Browsing by Author "Litzinger, Ralph A"
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Item Open Access Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru's Andes(2007-05-10T16:02:45Z) Yezer, CarolineThe war between the Peruvian state and the Maoist Shining Path rebels began in the Department of Ayacucho, an area with a majority of indigenous Quechua- speaking peasant villages. After twenty years of violence (1980-2000), this region of South America’s Andes began a critical period of demilitarization, refugee resettlement, and reconciliation. In this transition, the rebuilding of villages devastated by the war raises critical questions about indigenous autonomy, citizenship, and the role of international human rights initiatives in local reconciliation. I examine the tensions between interventions by national and transnational organizations, and the insecurities that continue to define everyday life in villages like Wiracocha - a newly resurrected community that was in the heart of the war zone.1 Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in this village and ten months of comparative fieldwork in villages across the Ayacucho region and in the city of Huamanga, my research shows that villagers were often at odds with the aid and interventions offered to them from the outside. I focus on the complicated nature of village war history, paying attention to the initial sympathy with Shining Path and the village's later decision to join the counterinsurgency. In Ayacucho, memory has itself become a site of struggle that reveals as much about present-day conflict, ambivalences, and insecurities of neoliberal Peru as it does about the actual history 1 Wiracocha is a pseudonym that I am using in order to maintain subject confidentiality. of the war. Villagers sometimes oppose official memory projects and humanitarian initiatives - including Peru's Truth Commission - that that they see at odds with their own visions and agendas. Finally, I examine the less predictable ways that villagers have redefined what it means to be Andean, including: the maintenance of village militarization, a return to hard-handed customary justice and the adoption of bornagain Christianity as a new form of moral order and social solidarity.Item Open Access Beyond “Revolutionary Humanitarianism”: Chinese Doctors in South Sudan(2019) GONG, YIDONGThe transnational movement of medicines and medical professionals to post-war settings has given rise to various forms of caregiving, expertise and ethics. However, little is known about the broad range of actors and agents from the Global South engaging health and the body, beyond the spectacle of international NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières. My dissertation, entitled “Beyond ‘Revolutionary Humanitarianism’: Chinese Doctors in South Sudan,” analyzes the historical formation and contemporary reconfiguration of China’s longstanding medical programs in South Sudan. Through extended participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival research, I explore the role of medicine from China in South Sudan, a hybrid system that integrates aid and business. I argue that China’s medical interventions in conflict zones represent an assemblage of “regimes of living,” not only opening up possibilities for sustained care beyond global health agencies’ provision of emergency food and transitory medical campaigns, but also bringing about disparities in quality of life. Rooted in technological advancement rather than Christian tradition, China’s medical programs in Africa are producing a new form of everyday ethics, open to interrogation and debate on the ground. My research is in dialogue with literature on humanitarianism, biopolitics, and the anthropology of life. Focusing on bodily experience and medical expertise in a volatile setting, my project explores the new biopolitical landscape of present-day Africa, offering an alternative to the widely accepted logic and values of medical humanitarianism in places marked by “crisis” or “conflict.”
Item Open Access Culture in the Age of Biopolitics: Migrant Communities and Corporate Social Responsibility in China(2013) Chien, JenniferThis dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era.
Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.
Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.
Item Open Access Dancing in the Squares(2015) Wang, Yifan“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.
Item Open Access Haunted Borderland : The Politics on the Border War against China in post-Cold War Vietnam(2014) Shim, JuhyungThis dissertation deals with the history and memory of the Border War with China in contemporary Vietnam. Due to its particularity as a war between two neighboring socialist countries in Cold War Asia, the Border War has been a sensitive topic in Vietnam. While political sensitivity regarding the national past derives largely from the Party-State, the history and memory of the war has permeated Vietnamese society. The war's legacy can be seen in anti-China sentiments that, in the globalized neoliberal order, appear to be reviving alongside post-Cold War nationalism. The Border War against China represented an important nationalist turn for Vietnam. At the same time, the traumatic breakdown of the socialist fraternity cultivated anxiety over domestic and international relations. The recent territorial dispute over the South China Sea, between Vietnam and China, has recalled the history and memory of the war in 1979. The growing anti-China sentiment in Vietnam also interpellates the war as a near future.
As an anthropological approach to the history and memory of war, this dissertation addresses five primary questions: 1) how the historyscape of Vietnam's past has been shifted through politics on the Border War; 2) how the memoryscape involving the Border War has been configured as national and local experience; 3) how the Border War has shaped the politics of ethnic minorities in a border province; 4) why the borderscape in Vietnam constantly affects the politics of the nation-state in the globalized world order; and 5) why the border markets and trade activities have been a realm of competing instantiations of post-Cold War nationalism and global neoliberalism.
In order to tackle these questions, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Lang Son, a northern border province and Ha Noi, the capital city of Vietnam from 2005 to 2012, and again briefly in 2014. A year of intensive fieldwork from 2008 to 2009 in Lang Son province paved the road to understanding the local history and local people's memory of the Border War in a contemporary social context. This long-term participant observation research in a sensitive border area allowed me to take a comprehensive view of how the memory of the Border War against China plays out in everyday life and affects the livelihood of the border's inhabitants. In Ha Noi, conducting archival research and discussing issues with Vietnamese scholars, I was able to broaden my understanding of Vietnamese national history and the socialist past. Because Vietnam is one of the countries with the fastest growing use of the Internet, I have also closely traced the emergence of on-line debates and the circulation of information over the Internet as a new form of social exchange in Vietnam.
As a conclusion, I suggest that memory and experience have situated Vietnam as a nation-state in a particular mode of post-Cold War nationalism, one which keeps recalling the memory of the Border War in the post-Cold War era. As the national border has been reconfigured by the legacy of war and by fluctuating border trade, the border challenges unbalanced bilateral relations in the neoliberal world order. The edge of the nation-state becomes the edge of neoliberalism in the contemporary world. The Vietnamese border region will continue to recall the horrors of nationalism and internationalism, through the imaginaries of socialist fraternity or in the practices off contemporary neoliberal multilateralism.
KEYWORDS:
Vietnam, China, Lang Son, the Border War, Memory, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, Neoliberalism.
Item Open Access Making and Unmaking of Guiyu: The Global Center of E-waste(2021-06-01) Feng, YuqiaoAs the industry of electronic devices rapidly develops, the disposal and recycling of e-waste become an issue at stake. Despite the constant effort of both governments and Non-Governmental Organization, exportation to developing countries remains one of the major approaches for the first world to dispose their hazardous e-waste. Developing countries in Asia and Africa are such perfect destinations for e-waste dumping for their cheap labor and the lack of environmental regulation. Without adequate precaution and proper handling guide, human health and environmental integrity are under threat in these areas. China, being the largest electronics manufacture country, aside from dealing with the considerable amount of domestic e-waste, also faces multiple challenges in regulating the importation of e-waste. In addition to discuss the historical background, current situation, and possible future of e-waste trading on a global level, this project focuses on Guiyu, China, a small southern town which is considered one of the largest e-waste centers in the world. Taking Guiyu as an example, this paper aims to reveal the complexity surrounding the disposal and recycling of e-waste and the potential harm on human health of informal recycle activities. Tracing back the history of e-waste trading in Guiyu helps understand the how did the business become dominant industry. The economic and social context and the shared cultural belief of Chaoshan people also play key roles in the local e-waste recycle development. The paper suggests possible upstream and downstream solutions as well. The paper relies on secondary sources including academic journals, local newspaper, and public documents. Visual and audio material such as documentaries and interview footages are also important resources for the project. Related works that had been conducted within the Chinese language sphere are important sources for this project. To combine local perspective in the process of research, the paper largely depends on articles and official reports that are written in Chinese. Due to the difficulty in obtaining reliable and objective report on the result of the industrial park in Guiyu, the future of Guiyu and its e-waste business remains uncertain.Item Open Access Mobile Ethnicity: The Formation of the Korean Chinese Transnational Migrant Class(2013) Kwon, June HeeThis dissertation, Mobile Ethnicity, examines the formation of a transnational ethnic working class and the dynamics of remittance development in the context of Korean Chinese labor migration between China and Korea. I conducted multi-sited field research for over two years, mainly in Seoul, South Korea, and the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian, China, the ethnic zone bordering North Korea. My ethnography is built on a local saying: "Everybody is gone with the Korean Wind." The Korean Wind is the popular name for the massive Korean Chinese transnational labor migration to South Korea that occurred mostly during the 1990s and 2000s, at the intersection of post-Cold War and post-socialist cultures. I especially highlight the Korean Wind as a unique product of China's economic reform and open economy (gaigekaifang), which has affected not only Korean Chinese but also Han Chinese in Yanbian and elsewhere in the region.
Through the lenses of kinship, development, money, love, bodies, and time, I analyze the new affect and materiality, new forms of belonging and dwelling, and new hopes and frustrations of mobile ethnicity. On the one hand, I trace the reconstituted subjectivity of Korean Chinese as a particular ethnic working class in a transnational setting. On the other hand, I map the re-characterized ethnic space of Yanbian as a borderland traversed by a myriad of different agents. Caught between the "Korean dream" and the "Chinese dream," Korean Chinese have chosen transnational mobility as a way of dealing with the contingencies of neoliberalism and globalization. But their way of working for a better future has created unexpected vulnerabilities, sealing them into a circuit of migration as a transnational ethnic working class.
This ethnography illuminates the ripple effects of the Korean Wind with a focus on remittances, as Korean Chinese have discovered, promoted, and deployed their ethnic currency in the transnational labor market. On a macro level, remittances play a critical role in relocating populations (both pulling them into spaces and pulling them out), and create an intersection of internal migration and transnational migration, thereby reshaping the ethnic relationships and spatial characteristics of the region. I emphasize the vulnerable characteristics of a remittance-dependent economy, which fluctuates in response to exchange rates and global economic forces. On a personal level, remittances are not only gifts or realizations of familial duty, but also an unstable form of currency requiring careful management and submission to a peculiar temporality of long waits and unknown futures. The life built upon the contingent flow of remittances has created and been impacted by the transnational temporality, constantly moving back and forth between the sharply split worlds; working and resting, making money and spending money, Korea and Yanbian. Rigid visa regulations by the Korean government especially force migrant workers into a "split life," as they must weave two different worlds into a common everyday life, and discipline their bodies to switch easily between two different modes of time.
This study examines "Yanbian Socialism" that has responded to and intersected with the Korean Wind, a particular socialism that stresses overt expressions of the Korean Chinese political faith in China while acknowledging the prefecture's cultural and economic links to Korea. My dissertation aims to weave together an account of the particular structure of feeling experienced by Korean Chinese as they are caught between confusion and hesitation, contention and contradiction, economic desperation and political caution. I view their constant adjustments and revisions as a major influence on the formation of mobile ethnicity. My work thus provides a new understanding of the politics of class and gender among Chinese ethnic minorities, articulated through transnational mobility at the intersection of post-Cold War, post-socialist, and neoliberal currents across and beyond East Asia.
Item Open Access Other Caregiving and Other Activism: Foregrounding Women Behind Black Lung Patients(2021) Ni, YanpingThis ethnographic study looks at women caregivers in pneumoconiosis (also known as black lung) patients’ families in rural China. Based on archival research and ten months of digital fieldwork, this thesis argues that the family is a crucial space to examine for thoroughly understanding black lung, a disease that has sickened more workers in China than any other disease and encapsulates the ugliness of China’s miraculous economic development. An analysis of China’s social reforms over the past decades reveals the state’s strategy to push sickened workers back to the family unit, and close narratives of two women’s daily lives in caregiving illustrate the complex impact caused by the incurable black lung as well as the creative responses initiated by suffering people in desperate situations.
Item Open Access Politics of Tranquility: Religious Mobilities and Material Engagements of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao China(2015) Cho, YasminThis dissertation ethnographically examines the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in Yachen, a mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment in eastern Tibet that emerged in the 1980s and is now a leading center of Tibetan Buddhist revivalism in post-Mao China. Over 10,000 nuns make up the vast majority of the permanent residents in this community (approximately 2,000 monks live there as well), but few scholarly discussions have taken place regarding the lives and practices of the nuns in Yachen or in Tibetan Buddhist revivals in China in general. This dissertation, therefore, calls attention first to the lack of proper research on these nuns by providing ethnographic accounts of their everyday lives in “China’s Tibet.” By placing the nuns and their lives at the center of discussion, I was able to realize the significance of examining the material, sensory, and mobile events and occasions through which alternative political logics and possibilities appear in the practice of Buddhism and in Sino-Tibetan politics. This alternative politics—which I call the politics of tranquility—presents itself through the mobilities and material engagements of the nuns in Yachen, and offers a stark contrast to the existing dichotomous understanding of Sino-Tibet relationships. Therefore, second, I argue that mobilities, as well as material and sensory engagements, are essential to the practice of Buddhism and the lives of the nuns in Yachen, without whom the current Buddhist revivalism, in Yachen at least, would not be possible.
Following my Introduction (Chapter 1), I begin my chapters by presenting the distinctive mobilities of the nuns. Most of the nuns whom I have known in Yachen are escapees, running away from their homes to become nuns in this remote region; their mobilities, against all odds—both physical and social—are what initially make Yachen possible (Chapter 2). Upon arrival, in the face of the harsh spatial regulations imposed by the Chinese state, they engage in building residential huts for themselves; these building activities are primarily responsible for Yachen’s accelerated expansion and thus for its potential political tension (Chapter 3). In Chapters 2 and 3, I also argue that the nuns’ mobilities and building practices, which have rarely been taken seriously within the Buddhist revival in China, in fact constitute the fundamental process of making Yachen, i.e., of making the sacred. In addition, by living with the nuns, I was able to observe their intimacies and secrets through the lens of their transgression and confession. I consider the act of transgression as one of the most political ways to give an account of the self as Buddhist practitioner, as nun, and as woman (Chapter 4). I argue that the nuns actively, provocatively, and riskily (re)shape Yachen’s norms and morality through their acts of transgression and confession. Finally, by drawing on food consumption and eating habits among the nuns in Yachen, I tackle the highly intertwined issues of ethnicity, money, religion, and ethics in Buddhist revivalism as well as in Sino-Tibetan relations (Chapter 5).
Item Open Access Rural Villages, Urbanization, and Female Villager’s Social Status: Fieldwork in a Shenzhen Urban Village.(2022) Cai, XinqianIn 2004, the Shenzhen Municipality announced that Shenzhen would become the first city without rural areas and rural villages in China, a milestone in the process of urbanization. Officially, rural villages in Shenzhen have disappeared. However, they still exist in another form – urban villages. Attending to the processes of urbanization and rampant economic development, the social lives of these urban villages has changed in many ways, except for the patriarchal logics which continue to marginalize and devalue female villagers. To further understand Shenzhen urban villages and female villagers, I conducted fieldwork in a Shenzhen urban village and collected data by participant observations and interviews. In this thesis, I focus on how urban villages use their agency as formerly rural villages and how urban villages are reclaiming female villager’s social status.
Item Open Access “Sky Eye”: Infrastructure, Politics and Livelihood in Southern Guizhou(2023) Wang, ZhushengyuanThis thesis sheds light on rural life in Kedu Town, southern Guizhou. Drawing from the idea of “doubling of infrastructure” (Muehlmann 2019), I see the FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) project as a channel for the state to highlight the political importance of scientific research, serving a “visible” purpose. This infrastructural project has what I call an “invisible” intention: it produces social activism at the local level, as villagers critique the politics of displacement, call for better compensation, and worry about future livelihoods in the pandemic and now post-Zero Covid policy era. Based on fieldwork and interviews, the thesis is that the FAST project unveils its “invisible” intention due to conflicts between the displaced residents and the local government. I also drawn attention to how the emergence of COVID-19 created new challenges to local livelihoods in the FAST era, revealing how the FAST project now has an increasingly complicated presence in Kedu Town.
Item Open Access The Striving Trap: Chinese 996 Work Culture, Online and Offline Perspectives(2022) Bao, XinThe concerns and questions of this paper focus on what happened when Chinese Internet tech companies initiated an overtime working schedule known as “996—working from 9am to 9pm a day, six days a week—in terms of the intertwined agencies of the state, companies, and workers. I describe how, on the one hand, “996” has gradually been transformed from a specific system of work into a culture of overwork that is not merely confined to Chinese Internet tech companies but has permeated China’s employment market, attracting great attention which is embodied in substantial discussions and critiques in online spaces. These involve explanations given by celebrities, grassroots movements, and interventions by the state. On the other hand, workers, especially tech workers, are trapped by “996” in offline spaces in virtue of the future-oriented promises of the work, at the cost of having to endure present suffering, which is externalized as work-life imbalances, gender inequality, and age discrimination. I have divided this thesis into two chapters: In the first, I have arranged the abundant online materials on the discussion of “996” chronologically, in order to present how “996” has developed in the public’s view in terms of protests and movements, and in order to discuss how these movements contribute to the formation of a Chinese precariat. In the second chapter, by presenting first-person voices from 996 tech workers, I attempt to analyze the term neijuan, which emerges from these discussions, alongside Xiang Biao’s analysis of “suspension” and Lauren Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism” in order to show the complexities, possibilities, and predicaments of the influence of “996” on the working environment in China in general.