This project explores the occupation of “firemen”: the workers who were in charge of heating a kiln to a certain temperature, maintaining that temperature for a certain length of time, and managing the cooling process. This is a specific “occupation,” different from the men who built the kiln or created the ceramics to be fired inside the kiln. Such occupations were all part of a larger group associated with making ceramics (including porcelain, but many other materials were also fired in kilns, such as bricks and roof tiles), but depending on our definition of a “potter,” the many people involved in the manufacture of ceramics were not all “potters.” I am interested here specifically in the occupation of the firemen and questions such as, What was their technique, and what was the object of their technique? These questions originate with a Chicago-based sociologist Everett Cherrington Hughes (1897–1983), whose framework we use in this project, especially by way of the discussion of Hughes as it applies to historians presented in Sarah Schneewind's book The Social Drama of Daily Work: A Manual for Historians (Routledge, 2024), available open access. The UTMOST project (Uncovering the Traces of Ming Occupations through Sociological Theory) has many collaborators and a series of meetings are planned to discuss this work at the University of Warwick in July 2026 and at the MPIWG in May 2027.
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