Commentary to Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming: The “Perils of Periodization” and Beyond: Tracing Objects across Spatiotemporal Boundaries

In their article, “The Perils of Periodization: Roman Ceramics in Britain after 400 CE,” published in the fifth issue of Fragments, Keith J. Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Robin Fleming bring our attention to the “perils of periodization” in British historical archeology.[1] Using late- and post-Roman period ceramic potsherds discovered across lowland Britain, they show that naming the early fifth century as “Anglo-Saxon” does not do justice to the dynamic material culture of the time. The ceramic pots, on the contrary, demonstrate that the post-Roman material culture was still under the influence of Roman ceramic production. Although they reveal a diminishing proficiency in Roman ceramic craft methods, these pots also exemplify diverse adaptations of their techniques and styles by indigenous and immigrant communities. Using a wittingly subversive label (“slightly odd pots”) that highlights the awkward position of these pieces in time and place, the authors argue that the pots embody both changes and continua in ceramic technology, mode of production, scale of industry, and material culture in this transitional period. As such, they resist a simplistic label as either “Roman” or “Anglo-Saxon”—hence the “perils” of conventional periodization.

Besides its in-depth discussion of periodization, the article raises some important questions about the role of things as both tools of historical research and agents of knowledge-making. How does a history written from the perspective of material things revise the conventional narrative framed in terms of political ruptures? How does it challenge linearity in historical accounts? And, to what extent are these questions relevant and heuristically useful outside early British archaeology/history? Expanding the perspective of Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming, in this commentary I will explore the significance of boundary-crossing objects in historical research and the novel connections that they allow us to make.

Objects as Tools of Historical Research

At a public lecture given at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in March 2018, historian of science Dagmar Schäfer proposed an intriguing perspective on epistemic changes in Chinese history.[2] Conventionally, major changes in the field of science and technology in premodern China have been understood as outcomes of dynastic transformations: that is, transformations of state institutions and their bureaucratic apparatuses, elite networks, and social infrastructures. Without downplaying the importance of such political changes, however, Schäfer shifted attention to the domain of material things in order to suggest an alternative way of looking at changes in the orientation of knowledge. To make this point, she used as an example an industry of tremendous importance in premodern China—silk production.[3] Through a close examination of silk textiles produced across different dynasties, she argued that a gradual yet noticeable change occurred between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries, when the concentration of knowledge shifted from the raising of silkworms to the manipulation of silk fibers. This transformation, she contended, could not be grasped with reference to dynastic changes; nor was it visible through a purely textual mode of historical research. On the contrary, it had to be understood in terms of a continuum of institutions and resource management systems across dynastic divides and it was most clearly read on the bodies of the material things produced by them.

Although they work on different regions and periods and in different disciplines, Schäfer’s argument has a lot in common with the one presented by Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming. They are cautious about the pitfalls inherent in discourses of rupture, which have produced essentializing views of the subjects of their research. Both work to show that change is not synchronous across different sectors of a society, and that conventional periodizations lose their efficacy in the face of everyday material practices. Beyond their shared concerns about periodization, moreover, both studies use objects to substantiate their arguments. For Schäfer, textiles play key roles in tracing where and how knowledge was produced and put to use, while ceramics are central to Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming’s efforts to restore millions of Britons to the picture of fifth-century post-Roman Britain. Their work compels us to look at artifacts not merely as sets of passive sources packed with data but as active agents in the formation of fresh insights and new intellectual claims.

As studies of material culture point out, objects shed light on worldly experiences often inaccessible through written words, and therefore they are important guides in our exploration of the undocumented historical past. Although many of them have disappeared over time, many others have survived, drawing our attention to their resilient materiality, the complex trajectories of their lives, and the human memories and feelings deposited in them. Admittedly, such bundled information is not easy to unpack. An old silk handkerchief with an initial embroidered at one corner, for example, might simultaneously hint at the personal relationship between the maker/embroiderer and the owner, the socioeconomic status or bodily memories of the user, the intangible skills of the weaver, dyer, and embroiderer, as well as the contemporary fashion at the time of its production. The seemingly transient and elusive nature of such information is crystalized in the materiality of the handkerchief, and it is, just like the colorful light reflected by the multifaceted surface of a crystal, complex, multivalent, and tantalizing. Yet, the complex nature is still worth exploring because, in playing this intellectual hide-and-seek, the object communicates with us. In other words, borrowing art historian Jonathan Hay’s phrase, the object thinks with us to produce new intellectual sensitivities and curiosities.[4]

Objects as Mediators of Norms

In a particularly intriguing part of their article, Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming ask, “What makes a pot a pot?” On the one hand, as the authors argue, the question appears not to be meaningful because the answer undoubtedly differs across time and place. It is, however, an important one because it hints at the significance of accepted norms in a given time and place. A pot that deviates from the established forms, materials, and methods of production is considered exceptional, or “slightly odd.” Yet, a norm is a historical construct and, more often than not, is subject to retrospective and reductive thinking. Articulating the contradictory traits that constitute the pots, the authors show that there was not a single norm in ceramic production in fifth-century lowland Britain. On the contrary, these objects materialize the trading between diverse sets of norms in technology, materiality, and aesthetics, which, in turn, points to a wide range of interests, desires, and strategies held by the makers and users of these pots. The presence of such an irreducible past on its body might be the most intriguing aspect of an object’s existence.

Perhaps a better way to say this is as follows: objects are always located at the junctures of relations. They link makers and users, sellers and buyers, communities and individuals, humans and non-humans, economic and cultural forms of capital, institutions and the market, science and industry, ideas and materials.[5] Through their social and physical movements, moreover, they have constantly eluded and redrawn cultural, political, temporal, and geographical boundaries. As a result, objects are amenable to unceasing identity-building and knowledge-making. They betray the contingency of norms rooted in temporal and spatial specificities.

In this vein, both Schäfer’s work on silk and Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming’s study of ceramics skillfully navigate the nonlinear histories in which material things interweave ruptured segments of time. Their narratives capture, at once, subtle fractures within the largely unobstructed practice of production as well as enduring systems amidst far-reaching sociopolitical changes. Silk production, for example, was reliant upon the continuous operation of the Imperial Textile Manufacturies across dynastic transitions, just as Roman-style ceramics were continuously made by local artisans within changing socioeconomic environments. Over time, however, silk technology shifted its focus from sericulture to textile manufacture, and likewise, the specific techniques and materials of ceramic craft changed amidst a broad adherence to the classical form. At least implicitly, however, Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Fleming’s article is not only about the blurring of temporal divides but also about the bridging of spatial ones. In the last part of this essay, I will therefore turn to an exploration of how the study of objects can bring meaningful insights to the understanding of cross-border interactions.

Contact Zones and the Spatial Movement of Objects

If the diachronic continuities embodied by objects raise the question of periodization, their geographical travels challenge the static coherence of spatially defined boundaries. In particular, so-called contact zones, where objects cross one or more cultural or geographical borders, provide fertile ground to explore the question of norms and identities in knowledge systems and material cultures. Historically, contact zones proliferated alongside the travels of both animate creatures and inanimate things.[6] They were formed at the nodes of overland and maritime trades, in commercial hubs, through pilgrimage and tourism, through military campaigns and conquests, and symbolically through layers of networking and mediation. Contact zones were not just locations where preexisting cultural entities encountered each other. They were sites where the boundaries of such entities were constantly redrawn, where their identities were redefined through interaction, and where such processes gave rise to the emergence of new values, sensitivities, and knowledge. Objects that were brought to, made in, and taken out of such contact zones were naturally multivalent and polysemic. Through negotiations and exchanges, they challenged and reshaped the norms held by a single group or entity.

For example, Canton (present-day Guangzhou), a prosperous port city located on the southeastern coast of China, was a major contact zone in the early modern world. Connected via the South China Sea to the maritime trades in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and as far as the Caribbean to the east, people and things constantly moved in and out of the metropole during the Ming and Qing eras (1368–1911), the country’s last two imperial dynasties. The vibrancy of Canton’s commerce was such that a local notable named Qu Dajun (1630–1696) compared the numerous foreigners who roamed around the city’s trading district to “spokes of a wheel meeting at the center.”[7] Famous Chinese commodities—teas from Yunnan, silks from the Lower Yangzi River, and porcelain from the Jingdezhen kilns—were brought by local merchant associations to Canton and sold there to traders who had come from all over the world. In this contact zone, commodities had to meet plural standards and tastes held by different trading parties. For example, the so-called Kraak porcelain,[8] which was sold to Portuguese and Dutch merchants, was generally of a quality frowned upon by domestic Chinese consumers. In early modern Europe, however, this porcelain yielded a frenzy for Chinese blue-and-whites, and it was thus embraced by Chinese artisans and merchants as a valuable export product. Alongside the crisscrossing flows of ideas and commodities, therefore, existing norms were continuously tested and modified, which, in turn, gave rise to new forms of commodities.

Figure 1, for example, is a handsome chair made by Cantonese cabinetmakers in the eighteenth century. It is made of an Asian rosewood loosely called hongmu in Chinese, and its unique design conforms to that of the so-called corner chair that became fashionable in Britain in the early eighteenth century. The intriguing design and origin notwithstanding, a more enticing question concerns the chair’s construction. Unlike chairs in early modern China, which were made with the principles of symmetry and angularity, the oddly curved seat of this chair is propped by four legs of uneven size and structure. As such, it does not meet the norm of a chair in Chinese convention. How, then, did Chinese artisans craft this “slightly odd” piece? Without going into too much detail, the artisan cleverly mobilized his knowledge of joinery to suit the foreign form and style of the chair. Because the legs are asymmetrical,[9] gravity is distributed unevenly when the chair is being used. In order to address this problem, the artisan not only increased the size of the front leg but also chose a special joint seldom used in chair construction (Figure 2). Adapted from an existing use in abutting much heavier and ornate members of large tables and daybeds, this joint—called a butt-joint (qiyatiao jiehe)—was chosen based upon the artisan’s adroit analysis of spatial structure within this new context of problem-solving.

Figure 1: An export corner chair. Eighteenth century, Canton. Private collection.

Figure 2: Detail of butt-joint.

The conscious and cautious choice of the artisan and the resultant merging of European form and Chinese technique allow the object to resist a singular cultural identity. The chair showcases, on the contrary, a subtle negotiation between divergent norms in technology, aesthetics, materiality, and comportment for the purpose of securing profits and facilitating the work process in the bustling market of an early modern entrepôt. Much like ancient Romano-British ceramics, therefore, the eccentric nature of this chair and of many other contemporary objects produced in Canton offers a unique vantage point from which to observe how norms and conventions were actively mobilized and adapted to produce something new.

When we say such border-crossing objects have agency, we are referring in some way to their ability to bring forth knowledge, activities, and feelings that are taken for granted and seldom given voice in everyday life. The lingering Roman potting techniques and their application to “unorthodox” pots in post-Roman Britain, the reclassification of silk from horticulture to manufactural technology in the late imperial Chinese taxonomy of knowledge, and European furniture produced with Chinese joinery in early modern Canton all underline the heightened moments of cultural and epistemic friction and negotiation produced by objects moving across spatiotemporal boundaries. Such boundary-crossings, inherent in the nature of objects, tell fascinating stories that do not prioritize a single perspective or set of values. Rather than portraying encounters between well-defined discrete entities, these stories reveal recalcitrant heterogeneities in them, processes of adaptation and transformation that take place among them, and the emergence of new things and ideas through them.

Notes

1. Keith J. Fitzpatrick-Matthews and Robin Fleming, “The Perils of Periodization: Roman Ceramics in Britain after 400CE,”Fragments 5 (2016). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/frag/9772151.0005.001/—perils-of-periodization-roman-ceramics-in-britain-after-400?rgn=main;view=fulltext (last visited May 15, 2018).

2. Dagmar Schafer, “Politics and Scientific Change in Dynastic China,” public lecture at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong (March 20, 2018).

3. In premodern China, sericulture was seen as a pillar of state revenue as well as an embodiment of moral economy and the ideal social order. Its socioeconomic and political significance was epitomized in the widespread axiom, “Men plough and women weave (nan geng nü zhi).”

4. Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 61–90.

5. Even fine art, often considered the purest form of material culture, straddles the porous realms of artistic expression and social recognition. Throughout history, art pieces have been largely produced through commissions between artists and patrons and have functioned as means of financial investment and class distinction. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, borrowing the words of Baudrillard, illustrates how art auctions in modern Western societies institutionalize a Bourdieuan mode of distinction based upon non-transparent values such as tastes and expertise and through closed exchanges among peers. See The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–45.

6. As a theoretical concept, contact zone and its variants are certainly not confined to the field of history. It has been widely explored in the fields of anthropology, comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of science. For works conceptually relevant to the current essay, see Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), and Ángel Rama, Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, trans. David Frye (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

7. Qu Dajun, Guangdong xinyu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1985), 475.

8. A type of Chinese blue and white porcelain made in Jingdezhen for export.

9. The rear three are framed together with stiles and a top rail while the front leg is left independent.