alignment between the two in others. In her study of whitewood figurines from Ningbo in this volume, Yuanxie Shi discerns a disjuncture between the rhythms of political history and material history. Export trade in these carved wood objects, for example, reached its nadir during the Cultural Revolution. In an earlier essay on the visual and material history of the Ming–Qing transition, Jonathan Hay calls this gap “disjuncture diachronics” and invites scholars to probe it by being attentive to multiple narratives.Footnote ²⁰ Future research is needed to reveal the trajectories of epistemic change and political change as well as the relationships between the two.

Insights from Qing history, where material cultures studies enjoy a relative head start, are instructive in this regard. At a recent workshop on Qing history, contrary to my expectations, a focus on things—political things, social things, moral things, to use organizer Tobie Meyer-Fong's categories—seem to have reaffirmed our conventional narratives derived in large part from political history.Footnote ²¹ This coincidence between political history and material history is puzzling. Research in global history of technology has shown that changes in the material processes of making things and the forging of tools follow their own rhythms: the telescope, like the adaptation of New World crops, made its way around the globe fast, almost instantaneously. Changes in weaving looms or farming implements, in turn, occurred glacially. The current research of historian of science Dagmar Schäffer has shown, for example, that despite the political rhetoric of Taizu, the founding emperor of the Ming, of restoring the cap and gown of the Han, two of his princes were buried with robes Mongolian in cut and color.Footnote ²²

Be that as it may, one may summarize recent research on material cultures in Chinese history, those in this special issue included, by way of a paradox: the more historians strive to diffract the cultural prestige of “paper” by shifting their regime of attention to “rock” and “scissors,” the more relevant writing and textuality appear to be (except perhaps for Naquin). The power of “paper” as a technology which persists through the course of Chinese history has to be recognized, even as its material formats, means of circulation, and efficacy changed. The métier of the material historian is not to ignore “paper” but to achieve a balance, even a degree of cognitive justice, by giving “rock” and “scissors” an opportunity to reveal themselves in all their complexities. Our goal at the present stage is to improve our understanding about material technologies, tools, and instruments (as well as the people who made them) so that they can attain the same rigor and authority as our knowledge about texts.Footnote ²³

Doing material history

The salience and lingering relevance of “paper” complicates our research method and strategy as we set out to do material history. How much weight should the historian assign to the material archive? How should we adjudicate the contradictions and gaps between the material evidence and textual evidence? Can we make a convincing argument in the absence of textual sources? In the extreme case of the history of food and banquets, a promising subject that has attracted recent scholarship, by definition all the food and wine were consumed; all that is left are fragments of texts.Footnote ²⁴ Kleutghen articulates this tendency as “objects doomed to text even when they survive.”Footnote ²⁵ She is referring to the Qianlong emperor's list of counter-gifts for the British Macartney Embassy of 1793, but she might as well be speaking of the challenges and opportunities of writing history out of all ephemera, texts included. After all, are slips of bamboo not more transient than stone steles, at least in Guo Zhongshu's way of making and knowing?

The ephemeral quality of all evidence is perhaps the most productive realization afforded by recent studies of material history. There is, however, no uniform answer to the questions posed at the beginning of the last paragraph. Every historian who conducts research on material cultures in Chinese history has to fashion his or her own approaches on the basis of the evidence at hand and the research questions formulated. When the research begins to accrue to a certain density, the field as a whole may make a concerted effort to reassess whether conventional standards about the nature of admissible proof and argumentation may require revision. Until then, we summon all our persuasive powers to convince our manuscript reviewers, one reviewer at a time.

In the spirit of encouraging future research, I end by proposing three fruitful areas of inquiry at the present juncture: