Learning to See Value: Exchange and the Politics of Vision in a Chinese Craft

Abstract

This article explores the relation between value and vision, or the ways in which seeing, seeing in a particular way, and failing to see, might all have economic consequences. I address these issues in the context of a discourse I heard from artisans producing zisha pottery, in the Jiangsu Province of China. This discourse concerned the consequences of the inability of purchasers of zisha pottery to ‘see’ the craft, and the need for clients to be taught to distinguish between apparently very similar pots, with the aim of promoting ‘traditional’ methods. The observation of interactions between artisans and their clients led me to suggest that one can fruitfully borrow insights from the anthropology of the senses and of learning to inform anthropological theories of value.

Keywords:

• Value
• vision
• senses
• China
• craft

Acknowledgments

This article is based on doctoral research and 12 months’ fieldwork conducted in the Jiangsu Province, China, in 2003–4, with brief return visits in 2006 and 2008. Doctoral research was made possible by the Sutasoma Award (Royal Anthropological Institute), the Anthony Wilkin Fund (Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge), the Ling Roth Fund and Richards Fund (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge). My thanks to Charles Stafford for his comments on a draft of this article, and to the two anonymous reviewers of Ethnos who provided some very helpful suggestions on a first draft. A truncated version of this article was presented at the conference London Anthropology Day, Goldsmiths College, 13 June 2008. I thank the participants for some very useful comments. This article was written whilst I was holding an esrc Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the London School of Economics. The names of informants that appear in this article are pseudonyms.

Notes

I have preferred the term ‘client’ to ‘customer’ in most of the text to give a sense of the often enduring relations that are established with artisans – relations that are more than simply commercial.