Living on bamboo

This book charts the social transformation of a community of rural artisans in Sichuan during the 20th century. The village is located in Jiajiang County, between Chengdu and Leshan. Traditionally, local residents have made their living by hand-making paper from naturally occurring bamboo, forming distinct kinship networks and community structures around this core skill. The topic of "skill" weaves throughout the book through two interrelated threads: technical and social. By focusing on the details of a single skilled labor, the author seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the rural people's lived world.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jiajiang's handmade papermaking has faced a series of significant challenges: changes of dynasties, wars, revolutions, collectivization, the concept and practice of modernization, reform and opening up, and marketization. Each of these major social changes, occurring within the broader context of the "urban-rural divide," has forced papermakers to redefine their identities both technically and socially. This book traces the shifts in the distribution of knowledge over a century, which has led to a massive shift in control of skills from rural areas to urban areas, from primary producers to management elites, and from women to men. In the author's view, papermaking skills are a resource, an object of distribution and contestation. From this unique perspective, the author uses the case of a traditional craft to explore the larger question: how modern processes such as revolution, the founding of the People's Republic of China, and marketization transformed rural China in the 20th century.

2024-05-01

江苏人民出版社

Think Tank

340

9787214290564