The Social Life of Inkstones Read Along: Chapter 2

[forestofglory]

Welcome to the second 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: "Chapter 2 Yellow Hill Villages: The Stonecutters"

Previous posts:
Introduction
Chapter 1

You are welcome to join in at any time!

In this chapter we looked at the quarries where Duran stone was mined. Here are some optional discussion questions:

What where the main arguments in this chapter? Did you find them convincing?

This chapter had fewer historical figures and fewer inkstones than last chapter, but did any of the ones mentioned or pictured stand out to you?

What did this chapter make you want to learn more about?

Did anything in this chapter remind you of fiction you enjoy? Or inspire creative writing thoughts fic or otherwise?

Comments

[rhysiana]

What where the main arguments in this chapter? Did you find them convincing?

I think the main arguments in this chapter were about how the line was drawn between scholars and artisans in society, and how much the scholars worked to solidify that difference. Ko is fairly clearly on the side of the artisans here, and her choices of scholars to highlight while making her argument are 1) very supportive, but also 2) fairly hilariously biased. (Mi Fu is enough to make anyone sympathetic to artisans over scholars.)

The beginning of the chapter, with the discussion of how specialized the tools are and how knowledge of how to make them and repair them is just as essential as actually quarrying the stones, I felt flowed nicely into her arguments about scholarly approaches to artisanal literacy and what defines a person as truly part of "literate" society. Though she doesn't address the idea directly, this reminded me a lot of discussions I see in crafting and art circles about the loss of the apprenticeship system. She talks several times about how scholars dismissed the importance of the stoneworkers' knowledge because it wasn't generalizable and recordable, ie teachable from a book - anyone who has ever tried to learn a craft from just written instructions knows there is real merit to hands-on instruction and demonstration.

I noted some passages that really seemed to get at this tension of the scholars trying to establish themselves as superior:

This knowledge is rendered in writing only in the modern era not because it is inherently resistant to textualization. It is because the Yellow Hill practitioners who are masters of their dense and foliated worlds have no use for abstraction, nor has it been in their interest to make the localized knowledge that has been their dominion accessible to others. To textualize and to generalize is the scholar’s métier, not the stoneworker’s.

Ko presents this as another historical swing to establish legitimacy:

The scholars who served in the court of the Tang (618–907) tended to hail from aristocratic families that had dominated politics for centuries. The decline of this hereditary elite in the eighth century and enlarged educational opportunities for sons from common families in the provinces set the stage for the rise of a new educated elite, the scholar, after the fall of the Tang and at the beginning of the Northern Song (960–1127). The intellectual and artistic priorities that these men fashioned became so paradigmatic that they exerted lasting impact on the self-perceptions and values of scholars in subsequent dynasties. In particular, their antiquarian tastes, predilection for collecting vessels from the classical era (or ink rubbings of inscriptions on them), systematic research of ancient scripts, and emphasis on personal character in the calligraphic hand, all focused attention on the theory and practice of calligraphic writing.

[...]

Knowledge about brush, inkstone, paper, and ink was crucial to the Northern Song scholar because he recognized that writing—his métier—was a practiced craft that could be improved by sharpening his tools. In this sense, the emergent literati set on establishing their “professional” identity can be said to exhibit a craftsman’s cast of mind, although in their own eyes this by no means reduced them to the status of craftsman.

(I found the above passages particularly interesting because they explain why upper class court functionaries in historical dramas are always so obsessed with buying antiques.)

The literary flourishes and discourses on the artistry of writing aside, the core of the connoisseur’s knowledge, which pertained to the quality and features of stones, originated from the stoneworkers.

Not that the scholars wanted to admit that...

Historical figures of interest

I found Su Yijian fun:

Despite its consistent structure, Four Treatises is a loose collection of personal observations, hearsay, and quotations from historical and fictional accounts that harks back to the “notation book” tradition.

[...]

In prefacing his descriptions with “People say,” Su Yijian admitted that he had never been to Duan. He did not make claims for himself because his intention was less to proffer authoritative opinions and more to supply anecdotes as literary references for the scholar at drinking games to dazzle his poetic opponents. Art historian Craig Clunas has described this way of organizing information as a form of “aesthetics of multiplicity,” whereby “more is more.”

These passages and the categorization "poetics of the list" put me strongly in mind of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, written by a court woman in Heian-era Japan (990-early 1000s). Pillow books were fairly common in Japan (being essentially equivalent to commonplace books in the European tradition), but hers is considered one of the best views of Heian court life, and she was exceedingly fond of interspersing her observations and snippets of gossip with rather poetic lists.

By contrast, Mi Fu sounds like he would be insufferable at a party.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Mi Fu’s obvious indebtedness to the stoneworkers of Duan, knowledge of the latter always appears in quotations, the very citation of which confers authority and authenticity on Mi himself. In this way, the establishment of the subject position of the scholar-connoisseur in the Northern Song goes hand in hand with the denigration of his inferior other, the craftsman (the stoneworker in this case).

[...]

“The merit of a vessel inheres in its being usable. . . . When it comes to classifying and ranking inkstones, the most important criterion is its ability to activate ink; second is its color; the refinement or coarseness of its craftsmanship and shape comes last.” The emphasis of the primacy of usefulness allows the scholar-connoisseur to distinguish himself from his impostors, the dilettanti who have no mind for writing as a studied craft.56 As for the stoneworkers who possess expert knowledge on the mineral features and geographical origins of the stones but do not use them to grind ink, the discourse of function reduces them at best to idiot savants in their own trade and anonymous native informants to the scholars."

Re: fic thoughts, if I ever want inspiration for a complete but historically accurate bore, I know who to use.

Assorted other thoughts:

I rather like the incorporation of eyes into the carvings. The Peach Blossom Hut stone was a lovely use of them.

The structure of knowledge has shifted from an ordering of the seventy-some quarries scattered in the Duan area to an ordering of the stones gathered from the same shaft of the submerged quarry but in different years.

Like wine. (And wine snobs.)

The hypothetical situation is a near-comical refutation of the philological creed of “seeking the truth from concrete facts” gathered from personal observation.

But of course this inconvenient reality was never made explicit in the discourse. The knowledge useful to the inkstone connoisseur is constructed ex post facto and shored up by faith in the authority claims of someone else. It is the opposite of what is usually meant by authentic, in situ, or indigenous knowledge.

Tell us what you really think about those scholarly claims of authenticity, Dorothy! I wonder if they can feel the burn traveling back through time.

Another fic thought:

Oh right! The other note I had written to myself was "inkstone rubbings", about the caption under the figure near the beginning of the chapter, where it's mentioned that the display after the Wuding ceremony (I think?) was one of the only times people from outside a particular family were allowed to take rubbings of their internal exemplars. Seems like a story could grow from this somehow? Seeds of thoughts...