Text and Labor in Asian Construction, Transportation, and Infrastructure
Workshop organisé par le Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (université de Chicago), dans le cadre du projet Knowing and Doing: Text and Labor in Asian Handwork.
Caroline Bodolec (CCJ-CECMC) est membre invité du projet et participe au workshop.
“Handwork”—broadly construed to include farm work, construction, as well as other crafts and skills that sustain material life—relies on various forms of knowing in order to train the hand to perform the work. This “knowing,” which may be tacit or explicit, individually embodied or widely shared, constitutes the focus of our investigation. In the third and last of three symposia, we look at the relationship of textual traditions and handwork in the case of construction, transportation, and infrastructure in modern and premodern Asia.
Date
- Samedi 5 novembre – Dimanche 6 novembre 2016
Lieu
- Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue – Chicago, Illinois 60637
Caroline Bodolec participera, le samedi 5 novembre 2016, avec Adam Sargent (Université de Chicago) à la session 1 : Construction.
Résumé
The building trades worldwide have always been associated with secret lore and arcane knowledge. In Asia as in Europe, carpenters and masons were assumed to possess dangerous skills: by altering the proportions of a door frame they could invite fortune or misfortune; by placing a ridge pole in this or that way, they could ensure prosperity and progeny or cause the owners’ early deaths. Much construction work does indeed require advance planning, measurement, and a knowledge of numbers and proportions – skills that may have been rare enough in the preindustrial world to be associated with magic. Such skills could be passed on orally in the form of formulas and jingles, or written down in scrapbooks. Much building knowledge, however, may never have been codified; builders worked with clay and mud, for example, may have relied more on an embodied sense of form than on verbal rules and prescriptions. Modern building techniques, of course, are highly formalized, but here too, it is the builder’s eyes and hands that translate the architect’s blueprint into concrete shape. This panel will explore the intersection between formal plans, semi-formalized craft lore, and individually embodied knowledge in different building sites in Asia.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (2 novembre 2016). Text and Labor in Asian Construction, Transportation, and Infrastructure. . Consulté le 17 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mft3
