The Craft of Mud-making: Cropscapes, Time, and History

I am honored to receive this award, and most grateful to SHOT for this and the many other rewards and pleasures the society has given me, ever since the legendary Mel Kranzberg published my first-ever article, on Chinese plows, in Technology and Culture in 1978.¹ At that point I had been working for five years on the history of agriculture in China, so I was already a historian of mud, and ever since I have remained fascinated by the material affordances and exigencies of mud-making, and by the place of this humble craft in history. This evening I would like to offer some reflections on mud as a useful medium for a historian of technology to think about the plural temporalities of the material practices we study, including how short-span technical processes and rhythms might be woven into the mesh of history.

I begin with some general remarks on materiality and temporality, and on mud-making as a practice of historical significance, in particular its role in shaping specific cropscapes (a term to which I return in a moment). I then offer a sequence of personal encounters with mud as a historical phenomenon that unfolded through my career as a historian of agriculture. I begin with the millet cropscapes that were the material foundation of the early Chinese state, and around which a sophisticated system of dry-farming developed. Next I move to the rice cropscape of Kelantan, Malaysia, where I did a year's fieldwork just as the technological packages of the Green Revolution were being introduced in the mid-1970s; here I focus on timing to ask how the new cropping rhythms affected the transition. My third case is the rice cropscapes of southern China in the late imperial era, gendered landscapes in which women's rhythms of silk-making were given equal weight to the timing of rice-growing by men. In each case I outline the multiple intermeshed temporalities that kept the cropscape working. I conclude my talk with a brief reflection on the longue durée of each of those cropscapes and on mud-making practices as an example of the evolving materialities that attract so much attention from historians today.

1. Mud-making and Time

Charting temporalities and how they are interwoven, connecting micro- to macro-; short-term to long-term; lines, broken or unbroken, to cycles or loops, is obviously a central concern for historians. For historians of technology, interesting questions arise about how and whether longer-term trends or transitions connect to the shorter-span time-registers specific to particular technologies. Almost every technological change has a chronological impact: from time-saving machines to industrial plans or the logistics of just-in-time production; from the transformations of time-consciousness induced by the disciplines of factory time, railway time, or Taylorism, to the exhilaration of speed experienced in trains, cars, or elevators; or the sense of history shifting, the dread before-and-after of Hiroshima, or the half-forgotten pace of life before the internet.

One register of temporality that necessarily concerns historians of technology along with chemists, physicists, and biologists, farmers and cooks, artists and smiths, is the pace and rhythms of matter itself. How long does a particular ore take to melt, or a casting to cool? When should I start adding oil to the egg yolks, how fast, and at what point has the mayonnaise taken? Timing our interventions in such material processes is a basic skill prerequisite to all the transformations of our environment that nowadays we call technology.

As a historian of agriculture, one basic technique that has particularly captured my attention is mud-making. Mud-making, the controlled marrying of crumbs of soil with drops of water to achieve a desired consistency, is a technical process fundamental to building human worlds: farming and pottery, building and painting, mayonnaise and calligraphy all involve mud-making. The importance of this transformative technique is honored in a profusion of creation myths in which a deity fashions the first humans from clay.²

Agriculture, along with ceramics, is the field of...