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Article ID: CBB312416239

Useful Work: State Demands and Craftsmen's Social Mobility in Fifteenth-Century China (April 2021)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 62
Issue: 2
Pages: 373-400

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/794369

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2021.0060

Publication Date: April 2021
Edition Details: Special Issue: Technology Is Global: The Useful and Reliable Knowledge Debate
Language: English

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Expertise Guilds Useful knowledge Technology and State Crafts and craftspeople Social networks Ming dynasty (China, 1368-1644) China

This article examines the relationship between practical expertise, political power, and social mobility in fifteenth-century China. Practices and concepts from that period have been reinterpreted in recent debates on Useful and Reliable Knowledge (URK), showing that elite intellectuals and politicians were concerned with the role of crafts and technology, that is, their usefulness for the imperial state. In this article I show how a rhetoric of useful work contributed to the disappearance of practitioners in state politics and their growing invisibility in historical records by the mid-Ming period.

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Associated with

Article Dagmar Schäfer; Simona Valeriani (April 2021) Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate. Technology and Culture (pp. 327-347). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB312416239/

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