Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots : The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000 / Jacob Eyferth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eyferth, Jacob, author.

Series:

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 314.

Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 314

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Paper industry--China--History.

Paper industry.

Paper industry--China--Jiajiang Xian--History.

Physical Description:

1 recurso online (xiv, 335 p. )

Distribution:

Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2009.

Other Title:

The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000

Place of Publication:

Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution--understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations--was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.The larger context for this study is the "rural-urban divide": the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Introduction

Locations of Skill

Community and Kinship in the Jiajiang Hills

Class and Commerce

Artisans into Peasants

Papermakers on the Socialist Road, 1949 to 1958

The Great Leap Famine and Rural Deindustrialization

The Return to Household Production

Paper Trade and Village Industries in the Reform Era

The Jiadangqiao Stele

Conclusion

Character List for Selected Chinese Names and Terms

Glossary of Selected Papermaking Terms

Main Paper Types and Their Markets in the Twentieth Century

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Harvard East Asian Monographs.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-313) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68417-487-2

OCLC:

644150562

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781684174874 DOI