Abstract
Abstract
This chapter addresses the sensorial practice of touching and its centrality to the formation of Chinese “literati connoisseurship.” Drawing from ethnographic research between 2010 and 2016, it explores touching as embodying the sense of “being a literatus” among literati walnut connoisseurs in Beijing. An urban hobby often associated in Beijing with the lifestyle of the Qing dynasty’s Manchus, collecting literati walnuts has recently emerged as one of the most popular genres of cultural collecting currently being revived in the city’s folklore markets. Their natural texture, which makes them appear to have been artificially carved and etched into their unique shapes, renders these walnuts a highly desired commodity in Beijing’s expanding cultural collecting scene. This chapter examines the revival of literati connoisseurship as an embodied practice that is increasingly incorporated into the market of cultural collecting emergent in post-socialist China.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Reference42 articles.
1. Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience.;New Literary History,1988
2. C9P53Benjamin, Walter (2008). “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian.” In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by 235Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 254–256. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3. C9P54Brownell, Susan, and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey (2002). “Introduction: Theorizing Femininities and Masculinities.” In Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, 1–34. Berkeley: University of California Press.