Nonproducing Skills: Failure, Maintenance, Recycling, and Transport in Early Modern East Asia

This workshop examines skills that have been overlooked in the literature of craftsmanship and artisanal knowledge. “Nonproducing” skills underscore labor and technical strategies devised to manage the unpredictable human-material interaction that arose in the course of production. The organizers aim to bring the study of skills into conversation with emerging concepts, to contextualize Ming material culture and technology in the transnational and connected history of East Asia and beyond, and to publish select papers.