Maris Gillette

During the EURIAS fellowship year I will finish my manuscript Firing China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Workers. The town of Jingdezhen, known to many as China’s porcelain capital, is arguably the world’s most important ceramics industry.  Ever since Jingdezhen porcelain caught the attention of the Song dynasty Jingde emperor (who gave the town its name) in 1004, successive Chinese governments have patronized and supported Jingdezhen's ceramics industry.  In Firing China I trace the long history of government involvement in the town, arguing that state intervention in porcelain production has been the single most important factor affecting the lives of local ceramics producers.  How and where ceramists work, who they work with and what they do, how much they make and how they view their jobs, what they aspire to and what values they profess, are now and have for centuries been directly influenced by the nature of government intervention in porcelain production.

Each chapter of Firing China begins with a dramatic fictional narrative about people who make or use Jingdezhen porcelain, to enhance readers’ personal identification with the historical and ethnographic materials on which the book is based and convey a sense of what it felt like to make, own, or sell porcelain at specific historical moments.  I use archival records in Chinese and English, oral histories (in Chinese), ethnographic field research that I conducted in Jingdezhen between 2004 and 2010, and secondary scholarship to show how the relationship between the central government and Jingdezhen’s ceramists shaped porcelain producers’ opportunities, aspirations, values, and social practices from imperial times to the 21st century.  In the first chapter I consider state support from 1004 to 1850.  Each subsequent chapter focuses on a progressively shorter period: the industry’s decline from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, the high socialist period, and the early days of privatization in the part-command, part-market economy, until I conclude with 2004-2010, the period during which I conducted ethnography in Jingdezhen.  Firing China not only presents the struggles and resourcefulness, transformations and enduring traditions of Jingdezhen’s ceramists as they fire china under successive government regimes, it also combines history with ethnography, story-telling with nonfiction, and economic research with anthropology to analyze the history and economy of this famous and influential industry.