forestofglory | The Social Life of Inkstones Read Along: Introduction

Welcome to the first post of our read a long of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China by Dorothy Ko! For this post we are reading the introduction.

Since this the introduction to the book, I thought it might be nice for us to introduce ourselves, so here are some optional discussion questions:

1. What do you hope to get out of reading this book? What do you hope to get out of the read a long format?

2. What is your experience reading academic history books? (No experience necessary of course, but it's helpful for me to know for planning purposes)

3. What is your experience using an inkstone or writing languages that historically where written with inkstones?

4. In the introduction what did you find interesting and/or exciting?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

theladyscribe

Hello! I'm so glad we decided to do this!

I'm hoping to actually Finish A Book for the first time basically since the start of the pandemic. My attention span for reading has been completely shit for the past (oh god) two years, and having a deadline and people to discuss the thing with might actually get me to finish it.

As I mentioned on twitter, I have a masters degree in public history, so this sort of academic text, with a focus on material culture, is right in my wheelhouse. Ko writes in the intro (pages 4 and 5) about how following the history of the inkstone brings "a deeper understanding...[of] contending knowledge cultures, entanglements between words and things, [and] sensitivities about gender and embodied skills," and that is truly my favorite thing about material culture and public history. I love the history of Things, and how objects of usefulness can also be objects of great beauty, but they can also just be plain and simple workhorse objects.

I've never used an inkstone and haven't really done much writing in Chinese beyond what is on the Hello Chinese app. Who knows though - maybe this will spark a passion for it in me. :)

From:

cortue

I've not heard of the concept of public history before. Looking it up on wikipedia it seems to be people working in history outside of academia. So was your degree on studying the practice of history curation of history outside of university or a preparation to work in one of those fields?

From:

theladyscribe

It was a mixture of both - I took several classes in the theory of public history, which is a combination of historical curation outside academia and how to present history to the public (which go hand-in-hand, especially when thinking about the front-facing and back-office spaces of museums, archives, and historic sites), but I also took hands-on classes (my favorites were the archives class and the oral history class). Unfortunately, jobs are hard to come by, so I don't actually work in the field, but I love talking about history and all the different ways it gets presented to the public!

From:

cortue

That's such a neat field! I was reading recently about an archivist who has to decide what to keep and how to document it, especially in modern times where there can be such an excess of stuff. It did make me curious about how the guidelines of such things are developed.

From:

forestofglory

I love the history of Things, and how objects of usefulness can also be objects of great beauty, but they can also just be plain and simple workhorse objects.

Yes! to all of this!

From:

rhysiana

That degree sounds super interesting! I often wish I had done my MA in something history-related rather than linguistics-related. So glad we can read things like this now without being graded!

I love the history of Things, and how objects of usefulness can also be objects of great beauty, but they can also just be plain and simple workhorse objects.

Yes! This connects with that point in the other book forestofglory has been posting about on Twitter, Technology and Gender, where the author talked about how museum exhibits of everyday objects turn out to be some of the most popular. (I had to go re-skim the introduction to remember which book I saw that bit in. Clearly I need a copy of this other book too!)

From:

forestofglory

Technology and Gender is an older book, so there should be a bunch of used copies floating around. (Or I could ask around and see if anyone with academic access can help me get a PDF)