The Social Life of Inkstones Read Along: Introduction

[forestofglory]

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?

Comments

[cortue]

Hello! I am someone who's interested in history in a lot of different directions and so having someone else pick a place to start is very useful, and I'm a big fan of reading things in a group and seeing other perspectives. Especially for academic history books, which I have very little experience with. My background is largely in the physical sciences, and so it's a good challenge for me to read more history research and get some perspective on how to analyze it rather than passively consume it.

I have no experience with inkstones. I did used to be able to write quite a lot more in simplified Chinese characters (I was taking language lessons and wrote a lot of my notes in Chinese), but I've lost a lot of that and don't have much time for practice.

In addition to what's already been mentioned, I thought the comments she made about how the idea of class got fluid and how that was possibly connected to people who might otherwise have been considered high class being barred from becoming scholars.

[rhysiana]

Re: the class fluidity point, it does sound like we'll be learning a lot about how much possible nuance there was in stuff that a lot of other texts (usually trying to cover much broader subject area) have presented as more clear-cut. Exciting! I think I've always like very specific history more than general overviews for this reason. They often pick up on so many other things incidentally as well.

[xmarksthespotwhereistand]

When she likens these people to the inkstones in how they might gain layers of meaning. :squee: It's very interesting because there is a pretty rigid system in place (the imperial exam system) that comes with the prestige and access and yet, the idea of scholar becomes so much more fluid if we look closer. It has the layers of meanings of 'someone with knowledge of classical texts' or 'someone who actively spends their time with classical texts (instead of working, going on military pursuits, crafting or selling goods)' or 'writer of essays' and we can already see how these don't or even can't always overlap.