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- Convenors:
-
Xinyuan Wang
(University College London (UCL))
Jolynna Sinanan (University of Manchester)
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- Chair:
-
Daniel Miller
(University College London (UCL))
- Discussant:
-
Anne-Christine Trémon
(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/012
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will deal with a range of evolving commoning practices in the fields such as healthcare, sexuality, migration, and religion, drawn on ethnographies in China and beyond, with a focus on the digital possibilities facilitated by the proliferation of the smartphone.
Long Abstract:
A disproportionate amount of discussions around commoning are based on Western norms and Western histories. The very notions of a public sphere and public goods, of the role of the state and terms such as neoliberalism, have tended to ignore the degree to which the world’s largest population is not simply an exception but a hugely important and different set of configurations. Even the transformative results of Covid-19 will have had almost diametrically different consequences as can be seen from how the Chinese state makes claims for its response contrasted with others. We are still far too dependent upon the projections upon China that maintain an orientalist, even colonialist set of moral and other assumptions.
As a major global force in digital technologies, China is shaping and being shaped by digital technologies at a breath-taking speed and scale. Furthermore, the all-encompassing role of the Party-state, along with the traditional Chinese cosmology, makes China a special case with regards to commoning practices among various groups, including Chinese immigrants. Digital anthropology, with its strength in understanding digital practices in daily life, provides an ideal perspective to make sense of the evolving commoning in the digital age.
This panel will deal with a wide range of evolving commoning practices in the fields such as healthcare, sexuality, migration, and religion. Also, with a focus on the digital possibilities facilitated by the proliferation of personal digital devices, such as the smartphone, the discussion of digital commoning practices will be always situated in wider offline practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how social relationships and values are embodied by Hui Muslim cuisine in current digitised China. We explore how the employing of social media in promoting halal food invokes discussion and negotiation of dietary taboos, ethnic relations amongst urban Hui Muslims and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, by feat of an analysis of Ramen, Steak and Lamb Soup—three representative food in Xi’an Hui Fang Jamaat, examines the relationships between Hui Muslim migrants, local Hui Muslims and younger Muslim generations have conflicted and negotiated. The intense relations amongst them have been expressed through food-taste, preparation and promotion for sale, while pointing to deeper regional and religious tensions. For example, how Muslim migrants have been excluded due to their unstable incomes and disadvantaged social status; and how young Muslim generation, in choosing ingredients, making and selling new (western) forms of food—steak or pizza, have been censured for neglecting the religious and ethical imperative of making Halal food. Furthermore, when local young generation attempts to break the inherited routines of food sales—passive, petty family-run catering business in tourist sites, resorting to internet, social media and other social networking Sites (SNS) to redefine and reproduce local cuisine in this digital era, the gradually neglected traditional cuisine of Hui Fang Jamaat—such as lamb soup—which have been representing by the older generations of the 1960s and the earlier, begin to face with a more serious problem of survival. We then demonstrate how those social issues have borne social, cultural and political significance, and how a variety of values have been brought to those discussion and practices within Muslim population.
Paper short abstract:
This article examines how Hunan TV/Mango TV perform the dual roles of connecting users and conveying “socialist values.” Simultaneously, how it plays a role in the lives of the local youth - why they consume or do not-consume its programmes, and how the content interweave with their daily life.
Paper long abstract:
Although nowadays in China young people move some of their attention to the social media platforms, such as Douyin (known as Tiktok), almost every youth still is watching or has ever watched Hunan TV/Mango TV’s programmes. In 2020, the national coverage of Hunan TV had increased to 1.29 billion, which is close to 1.3 billion people approaching the country’s population. Mango TV, as Hunan TV’s online platform, has successfully platformized performing the dual roles of connecting users and conveying “Socialist Values” and competes against China’s “three digital technology giants” of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). Based on 15-month fieldwork in Hunan TV/Mango TV and a county called Posheng, I aim to offer a rounded account of how Hunan TV/Mango TV plays a role in the lives of the local youth. More specifically, I attend to why the young in the rural consume or not-consume some Hunan TV/Mango TV’s programmes, and how the programmes interweave with their daily life. I find that Hunan TV/Mango TV’s programmes practically play the role of both entertaining and teaching in Posheng, ideologically and practically, and they provide Posheng youths with an imagination of waimian (outside world), referring to the cities. They produce desires to live a better life, in turn making meaning of their own experience, imagining what they are experiencing in this world, and figuring out "who I am" being in a broader social discourse. This research also shows how broadcast television is adapting to digital and multi-platform environments and continues to thrive.
Paper long abstract:
This essay examines the date practice of Chinese IT professionals of a domestic Internet giant, whose daily work revolved around reducing the complexity of ordinary users into different metrics. Along this process, these tech experts also reproduced the ideology of data superiority and had gone so far to make their own life a quantifiable project. Drawing on this ethnographic investigation, It is argued that the perspective of backstage not only opens up the possibility of ethnography but also illustrates the way in which IT expert community and tracking technology has reinforced the audit culture and brought quantification mode of thinking into broader social fields.
Paper short abstract:
The embody practices as various forms of art created and performed by African students in China. With arts, express their identity and call for togetherness through art, using digital space to transmit their attitudes and engage in promoting the multicultural understanding.
Paper long abstract:
African students are increasingly finding their way to China as destination for higher education with number grown from 1,384 in the year of 1999 to 18,562 in the year of 2018. Their individuality, as well as their belonging to the International student and African student communities cultivating and accommodating their cosmopolitan status and Pan-African identities. As embody theory, the body is a vital site of identity construction and materialization that carries all our identifiers like skin color, hair color, religion, physical characteristics, language, abilities. The embody practices as various forms of art created and performed by African students in China, including hair styling, paintings, fashion design, music, dancing and stand-up comedy, that “speak out” about the incompatibility and suffering of African students and motivate individuals to resist inequality, racism and discrimination. With arts, express their identity and call for togetherness through art, using digital space and new media platforms to transmit their attitudes and mobilizing audiences to question existing social structures and engage in promoting the multicultural understanding. Such practices reflect not only the imagination of multicultural engagement and reinforcing their Pan-African identity as well as cosmopolitan global student status, but also demonstrate the potential of artistic empowerment as a creative way to resist falling into the margins.
Paper short abstract:
The adoption of digital payment enables gift-money's digitization through mobile transfer. My paper discusses digitized gift-money's impacts on gift paradigms and social relations as windows in reading money's social/monetary meaning in contemporary China's dialogue of morality and neoliberalism
Paper long abstract:
It was a long debate about money's monetary nature, social nature, and other types of nature. Money were understood as an impersonal commodity without social meanings in classic theories of money, while anthropologists also emphasize the social meaning of money. China's money-gifting tradition is a typical socio-cultural phenomenon to support this idea. Money-gifting plays a vital role in connecting morality, sentiment, and interpersonal relationships in ceremonies of cultural significance, where people attend with gift money, using ceremonial performances and sentimental interactions to hide the inherent monetary nature of gift exchange. A set of social paradigms is developed in gift reciprocating regulations and grow to a moral power constraining people's everyday behaviors. Based on literatures on social money and ethnographic cases of wedding money-gifting in villages of Tai'an city, China, my paper brings digitization to the concern of money's socially integrative function by scrutinizing nuanced shifts in the power relation between the monetary and socializing features of digitized gift money.