Learning to see value: interactions between artisans and their clients in a Chinese craft industry

Transcription

1 Learning to see value: interactions between artisans and their clients in a Chinese craft industry Geoffrey Gowlland London School of Economics / Economic and Social Research Council Paper presented at the London Anthropology Day Goldsmiths College, London, 13 June 2008 Please contact the author for permission to cite this paper Geoffrey Gowlland Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE g.k.gowlland@lse.ac.uk

2 I have conducted fieldwork in the town of Dingshu, in the Jiangsu Province of China, a town renowned for being the centre of what is known as zisha pottery considered one of the five treasures of Chinese ceramics. Prices for such pots range, from very cheap, to the equivalent of hundreds if not thousands of pounds, depending on the fame of the artisan who produced it. The clients of the most expensive pots are mostly businessmen from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and increasingly from the Mainland. And the main reason they buy these items is for their association with the class of scholars of the imperial era, and more generally for their important place in Chinese tea culture. So these objects, to be valuable, need to conserve an aura of 'tradition' and authenticity. In this paper I will be concerned with an intriguing discourse I heard from some artisans I talked with, concerning the consequences of the inability of their clients to see properly their craft, which they thought would eventually result in the altogether disappearance of the craft. Not that there was a lack of demand for this type of ceramics on the contrary, the area is seeing a boom in production, so that from the cooperative factory employing 200 or so in the 1970 s, today dozens of villages, in addition to the township of Dingshu, are in large part involved in the mass production of these objects. But this overproduction was precisely perceived to be at the root of the problem: virtually lost, I was told, are the traditional techniques of old. The 1950s saw the introduction of a universal and modern tool, the plaster mould, that greatly simplified the process of making zisha pots. The use of the mould dispenses with many of the skills previously needed to achieve regularity in the shape of the pots, and smoothness of surfaces, which clients require. It made economic sense to use such plaster moulds, as one could make a greater number of pots in a shorter period of time. But also, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that most clients were said to be incapable of distinguishing a hand-made pot from a mould-made one. This inability to properly see on the part of clients had encouraged artisans to use these moulds, since there were few apparent advantages left in continuing with the traditional techniques despite claims that traditional pots are in fact of higher quality. Because of that situation, artisans complained that very few apprentices wanted to learn the more difficult traditional techniques. However, there was still a group of artisans who held on to the traditional techniques, or at least claimed to only use hand-crafting methods, because there was a clear economic advantage to be had in doing so: the added value of tradition, precisely and in this paper I will mostly be concerned with the problem they are facing, of advertising their work as traditional, and justifying the higher prices they demand for their work. By looking more closely at this situation I believe there are interesting points to be brought back to the theory on value in anthropology, in particular by suggesting that one borrow insights from the anthropology of learning and the anthropology of the senses, in order to explore the relation between value and vision. Roy Dilley has recently put forward an argument about the place of visibility of processes of production in regimes of value, to the effect that (visual) access to these processes by consumers

3 has certain effects on the valuation of the products (2004). The idea that seeing how things are done has in itself a value in the eyes of consumers is a particularly intriguing one. I feel however that we need to think further not just about visibility the presence or absence of an object to a person s gaze but about vision as a sense. The work of Cristina Grasseni is useful in that context. Grasseni (2004; 2007) argued that vision is necessarily skilled, necessarily the product of learning, learning to see in a certain way, and learning in a social context. If one agrees with Grasseni s point that vision is not a passive act, but rather involves participation in social spaces, then one might be lead to ask, Who is the agent of this vision that is becoming skilled? Here, in turn, the theory of regimes of value might be useful to inform our understanding of the anthropology of the senses by forcing us to be more attuned to the politics of vision. One might ask as a result not simply how people come to know what they know to become economic agents, but how, in regimes of value, certain individuals come to act on what is known, and what is seen, by others. I want to return now to my case study. I have said that a group of artisans claimed to be the last to continue using traditional methods, and I want to turn to interactions between these traditionalist artisans and their clients. Many of the most successful artisans insist that clients visit them personally for any purchase, rather than rely on an intermediary. This is a strategy to control the circulation of forgeries of their work, readily available on the market. Artisans let clients know that the only guarantee to get an authentic work is to buy direct. The useful by-product of that policy is that artisans have the occasion to present and talk about their work directly to their clients. Artisans constantly remind visitors that the techniques employed in their craft are unique. The visits of clients to private workshops are rare moments in which the demonstration of this uniqueness can take place. The artisan must show the client the traditional techniques and tools used as a form of guarantee that the pots are indeed traditional. The fact that these pots are traditional, or handmade, it is not something that can easily be recognised from the surface of the objects tradition must therefore be, in a sense, revealed. All these things that are made accessible to viewing during the personal visits of clients, including tools and techniques, are meant to establish a contrast: on the one hand, the exclusive craft that is carried out in the privacy of homes and private workshops, on the other hand, the cheaper pottery produced in open workshops on the streets of Dingshu and in surrounding villages. The items produced in either context might be similar enough to dupe the uninitiated, but revealing the processes that give rise to these exclusive works marks them in contrast to the other, common craft that is so readily available to anyone s gaze. Traditionalists further claim that many of the more successful artisans, including some who have the title of Master, are in fact resorting to the use of moulds. This revelation is all important: seeing the complexity of the traditional methods, the client might start appreciating the claims of the artisan, that it can take years to master even the basic techniques of the craft, and days if not weeks to craft just one pot.

4 When a price is revealed in particular when this price is many times higher than that of the more commonly available pots the artisan must make sure that the client knows about all the elements that make this work particularly valuable, needs to have made clear the inherent value of the work, a value that becomes apparent only once the techniques involved in the making of the object are revealed. One might think of this situation as a kind of reverse commodity fetishism: it is crucial for the artisan to reveal the labour, specifically the work of the hands, and to give a sense of the duration of labour, that have gone into the making of an apparently common kind of object. The kind of knowledge that is gained by artisans in such visits is not knowledge that can be accessed outside of Dingshu. In a similar way as apprentices, clients learn about the craft in social settings and from social interactions. They need to get a feel for the craft through exposure, and sometimes repeated exposure, to experts at work, or through the latter s demonstration of elements of techniques. I have suggested that, for artisans, the clients incapacity to recognise a hand-made pot had economic consequences. The added value of traditional pots was rendered worthless when clients failed to distinguish them from non-traditional mould-made pots. By inviting clients in their private workshops or in their homes, it was hoped that clients would learn to cultivate their sense of vision. It might be an advantage for artisans to teach their clients to understand their work. But artisans also insist that clients can never fully understand their work. by saying so, artisans also stress their ultimate superiority to evaluate their own work. This is done precisely through referring to vision as an embodied sense. Artisans would tell me, and doubtless many of their clients, that they had a better understanding than any connoisseur, and could see better than them, because their vision was informed by their practice. I have suggested that artisans blamed the difficulties of continuing a tradition on their clients incapacity to see properly, but through such a discourse, artisans were also casting themselves as ultimately the true connoisseurs of the craft they were acting on their place in the craft's regime of value. I have argued that this knowledge clients derived from personally visiting artisans was necessarily in part an embodied kind of knowledge. In the same way as apprentices, clients learn about the craft through repeated access to workshops. But apprentices have daily visual access to the work of a master, clients obviously do not come to have that same familiarity with the craft. This might seem obvious enough, yet this point was singled out by artisans as significant, resulting in the impossibility for their clients to ever properly understand their work. Although everything is given to see, full understanding, or full skilled vision, can never take place for anyone who does not actually practice the craft. There are several ways in which the power derived from the artisans fundamental capacity to see, and clients failure to see, became manifest. I will give just one example here. I have mentioned the problem of forgery in the zisha art world. Often, a collector or museum representative will seek the assistance of artisans to determine the authenticity of an item in their

5 collection. One artisan for instance told me that he could immediately recognise, with a single glance, his former master s style. For many years he had worked in the same workshop, and necessarily, in his view, he knew better than anyone his master s works. Collectors seemed to accept the greater authority of artisans when they sought their opinions on the authenticity of items in their collection. Arjun Appadurai (1986) argued that the slowing down or stopping the flow of circulation of commodities were to be understood as acts of power in regimes of value. This is what artisans are doing, both in controlling visual access to their work, and in discourse, by stressing the fundamental disparities between their clients and their own capacity to see the craft. Conclusion To conclude, I suspect that the importance of revealing methods of production is a relatively new phenomenon in Dingshu. Traditional methods of production become valuable precisely when a craft becomes traditional, and by this I mean when it can be compared and contrasted with something modern, in this case the widespread use of the plaster mould. Traditional techniques, from their complexity, enable this discourse on seeing and understanding, as they are contrasted with the simplicity (or so it is argued) made possible by the use of plaster moulds. The agency of the artisan is therefore fundamentally about the drawing of visual boundaries, training the eye to see contrasts, pointing at the common to reveal the exclusive. The senses need to be understood as fundamentally embodied and situated, as Grasseni has argued. But the further point I wanted to make was that these embodied and situated senses also operate within regimes of value, and as such are manipulated in negotiations of power. References Appadurai, Arjun Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilley, Roy The visibility and invisibility of production among Senegalese craftsmen. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(4): Grasseni, Cristina Skilled vision: an apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics. Social Anthropology 12(1): Introduction. In Skilled visions: between apprenticeship and standards, ed. Cristina Grasseni. New York: Berghahn Books.