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ICS Lecture: Jacob Eyferth “Women’s work and the politics of homespun in socialist China, 1949-76”

April 4, 2014
4:00PM - 5:30PM
Jennings Hall, room 140 (1735 Neil Avenue)

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Add to Calendar 2014-04-04 16:00:00 2014-04-04 17:30:00 ICS Lecture: Jacob Eyferth “Women’s work and the politics of homespun in socialist China, 1949-76” Part of the Institute for Chinese Studies "Understanding China -- Its Roots and New Frontiers Lecture Series" “Women’s work and the politics of homespun in socialist China, 1949-76” Abstract:For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spin and weave at home. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful and outdated, because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state, and because the entire population was in theory supplied with cloth through the rationing system. In this talk, I look at the reasons for the survival of handloom weaving, including interlocking scarcities of grain, cash, cloth, and cotton that forced rural women to make cloth from whatever little cotton they could scrape together, as well as the many ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and socially prescribed gift exchanges. More generally, I focus on concrete artifacts (cloth) and mundane practices (textile work) in order to overcome an abstract and reified understanding of socialism and to better understand how socialism worked in practice and how it changed the daily lives of rural people. Biography:Jacob Eyferth, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, is a social historian of China with research interests in the life and work experience of non-elite people throughout the twentieth century. Most of his work has focused on the countryside and on the mid-twentieth century, c. 1920-1970. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of rural papermakers in Sichuan. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China, that uses cloth and clothing as a lens through which to analyze how the monumental changes of the twentieth century – revolution, collectivization, industrialization, etc. – transformed the lives of rural women.  Jennings Hall, room 140 (1735 Neil Avenue) East Asian Studies Center easc@osu.edu America/New_York public

Part of the Institute for Chinese Studies "Understanding China -- Its Roots and New Frontiers Lecture Series"

 “Women’s work and the politics of homespun in socialist China, 1949-76”

 

Abstract:
For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spin and weave at home. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful and outdated, because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state, and because the entire population was in theory supplied with cloth through the rationing system. In this talk, I look at the reasons for the survival of handloom weaving, including interlocking scarcities of grain, cash, cloth, and cotton that forced rural women to make cloth from whatever little cotton they could scrape together, as well as the many ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and socially prescribed gift exchanges. More generally, I focus on concrete artifacts (cloth) and mundane practices (textile work) in order to overcome an abstract and reified understanding of socialism and to better understand how socialism worked in practice and how it changed the daily lives of rural people.


 

Biography:
Jacob Eyferth, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, is a social historian of China with research interests in the life and work experience of non-elite people throughout the twentieth century. Most of his work has focused on the countryside and on the mid-twentieth century, c. 1920-1970. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of rural papermakers in Sichuan. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China, that uses cloth and clothing as a lens through which to analyze how the monumental changes of the twentieth century – revolution, collectivization, industrialization, etc. – transformed the lives of rural women.