This special issue proposes that the semiotically theorized concept of 'qualia' is useful for anthropologists working on problems of the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Qualia are experiences of sensuous qualities (such as colors, textures, sounds, and smells) and feelings (such as satiety, anxiety, proximity, and otherness). The papers in this issue, first presented in a conference in honor of Nancy Munn and her groundbreaking book, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (1986), offer ethnographic accounts of the discursive, historical, and political conditions under which sensations come to be understood as being sensations of qualities -the qualia of softness, lightness, clarity, pain, stink, etc. -and in which those qualia are endowed with cultural value, whether positive or negative. The papers in this issue demonstrate that qualia are not just subjective mental experiences but rather sociocultural events of 'qualic' -and qualitative -orientation and evaluation. These papers thus provide models for the analysis of experience by calling into question what counts for social groups as the senses, materiality or immateriality, interiority, embodiment, or exteriority. KeywordsNancy Munn, qualia, qualisign, C.S. Peirce Sociocultural anthropology has always been interested in the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Our discipline is fundamentally concerned with the perceptible qualities of the world: looks, tastes, sounds, smells, and feels. We are interested in qualities insofar as qualities are interesting to people -even if sometimes these interests are not explicitly stated, but remain only obscure points of orientation. We focus not so much on the material properties of things as on people's reported experiences of and reflections on what they perceive to be their qualities. To emphasize

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This paper concludes this journal issue by examining the regimes of evaluation that link qualia to qualities. I examine the practices through which qualisigns of value emerge, looking specifically at practices of evaluation and ranking in Chinese art school. As Chinese art students matriculate from high school to college, they pass from a regime of standardized testing in which highly technical realist drawings are anonymously scored and compared, to a regime of 'critique' organized around small-scale faceto-face performances in which teachers and students discursively construct an art object as an indexical icon of the student. In the test, qualia are isolated and converted into quantitative scores; in the critique, qualia are integrated into indexical icons of personality. I regard the test and the critique as instances of the two evaluation regimes most widely used in contemporary institutions: the quantifying regime and the rhematizing regime (cf. Gal 2005 and this issue).

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The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. This is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. The book shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new “market socialist” economy where value is produced through innovation. Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, the book combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, the book sheds light on an important facet of today's China.