Regarding Labor from the Perspective of Materiality: An Ethnography of Fireworks Manufacturing Industry

Abstract (English)

This study is grounded in long-term fieldwork conducted in the Xiang-Gan border region of China—a historically revolutionary area. Focusing on huapao (fireworks and firecrackers), a cultural derivative of gunpowder (one of ancient China’s Four Great Inventions), it investigates how huapao have affected landscapes, labor practices, and moral ethics, while representing the image weaved by the materiality of huapao, its laborers, the rural industry and the local world. The study reveals that the materiality of huapao enables its workers to break the dichotomies of agriculture and industry, danger and safety, and tradition and modernity, and to forge an integrated way of life that defies conventional categorizations.

Theoretically, engaging with "the material turn," the study asks: Given the intimacy of fireworks and firecrackers to the local people, how might a non-human-centric perspective of the local world yield alternative conclusions? Further，based on the material perspective, how can the classic Marxist concept of the factory in labor studies be revisited in terms of an “ontological perception” of a specific substance (huapao)？Methodologically，the research experiments with a literary ethnographic approach, probing how anthropological "ways of seeing" can be textually rendered with maximal fidelity. By foregrounding sensory and embodied experiences, it challenges traditional ethnographic representations，which also conveys through such writing what kind of world a certain substance is deeply integrated with people.