COSEM-UA 127 - Consuming China, Past and Present

Institution:

New York University

Subject:

Description:

Material culture and consumption in China from imperial times to the present. This course explores some of the ways in which commerce and consumerism have flourished in China despite various potentially countervailing factors, including Confucians' presumed aversion to trade, Buddhist and Daoist renunciations of material things, wartime deprivations under the Republic, rising egalitarianism, and Communist Party denunciations of bourgeois ideals of consumption. We will investigate such aspects as clothing and cosmetics; houses and gardens; art collecting and connoisseurship; books and publishing; food and narcotics; opera and theatre. While illuminating Chinese social and cultural life, including aspects of continuity or change over several centuries, the course also introduces students to theoretical concepts about modernity's relationship to the world of goods and consumption, and considers whether and to what extent those concepts, formulated in a largely western context, may or may not be applicable to China.

Credits:

4.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nyu.edu

Phone Number:

(212) 998-1212

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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