ABSTRACT
The argument for this chapter was triggered by a moment during fieldwork in the town of Yingge, the main center of craft and industrial ceramics production in Taiwan. It explores ways in which two concerns of the anthropology of craft and material culture can be brought together, namely the interest in the embodied dimensions of making craft with skill, and in the way craft objects are agentive in the definition of meanings linked to work, means of production, and nationhood. One of the main purposes of developing the industry, for the Japanese, was to produce items of daily use for export to Japan. The main production method at that time was the jiggering and jollying method, associated today with industrial mass production, which enables the mechanical production of objects, notably rice bowls, using a plaster mold rotating on a lathe. The chapter discusses the division of labor as it operates in Yingge and its implications for relationships between producers.
