Faculty: Research: Maris Boyd Gillette
Maris Boyd Gillette
My research examines how objects express identities and produce knowledge; how institutional discourses and individual sentiments combine to create memory; and how capitalism shapes cultural ideologies and social practice.
My first field work was in a Chinese Muslim neighborhood in a large city (Xi’an) in northwest China. In my book Between Mecca and Beijing I argued that Xi’an Muslims used consumption to establish collective identities in their neighborhood and city (including in relation to the dominant non-Muslim population), among other Muslims in China (including non-Chinese Central Asian Muslims), as citizens of the modernizing Chinese nation, and in relation to international Islam and the developed and developing world. Locals used particular goods to emphasize different facets of who they were in relation to these contexts.
For my next research, published in four articles, I combined psychoanalytic theory with ethnography. Using my northwest China materials, I examined how speakers, when they tell stories, produce idiosyncratic, subjective meanings from within cultural and discursive formations. I also investigated how the state and religious institutions frame cultural memory, thus shaping the sentiments narrators experience when they remember historical events.
I am an active curator, and consider this work central to my exploration of how objects are used to produce knowledge. One aspect of my curating and scholarship has been how anthropologists use photographs to produce reality effects to support their narratives about people and places. I have also examined how photographs exemplify relationships between photographers and their subjects. This work is based on early 20th-century photographs from northwest China taken by Frederick Wulsin, Owen Lattimore, and Hedda Morrison.
My current research is based in Jingdezhen, often called China’s porcelain capital. Jingdezhen’s porcelain industry has a 1000-year history of state intervention, which is most recently manifest in the government’s privatization and marketization policies. The introduction of capitalism has promoted new ideologies of entrepreneurship and the development of new skills. Contemporary Jingdezhen ceramists experience a new pressure to represent themselves as “self-made” artists and artisans. They emphasize porcelain production and distribution as being about relations between things, rather than persons. Their vision of the market as depersonalized and competitive facilitates deceptive practices such as copying and counterfeiting ceramic art. My first article on this subject will be published in the Danish art magazine Aziatische Kunst. I am preparing a second article and a book manuscript.