Date: 7th
September 2018 (Friday)
Time: 1:00 –
2:30 pm
Speaker: Louise
Allison CORT (Curator, Ceramics Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler
Gallery Smithsonian Institution)
Venue: Room
12 Humanities Building New Asia College, CUHK
Text: Wong Pui Lim (Research Assistant)
Potters
at work today in rural villages of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia,
and southern Yunnan province, PRC, make earthenware or stoneware for local and
regional markets. Although under pressure from various social and material
changes, these two basic types of ceramics still play important roles in local
food preparation, and storage and in religious rituals. The technologies
associated with their production reveal cultural continuities and boundaries
that are obscured by the commonplace classifications of populations on the
basis of language, ethnicity, or modern nationality. Ms. Louise Cort shared the
summarized result of a long-term research project about village based pottery
production in mainland Southeast Asia that took place between 1989 and 2010. It
is a collaborated field research with Dr. Leedom Lefferts that visited more
than two hundred communities, looking for distinctive patterns of productions
in these villages.
According to Ms. Cort, there are few
historical documents in mainland Southeast Asia. Most of the information about
the production is from excavations in Indonesia, Philippines or from shipwrecks
in particular. However, there is a big
gap in understanding why in the past ceramics were made in various part in
Southeast Asia. How it is organized beyond the scale of village
production? How these ceramics come to
be made? There are no written documents for how indigenous produce or how these
ceramics are revalued by their makers and users. Therefore, Ms. Cort conducted
this long-term field research by witnessing methods of pottery production to
fill evidence in the gap. What method did she use to conduct the research?
‘Just sit down and let things happen,' she
stated. She visited communities where potteries are still being made and
conducted informal interviews with the villages to understand practical
everyday use of this village-based produced pottery and for its local or
regional distribution. Through close observation and videotape recording of
potters at work, two fundamental patterns of production technology for
stoneware and seven patterns for earthenware were identified. Ms. Cort
emphasized the importance of not to edit the video or select a specific part of
the production process. Instead, the researchers documented the whole process
of the ceramics production process. Why is this so important? One big discovery
in the research is that there is a variety of way to make earthenware pot that
looks the same when they finish. By observing the whole process of pottery
production, there are various ways to make pottery. Even the product may look
the same in the end, their beginning can be very different. The project
identified 6 types of different ways in making earthenware pottery, naming from
A to F. Ms. Cort selected on type A, B and C to explain their patterns and
distributions. Type C is special because it used a way that is similar to make
stoneware potter at the very beginning. Therefore, it is key to understand the
production by seeing it from the beginning to the end.
Through her past experience and study in
Japan and India, Ms. Cort suggested that earthenware and stoneware ceramics
usually do not exist together in a community. One will usually take dominate
role and the other disappear. It is special in Southeast Asia that two
different kinds of ceramics exist in same time and same place in the community
and the market. They are also related to one another. Production of potters is
regarded as one of the means to earn money. There is a seasonal variation which
most people produced potters in the dry season when there is little or no rain
for farming. Some people will choose to join the work team to overseas instead
of producing ceramics.
Earthenware production is the work of
women in Ms. Cort’s study. It is used to store water or for cooking purpose.
One special thing about it is that people will place it near the main road of
the village which anyone walk pass can drink the water. This ritual still
exists even in large and modern cities in the region that pottery will be
placed at the door as decoration. Different shapes of potters are made to suit
different cooking needs, for instance, the pot for steaming rice is different
from those for steaming medicine.
Indigenous stoneware production of
mainland Southeast Asia is located at the interior (Thai) and coastal
(Vietnamese). Historically, two
different patterns of stoneware technologies were found in the region that is
not defined by a modern national border. Stoneware is the work of men in many
parts of the region, especially Northeast Thailand and Laos. In contrast, no
men make pottery in Vietnamese. As high temperature is required in the
production, people will use a kiln shared by the community in a rotation. People usually work as a team, one as the
shaper and the other as the spinner. It has a different role in storage. It is
used to store rainwater in dry seasons, rice, textile, alcohol and so on. Some
are for guest use only. Ms. Cort mentioned an interesting battle between the
host and the guest. A larger potter of drinking water with long straw will be
provided to the guest. The host will keep adding water into the potter while
the guest is drinking. The one who stops first will lose the game. The shape of
jars is designed for specific, practical use. Each of them has a distinctive
role in households that cannot be replaced.
In the end, Ms. Cort suggested that the activities and sites would have changed in a certain level after the project ended. She believed that the activities and sites will reduce compare to a decade ago. Therefore, she encouraged other researchers to carry on the studies for a better understanding to the ceramics and its peoples.
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