Technologies of Everyday Life in China

(4 Credits)

What do cameras, chairs, cigarettes, calendar posters, and toothpaste tubes have in common? They are all objects that have, in addition to their practical uses, ideological, political, social, and economic meanings. This seminar investigates these meanings, with particular attention to the roles of science and technology in shaping material life. Focusing on late-imperial and modern China, we will examine how objects drove historical processes such as migration, industrialization, and the formation of social and professional communities—from papermakers to photographers. We will also explore how objects functioned as symbols and agents of modernization, as well as sites for the production and preservation of technical knowledge and skill. How, for example, did the camera—as both a scientific instrument and a visual technology—change how practitioners performed ancestral rituals and understood their bodies, their natural environments, and the supernatural world? Throughout, we will focus on the relationships between people, bodies, and things within their environments, and on questions of skill, technique, and technology as ways of knowing and making. Following three introductory sessions on these approaches, we will proceed through a series of tightly focused case studies. Each week will be dedicated to a single object, beginning with chairs, clothing, and textiles, and ending with cosmetics and electronics. In addition to books and articles, students will read short stories and poetry, examine images and contemporary artwork, watch films, listen to podcasts, and study material objects.