Awards
2009 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China (2007)
In his book Artisans in Early Imperial China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), Anthony J. Barbieri-Low investigates the contexts for artisanal production in the Qin (221–207 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties, incorporating an enormous range of archaeological, textual, and aesthetic evidence. His interdisciplinary approach is fueled in large part by the excavation of Qin and Han tombs during the 1970s and 1980s, which have yielded more than 3,000 texts, including legal documents, mathematical, medical, and philosophical texts, calendars, and even handbooks on divination. These provide information about early imperial Chinese society, its structure, and its values; and about its economy and market, including discoveries about taxation, sales contracts, and the labor pool—from training to performance evaluation.
This book is a magisterial study of the myriad and mostly anonymous artisans of early imperial China, from the men and women who worked for the royal court to the indentured workers in prison and slave camps. Barbieri-Low examines the lives of those who crafted objects as diverse as lacquer bowls, stone funerary monuments, bronze lamps, ceramic sculpture, and wall paintings. In a beautifully flowing style, he writes about the role of artisans in society and at work, from the technical processes they used to the clear evidence for mass production and modular design, and from quality control to advertising in the marketplace. He combines an interdisciplinary approach and contextualization of the artisans with a careful discussion of specific works of art and their production. Yet the author goes far beyond materialist analysis, adding an often overlooked human dimension to an already brilliant synthesis of social history, archaeology, anthropology, and aesthetics. He considers who these artisans were, how they lived, how they worked, how they marketed and sold their works and to whom, and how their contemporaries regarded them.
A work of great erudition and exemplary scholarship, Artisans in Early Imperial China reflects the author’s depth of knowledge in Chinese history, literature, art, and epigraphy, as well as his breadth of research in economics, anthropology, aesthetics, archaeology, and art history. An elegant and skillful writer, Barbieri-Low presents his arguments in a well-structured, readable, and engaging manner. There is a beautiful flow and connective quality to the prose, enhanced by the high quality of the book’s production. Although it is clearly aimed at scholars in early Chinese history, art, and archaeology, Artisans in Early Imperial China has a great deal to offer to art historians in many other fields, particularly in its methodology and organization. A thoroughly welcomed addition to the social history of art, the book will appeal to scholars as well as to lay readers interested in comparative cultural and labor history, art, and archaeology.
Jury: Carol Mattusch, George Mason University, chair; Elizabeth C. Mansfield, National Humanities Center and New York University; Susan Platt, independent scholar, Seattle; Perri Lee Roberts, Florida State University; Marianna Shreve Simpson, independent scholar, Baltimore; and David Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago.
