It never fails. I go to an event that has either camping or daytime field-side pavilions where folks are lounging, or both, and I start to obsess about my own kit. And by “kit” I mean the various bits, bobs, and not-worn trappings that make an SCA experience magical.
I’ve bitten the bullet this fall and commissioned a friend to make some silk banners for me, and I have plans to make a canvas day-shade. My husband is making me a chair. I dipped my toes into research on glass in 8th century China to figure out what kind of pitcher to buy to decant Yuan Dynasty lemon bochet into. (Psst. I totally found one and I can’t wait until it gets here.)
Last year at Meridian Grand Tournament, I focused on getting the furnishing inside my pop-up canopy decent. I bought an outdoor rug with a passable pattern when it went on End-Of-Season clearance at Lowes, as well as some patio furniture cushions – both red. The cushions were big enough to work as floor cushions – and while most Tang Dynasty seating was, to the best of my knowledge, stools and other low-to-the-ground platforms, cushions were a quick and cheaper way to make my space inviting for others to come and sit with me. I also cut a high density foam mattress topper down to size to fit my army cot and swathed the whole thing in red sheets so that I could have a couch – not dissimilar to the platforms we see in variouspaintingsthroughoutChinesehistory. My husband made me a table. All in all, it was a decent set-up – and I’m still tweaking it.
One of the simplest, easiest things to do to make your surroundings feel more period is to cover the modern elements. Small stuff is easier than big stuff, like pouring your drink into a more period appropriate cup. But making/buying tables, chairs, or even those incredibly amazing wooden chest coolers takes a level of time, skill, or money that is scarce for a lot of SCAdians. But believe me – the people who have them didn’t go and get/make them all at once. Everyone is always tweaking their camp/day shade/indoor presence to be more comfortable – both in terms of use and in terms of aesthetic.
Do small things. You will gain confidence with these accomplishments, and be able to take on bigger and bigger tasks. It’s not quite “fake it ’til you make it” but it is in that same garden – only with a better root.
So what small things can you do? More importantly, how do you do them?
The SCA has a tendency to feel like you’re picking a “lane” to travel down – particularly when it comes to the Arts and Sciences vs. Fighting. If you do both, as several of my close friends do, and you seem to be paying more attention to one than the other, there are those who will interpret your split attention as not being “serious” about the pursuit of the thing you aren’t spending time on at that moment. Which, frankly, is a crock and a half. But that’s another post.
A&S and Fighting are like apples and oranges – they’re different, but they’re both fruit. Most groups hold a weekly fighter practice (sometimes more than once a week) that lasts anywhere from 1 1/2 to 4 hours. In my experience, groups that have an A&S or Project Night only hold them on a monthly basis.
I’ve talked about balance before on this blog, and how hard it can be to balance SCA projects, events, and goals with your modern life when you work, have small children, etc., and that the modern life always, always, always comes before the SCAdian stuff. This balance and my schedule makes it difficult for me to do things like the 100 Days of A&S Challenge – it just doesn’t work for me and my life at the moment.
While chatting with a friend who is prepping for war this week, it hit me that we don’t carve out time to “practice” our A&S the same way that fighters make a point to be at practice every week. So why not? How hard could it be to carve out 1 1/2-2 hours, once a week, to focus on your A&S? Read that book you just bought. Work on the project that’s collecting dust. Tell the people in your life that every Tuesday night from 6:30 – 8 PM, you’re doing this thing. If your local group has their A&S/Project Night monthly, consider making your “A&S Practice” the same day of the week and time, so you can join in.
Depending on your A&S, you could invite others to join you, as a weekly project night. A good chunk of my A&S time is me with my nose in a book taking notes, so that’s not really conducive to company or people chatting, so do what works best for you. The point is to practice. Practice your research. Practice your craft. Practice teaching (writing blog posts, articles for your newsletter, handouts to share, making videos etc.).
A&S is a skill – both the researching and the doing – that can be honed just like fighting.
This is an open invitation to SCAdians who have Non-Christian personas to aid me in an on-going project.
I hope to feature a series of articles here on my website – Ouyang’s Desk – regarding the portrayal of religion in SCA personas/research. This includes garments, accessories, names, bardic, and other outward active portrayals, as well as research that might be presented for display.
I am interested in showcasing what are modernly minority
religions, whether or not they were minorities in period or in a person’s
region of interest. The fact that they are minorities now means that the
majority of people do not have a good working knowledge of that religion and its
symbols and other indicators. I see this primarily with Islam, Judaism, Hinduism,
and Buddhism, but it could also be applied religions considered “pagan” by
period, Christian authorities.
For example – while interfaith marriage in Judaism was historically frowned upon (as it was in many religions), the concept of being “ethnically Jewish” is a Nazi concept, stemming from historic antisemitism (see the Nuremberg Race Laws). To assume that all Jews everywhere in period were the same is erroneous and problematic – Judaism in period, in terms of foods, dress, and culture, was not a monolith. Middle Eastern Jews, Spanish Jews, English Jews, even Jews in northwestern China had the same religion, but differed in terms of dress, music, food, and other aspects of culture that were informed by their ethnicity and region.
There is also thought and discussion to be had regarding the
portrayal of a culture wherein which the dominant religion is not one that the individual
personally practices or adheres to. Religious practice also changes over time –
so someone who identifies with the same religion as their persona is going to observe
differently than their persona would have.
Lastly, in terms of oppression and other issues, how do we balance
respect for history with recreating “only the best” of the middle ages, when events
and issues like pogroms, inquisitions, and the Crusades, mean something
entirely different for non-Christian personas?
Please consider this an open invitation for you to share your thoughts on this subject with a wider audience. I’d ask that you include information about your persona (SCA name with any titles, time period, region, etc.). Ideally, articles would be 500-2,000 words in length, and include citations if necessary. If you’re interested, I encourage you to reach out so we can start working together to make the SCA a more informed and inclusive experience for everyone.
If you have any questions or would like to contribute, I look forward to hearing from you.
tri-cen-ar-ian, n. (pl. tricenarians). 1. The highest rank and pay grade for prefectures in Ancient Rome. 2. A person in their thirties, a person aged between 30 and 39 years (inclusive).
I’m 34. Being 34 is pretty great, considering. I have a good job in my field of study, solid social groups orbiting my place of worship, hobbies, and workplace, a fantastic spouse, and two beautiful and intelligent children.
From an SCA perspective, I feel like I’m on track with the rest of my age group. I’ve served as a Greater Kingdom Officer (Parchment), helped foster community growth in both of my areas of interest (Sinology and scribal arts), teach every chance I get both at events and online via posts and PMs, been inducted into the GOA Order/Order of High Merit for Arts and Sciences (Bridgit’s Flame and Velvet Owl, respectively), etc. I’m not burning the candle at both ends in the “rising star” or “mover and shaker” style per se, but I think I’m carrying my weight in terms of the care and feeding of SCAdians.
Known World Cooks and Bards, 2014 (Northshield) – Me, at the back of court, with my 4 month-old son and my veil askew because that happens when you are at an event with a small child. Also this dress doesn’t fit me anymore, because babies make your arms buff. Also eesh, I’m so glad I have rimless wireframes for events now. Photo by Deonysia of Rye.
The thing is? It’s hard.
It’s not hard in the sense that I have to exert a great amount of effort. It’s mostly little things here and there, or relatively short, frantic pushes toward a deadline. I don’t feel overburdened by the effort.
It’s not hard because people are hard to deal with. I am incredibly thankful to have an amazing support system, so that in the rare case where I come up against someone who breaks Wheaton’s Law, I have people I can turn to for help, even if it is just a hug.
It’s hard because I have to balance SCAdian-hood with Life. We always say “real life comes first.” Because it does. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t this overwhelming pressure to be involved and help direct the course of our community. Pressure to be active and present and available to new people. Pressure to volunteer to judge or teach, or to enter something in a faire, or to make progress on your project, or to donate something. Most of this pressure, at least for me, is an internal response to external stimuli. My apprentice contract stipulates that I need to teach, enter a faire, or “share my skills” with both my kingdom and the Known World at least four times a year. It also states:
Ouyang is required to find balance between studies and family life so that the former does not overtake the latter, as is virtuous.
It’s that balance that’s hard. It’s knowing that I need to have garb sewn for my daughter before the event that’s a week away, but that my son really wants me to play dinosaurs or legos with him.
It’s that balance of only going to one event a month, and then only if that event isn’t farther than 2 hours away so that I can easily day-trip – and if it is longer, making sure that my (incredibly capable and amazing partner and co-parent) husband doesn’t have something else on the schedule and is okay with me not taking the smallest child with me on an overnight.
It’s the balance between feeling like I am being generous or selfish with my time, depending on how I spend it.
It’s the balance of managing my finances so that I have enough to spend on the hobbies, projects, and interests that bring me joy (including event travel/costs) without shirking my financial responsibilities to my modern household.
It’s the balance of not letting myself get so mired in a research question, Thread of Drama, or other online interaction that I keep my nose buried in my phone while grocery shopping with the family.
It’s a balance of spending time at an event with my children who just want to run and play versus doing what I want to do – teach, attend a class, volunteer, etc.
Are these things that people younger and older than me deal with? Things that non-SCAdians deal with? Things that SCAdians who play as a family deal with? Probably. But I can’t speak to those experiences. All I know is that my age, the perceived expectations associated with my 8-year tenure in the SCA and my chosen journey, and the fact that my husband does not share this hobby makes this feel like a heavy weight.
And I wanted to say to others who also feel this weight – I see you. I don’t know what the answer or the fix is, but I see you.
So apparently the Musée Guimet’s tumblr is now defunct. This post is originally from December 29, 2013. This is me testing this to see if I can cite the reblog… Because you always cite your stuff. <3
One of the first things I do when I discover a new monograph (that’s a fancy word for book) source is look for reviews.
The academic publishing field can be pretty brutal. You publish your book, and there will be reviews of it that will be published in the various journals that have the same readership you’d like your book to have. These reviews might be glowing, encouraging people, usually fellow academics or library professionals, to add your book to their collections, or scathing, warning those same people away from your shoddy research and inaccurate conclusions.
This is an excellent way to vet a book – it’s similar to the customer review section of any online shopping website, only these are academics who, presumably, are well-versed in their field and so are coming to the book with a contextual body of knowledge.
So how do you search for book reviews? The same way you search for other journal articles! The key here is that the title of the book and the author are going to be your search terms. You can sometimes get hits by searching Google/Google Scholar, but if you want to be very specific, you can go straight to the journal you want to look in (you know, the one you have already saved fifteen articles from), or you can search databases like JSTOR, Proquest, or Taylor and Francis.
Sometimes, the reviews will be mixed. Sometimes they will be united in their critique. But it’s always a good idea to get a sampling, so you’re not relying on one person’s opinion. It’s also a good idea to look up who the reviewer is to check their credibility on the topic.
And even if the reviews are bad? Well, you still might want to take a look at the book, though maybe through a more cost-efficient method like inter-library loan, but do so with the grains of salt cautioned by the reviewers.
So let’s walk through this.
For this, we’ll look at The Westerners among the Figurines of the T’ang Dynasty of China by Jane Gaston Mahler, published in 1959. This is a series of photographs of tomb figurines with some accompanying text describing their clothing, etc. It’s been awhile since I held this book in my hands, but if memory serves, there was no indication of where the figurines originally came from (which is a problem when looking at this kind of art – because they were often the result of outright tomb robbery in addition to questionably ethical academics coming in to China from abroad). Provenance is important when looking at any extant item. Without provenance, you have no real substantial proof that the Thing is what it is being purported to be. (Psst. Go read Konstantia Kaloethina’s post on the importance of provenance. I will wait.)
I won’t be going into a lot of detail with these reviewers, but you can follow the links to each of their reviews (in JSTOR) to read them yourself. I’ll just be pulling out some of their summary comments.
To begin with, let’s look at Henry Truber’s review (1959), published in Artibus Asiae. Dr. Trubner received his Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard in 1947 and worked as a curator for Oriental Art throughout his career (sorry that this source isn’t better; you’d think it would be easy tracking down credentials of Sinologists from the 1930s-60s…). Truber points out the photographs and discussion of costume as being “a distinct and commendable service to modern scholarship”, but also notes the number of typographical errors as well as Mahler’s tendency to quote well-established facts at length within her text where a footnote would have sufficed. What sticks out to me is his point that Mahler’s “racial” identification methods are faulty (because of course they are – thanks, pre-Civil Rights bunkum. This is a Very Good Reason to pay attention to publication dates and the diction used when people not part of that culture discuss the history of marginalized cultures):
p. 264
Edward H. Schafer‘s own academic focus was on China’s interactions with other cultures during the Tang Dynasty. Dr. Schafer worked as a professor in UCLA Berkeley’s Department of Oriental Languages from 1947-1984, serving as president of the American Oriental Society and receiving many distinctions throughout his career.
In his review (1959), published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Schafer agrees with Trubner that Mahler’s descriptions of clothing are far more useful than her attempt to classify them by “race” as opposed to region or culture. He also notes Mahler’s clunky, extended use of quotes in her section on the history of Western China.
p. 206
Still, like Trubner, he recommends the book to students, noting that his own criticism as “carping.”
The last review we will look at is by Dr. Richard Edwards, a prominent historian of Asian art who wrote extensively about Chinese paintings and taught at Brandeis University, Washington University in St. Louis (where he was at the time of this review), and the University of Michigan. Edwards’s review (1960) is in the Journal of Asian Studies.
Edwards makes many of the same points that Trubner and Schafer did, but also notes that the twelve pages on clothing need to be taken with a grain of salt:
“We are told (p. 115) that ‘Dignitaries of the seventh and eighth centuries . . . adopted pleated cuffs and bands like the Kuchans (Fig. 6).’ The drawings of the Chinese in Fig. 6 show extremely long sleeves, and if the cuffs are there they cannot be deciphered.”
p. 337
Of the three, Edwards feels the most scathing in the end.
p. 337
There might be more at play here bubbling beneath the surface. All three reviews came out not long after Mahler’s book was published, as would be expected. All three were from men recognized in the field via academic postings or their own research and publications. Remember – Mahler is Jane Mahler. While Schafer worked to see policy changed at the University of California so that women could have full professor status, that was in the 1970s – far be it from us to say whether or not he had these same views of equality a decade prior. I also don’t want to assume that Trubner and Edwards were misogynists, but as sexism in academia is still an issue in 2019, I don’t think it’s an unfair assumption.
I want to point out that Dr. Jane Gaston Mahler was the first woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in Oriental Art History (Columbia, but I can’t find a date). She taught at Barnard College and Columbia University.
All that aside, I hope this exercise was helpful. Again, (scholarly) book reviews can be found anywhere you look for academic articles already – JSTOR, EBSCO, etc. It’s also not a bad idea to keep track of the journals specific to your area of study and check their tables of contents every now and again to see reviews for new titles to add to your wishlist.
It was requested, so I have added a way to subscribe to new posts via email. Emails will only send when there is new content, and you know me – I don’t post every day. Three posts in March (including this one) is rare! My personal goal is once a month.
Anyway, check out the form over there in the sidebar and enjoy!
Found in the Internet Wilderness (aka Reddit), shared on social media, and the inspiration for this post.
Hat tip to Mistress Sunneva de Cleia for sharing the horrendous screencap above.
Note: I wrote this very quickly as a response to the image at the very beginning. If I got something wrong, or if you think something could be cleared up, please leave a comment and let me know. We’re all here to help and learn from one another.
Hey. Internet-person.
We need to talk.
We need to talk about what “intellectual property” and “public domain” and “citations” actually mean. Because I think if you knew what they meant, you wouldn’t say things like in the comment at the beginning of this post, and because you’d understand that pointing to the people who said something before you said it actually strengthens what you’re trying to say.
Intellectual Property
I won’t pull out any fancy legaleze here, so don’t worry. It’s a pretty broad term, but Intellectual property is basically:
Anything intangible (that means you can’t touch it) you create using your brain-meat and creativity;
that is new and didn’t exist before you thought of it (derivative works, meaning works that build off other works are okay); and,
that you could apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, or some other legal protection for – meaning that it has to be something that can be turned into something that someone else can interact with – an image, sound, words, invention, etc.
Oh look! A video about IP that’s super easy to understand! Look at that! It’s really a series of seven videos, but… still. It’s trying to take a complex thing and make it simple in 10 minute chunks. Plus, Crash Course is neat.
So okay – for the purposes of our discussion, for which I am going to assume the author of the screenshotted comment was snarking against someone asking for them to credit them, and because this is an SCA blog – let’s work on the assumption that your Intellectual Property is some documentation you’ve written for an A&S project. It’s also the object you made, and any sort of diary you kept to document the process – be that in a blog, in a notebook, or a series of Facebook posts. It’s all Intellectual Property, and it’s all yours – though you may have given some rights to some other entities when you posted it online, such as Facebook or YouTube. Aren’t Terms of Usage of Service great?
Citations
In your documentation, you’re trying out a new method for doing a thing based on a supposition you’ve made after doing your research. Fun! Okay – but you still have to point to that research. That research is the intellectual property of the people who did that research and published it. Citing them – giving them credit – supports your claims and makes you a more credible person. If you cite a source to support a claim, or to lay out the groundwork which you then draw your suppositions from, the people who read your work can look back at those sources and go “Oh! Okay – I see how they got there. Neat!”
If you don’t cite these sources, you’re violating the Intellectual Property Rights of those researchers. You’re basically claiming to have done all the work they did – and you didn’t. If you cite the source, you’re thanking the researchers and acknowledging the work they did. It doesn’t make you lesser than the researchers you cite. Building on what others have done before you is important. Claiming what they did as your own is plagiarism – the theft of intellectual property.
Another video! This one has PUPPETS. 😀
Public Domain
“But if it is on the internet, it’s in the public domain.”
Nope.
The Public Domain is where things previously protected by copyright, patent, trademark, etc. go after that protection has expired. Currently, in the US, that’s 70 years after the death of the author. If it is a work produced by the US Government, it’s likely already in the public domain. Anything published (again, this is US law) before 1924 is fair game.
“Okay, so if it is in the public domain, then I don’t have to cite it?”
I mean, I guess not technically? But it’ll still be pretty nasty of you to do so. It’s not really theft, but again – citing your source is about more than just avoiding prosecution. The Night of the Living Dead is in the Public Domain, but you didn’t write or film it. To not credit Romero makes you just look… bad.
It’s not a good look.
So don’t be gross. Use citations. Give credit to the works you’re building off of – whether they are professional researchers/academics or fellow SCAdians. Be honest about where you found stuff. Be honest about when you’re drawing conclusions. This is how we all benefit and get better and learn from and with each other.
I’ve been working on an overhaul of my garb documentation, which is turning into this massively long thing that will be my “handout” at Known World Costume and Fiber. I finished this section this week, and thought I should share it here. Enjoy!
There is a popular theory in online hanfu communities, both predominantly Chinese-speaking and English-speaking, that the hezi (upper undergarment during the Tang Dynasty) was worn so that it was visible. To support this there are three images that are usually pointed to as evidenece: the painting Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, attributed to Zhou Fang (c. 730–800), the relief carvings and paintings of female attendants and musicians in the tomb of Wang Chuzhi (863-923), and murals from the Dunhuang Cave 61 (10th century).
EDIT: I recognize that these sources don’t fully fall within Tang, and are more likely Five Dynasties & Ten Kingdoms (though we don’t have solid date on when Court Ladies was painted), but since they are used to argue for a Tang Dynasty fashion/item, I’m looking at them in that context. Fashion is, as we know, fluid. Thanks!
The theory holds that the hezi was worn either so that the skirt was tied so that the top was visible, or else worn on top of the skirt.
Before we look at the images, let’s take a moment to talk about the hezi in a more general sense. First of all, we don’t know a lot. We don’t have any extants. The only images we have are artistic renderings that all follow the same idea of a tube-shaped garment with a curved front neckline that stops at the hip and has some sort of band or tie under the bust. The two best sources I have been able to find for Chinese undergarments are Fantasy Beyond Body 1 and Jamie Johns’s unofficial Fulbright blog about the history of breast binding in China. 2 Johns looks at Chinese language sources on the history of Chinese undergarments and makes the same observation many of us have (which Fantasy Beyond Body is also indicative of) – the lack of solid citations. Fantasy Beyond Body at least will say where something was excavated from – most of the time. It doesn’t for the Tang garments it proposes.
So there is a lot of speculation, which is probably why the Hezi-Qun theory got footing in the first place, spurred on, no doubt, by the fun costumes from Chinese historical dramas.
But honestly? Even this screenshot of Zhang Ting as Consort Wei from the Empress of China looks like what some would say is the Hezi-Qun is just the band of her skirt. But that slight sweetheart neckline is … no. Sorry, Noble Consort. (And don’t get me started on the robe thing.)
Advocates of the theory claim that the hezi is a wide strip of cloth (based on images, approximately 5-6″ wide) that is worn on top of the skirt. A cloth tie is then tied on top of it to hide the border between the hezi and the skirt. But… based on how Tang Dynasty skirts are made…. why would you do this? Even some modern hanfu manufacturers attach this so-called hezi to the skirt, effectively making it a decorative band. Then again, I have no idea how these skirts are constructed (I’ve never bought one to fiddle with), so I’m not sure what’s actually going on with the ties.
We should also note, before going any further, that Johns discusses two different Chinese-language sources on her blog, both of which use the term 亵衣 (xie yi, “obscene clothing”) to refer to undergarments.3 So the notion that such a intimate and taboo item of clothing would be worn in plain view doesn’t jive for me – not even during High Tang (c. 713-766) when the party was still going strong, women had unprecedented freedom of expression, and life was generally pretty swanky if you were an aristocrat. Also, all the example images are either from High Tang or after.
Instead, I believe that what others are interpreting as a visible hezi is rather an elaborately decorated, curved, or scalloped skirt band.
Let’s look at some images.
In Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses, there is a clear seam line below the twisted skirt tie. The skirt tie sits on top of the band, and the seam appears to be between the band and the pleated skirt, thus dismissing the notion that the decorated and curved-edged skirt band is instead an undergarment.
The placement of the skirt band is lower in the stone relief from Wang Chuzhi’s tomb, covering where this seam would be in some instances and falling below it in others. The skirt bands here are scalloped, and again, I see no evidence that they are separate garments worn on top of the skirt. They have been painted a different color, as has the band in a mural from the same tomb, but in the mural, the seam between the skirt and the band is obscured by the woman’s hands and the bowl she carries, making this evidence inconclusive.
Painted stone relief from Wang Chuzhi’s tomb. [Source]
There are two poses the women on the southwestern and southeastern walls of Cave 61 at Dunhuang. Some women are holding offerings while others are not. Clear images of both are difficult to find online that are not reproductions or artistic renderings, and the image I was able to pull from the digital panorama of the cave is fuzzy. Still, the decorative band at the top of the skirt is visible on both the figures to the right in the first image, and I believe the lower tie on the figure wearing the phoenix crown is not her skirt tie, but additional ornamentation. It should also be noted that the two rightmost figures in the first image are (from left to right) the mother of a Cao Yuanzhong, King of Guiyi, and the Great Empress of Khotan and daughter of Cao Yinjin. Both of these women are part of the Guiyi royal family, a kingdom subordinate to the Tang and Northern Song Dynasties. 45 We might be seeing some Khotanese influence in their clothing.
Screenshot from the digital panoramic view of Cave 61, showing the attendant ladies to the donor’s wife on the southwestern wall. [Source]
Okay, so what IS the hezi?
After staring at extant garments from the Song and Yuan Dynasties and all the descriptions of the Tang Dynasty hezi I can find, my best guess is that the hezi was a tubular garment made of a heavier weight silk, 6 potentially lined, 7 and closed with buttons 8. No artistic rendering of the hezi includes these buttons, but the合欢襟 (hehuanjin, Yuan Dynasty) has “flower buttons” in the front 9. These may be more like frog and loop clasps than what we would think of as “buttons,” given that the buttons used to fasten the collars of round-collared robes are cloth with loops.
Am I 100% right on this? Doubtfully. Am I going to try to make a hezi with buttons and see how it works? You bet your bippy I am.
潘建华著. (2005). 云缕心衣 : 中国古代内衣文化. 上海: 上海古籍出版社. | Pan Jianhua zhu. (2005) Fantasy beyond body: the civilization of Chinese underwear in ancient times. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. ISBN: 7532540944 ↩
Johns, J. (2010 Oct – 2010 Dec). We drive east. WordPress. Retrieved from: https://wedriveeast.wordpress.com/ ↩
Johns, J. (4 June 2011). “China’s Disappearing Clothing.” We drive east. WordPress. Retrieved from: https://wedriveeast.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/chinas-disappearing-clothing/ ↩
“Mogao Grottoes Cave 061.” Digital Dunhuang. Retrieved from: https://www.e-dunhuang.com/cave/10.0001/0001.0001.0061 ↩
Liu Mu-Ching. (2013). “Replication of four patroness on the mural of mogao grotto 61’s southeastern wall.” 石窟藝術與數位犁技整合研究計畫 (The Study of the Integration of Grotto Art and Preservation). Retrieved from http://imlab.tw/dunhuang/en/p22.html ↩
Johns, J. (4 June 2011). “China’s Disappearing Clothing.” We drive east. WordPress. Retrieved from: https://wedriveeast.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/chinas-disappearing-clothing/ ↩
潘建华著. (2005). 云缕心衣 : 中国古代内衣文化. 上海: 上海古籍出版社. | Pan Jianhua zhu. (2005) Fantasy beyond body: the civilization of Chinese underwear in ancient times. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. pp. 2-3 ↩
潘建华著. (2005). 云缕心衣 : 中国古代内衣文化. 上海: 上海古籍出版社. | Pan Jianhua zhu. (2005) Fantasy beyond body: the civilization of Chinese underwear in ancient times. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. p. 17 ↩
潘建华著. (2005). 云缕心衣 : 中国古代内衣文化. 上海: 上海古籍出版社. | Pan Jianhua zhu. (2005) Fantasy beyond body: the civilization of Chinese underwear in ancient times. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. p. 17 ↩
Master Thomas Paumer, current Meridies Parchment, and myself, a Former Meridies Parchment
Congratulations! You have just been entrusted with an office/official role related to the logistical workings of the SCA. Whether it is chatelaine, seneschal, signet, class coordinator, event steward, or any of the other sundry jobs or responsibilities, thanks! Good for you!
But I want to warn you.
Someone is going to come up to you during your tenure, probably toward the beginning of it, and you’re going to have a conversation along these lines:
Them: “So you’re the new Person Who Does This Job?” You: “That’s right!” Them: “I’m sorry.” You: “…”
I wish I knew what to tell you to say to people who do this, but I have no idea. Instead, I want to talk to the people who say this to people who volunteer to help make the SCA, you know, work.
HEY.
YEAH, YOU.
Guess what? Volunteering for an organization is hard enough to manage when one has employment, family, and non-SCA obligations to fulfill. But when your reaction to volunteering is to pity a person for taking on a task or role, or to belittle volunteering and volunteers, you’re NOT HELPING.
We are an organization that, without volunteers, would not exist. Stuff would not get accomplished. Events would not happen. Even local get-togethers would not happen.
So please, please, please, stop being condescending, or trying to find dark humor in volunteering. I realize that some of this might come from you having had a negative experience when you held a similar role or responsibility, and I get that. And if that’s the case, by all means, share the wisdom of your experience without belittling the choice someone has made to volunteer. But that’s another issue we have – Information Transfer. Offer to help make the experience better for the people who do the job after you. There is no reason why a new officer/person with a responsibility should feel like they have to reinvent the wheel.
Instead of giving a volunteer your “pity,” try saying “Thank you for taking on this difficult job. I did this job a while ago, so if you need any help or advice, feel free to reach out.”
Or maybe, “I appreciate your service to our local group/kingdom/society. Thanks.”
I would say “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” but NO. Sorry. That’s not going to fly. Because volunteers need support. I’m not talking about cookies from the Crown, I’m talking about grassroots, local support. These people are your friends. A simple thank you from all your friends gives someone the edification and endorphins that they need to be able to keep going.
When you say “I’m sorry” and yet still want to have events to go to, feasts to eat, pretty scrolls for awards, tourneys to fight in, classes to take, or any number of the other things that we do in the SCA, you’re just being entitled and, frankly, whiny.
You can either do the work or support the people doing the work. You can’t not do the work and also disparage the people who are doing it.
Oh, you want some references and stuff? Here. Here’s some documentation.
![[Source]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%8E%8B%E8%99%95%E7%9B%B4%E5%A2%93%E5%A3%81%E7%95%AB1.jpg){kind=link}