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

[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.