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- Convenors:
-
Ju-chen Chen
(The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Hsin-yi Lu (National Taiwan University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel sees the world as full of changes. We wonder whether the search for "the good life" in this uncertainty saturated world is a trans-regional phenomenon and asking whether the pursuit is a bargain against a not-so-ideal present, or is it compelled by the fear of falling behind?
Long Abstract:
This panel starts with an Asian perspective and invites interlocutors from Europe and beyond to contemplate a shared concern regarding uncertainty and a worsening prospect of the future.
Asia has been considered as in rising. It witnesses emerging cosmopolitans with transnational investments, expanding neoliberal markets and unprecedented cross border migration, the importation of new technologies and aspirations, and the commodification of exotic-turned-chic traditions. While Asia is seen as a promising new land that replaces the old world centers, existing Asian metropolitans also suffer a sense of insecurity of losing their fame to emerging cities. Under such conditions, uncertainly is often the state of mind shared by many Asians.
Is uncertainty seen as a risk in life or as an opportunity for change? When facing uncertainty, people are often guided by their imaginaries of the future. In the uncertainty and opportunity saturated world, one shared aspiration is the pursuit of "the good life." However, do people still believe in an absolute good life? Or, does the pursuit tell a story of fear — the fear of falling behind and missing opportunities? Is the good life an imaginary against a not so good present?
Asia is rising and, with it, the enlarged gap of differences, infinite competitions, and a lack of meaning. Considering that this Asian story is embedded in the global context — the rising of Asia implies the falling of other places, how do people in Europe and beyond take this bargaining for the good life?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -I-chieh Fang (National Tsing Hua University)
Paper short abstract:
How is uncertainty routinized or normalized, shaping the subjectivity of young labourers and their imagination of time, work and the good life? This article discuss these issues through an ethnographic study on young migrant workers in Shenzhen.
Paper long abstract:
This research aims at re-examining the social and class implications of uncertainty. How is uncertainty routinized or normalized, shaping the subjectivity of young labourers and their imagination of time, work and the good life? I attempt to discuss these issues through an ethnographic study on workers who had migrated from rural villages to Shenzhen in an electronic factory.
This article goes beyond the appearance of 'cruel optimism' to argue that uncertainties might be a crucial stimulus to the agency of peasant workers. Those staying and moving up the ranks gradually learned and developed skills, knowledge and strategies to grasp the future in a 'zone of indeterminacy'. No matter how irrational their scenario might be, it does generate actions, practices and pin down their economic decisions. It shed light on 'imagination is social practice'. Without understanding workers' imagination, we can't understand their economic decisions and class formations.
Teresa Kuan (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
"Bargaining for certainty" discusses China's psy- training frenzy, part of what anthropologists have called the "psycho-boom," in relation the many uncertainties that characterize social life.
Paper long abstract:
In 2017, a WeChat account for psychology enthusiasts posted a series of comics poking fun at the grumbles of therapists in China, taking the format of a call-and-response. Therapy is too expensive for most people; it is difficult to build a caseload; if you do have clients, they don't keep their appointments; and the reality of being or aspiring to be a therapist consists of taking classes and doing trainings non-stop. The jokes made in this series raise a serious question concerning why a person would invest in constant learning and training, particularly when it is not clear, nor certain, whether the investment will "pay off" given the huge gap between the cost of therapy on the one hand, and the financial ability of ordinary people, i.e. potential clients, on the other. This presentation answers the question by discussing the popularity of training in and of itself, particularly the significance of "group experience," in the Chinese context, and it will delve into the biographical particulars of two in-depth case studies to understand why a person would "study" in their free time and bargain away life savings or hard-earned income. This presentation will argue that the localization of psychological thinking in China, otherwise known as "psycho-boom," must be understood in relation to the many uncertainties - practical, moral, and existential - that characterize social life, and to the strong drive to exert some degree of control over them.
Ching-wen Hsu (National Tsing Hua University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the suren (novice) protesters during and after the Sunflower Movement in 2014 to understand the way public order and civic rights are conceptualized in Taiwan and to explore how they envision and act to pursue the right to the city in Taipei.
Paper long abstract:
Since the mid-2010s, "citizen" (gong-min, literally "public person") has become a popular phrase to frame protest and social activism in Taiwan. The occupy movement known as Sunflower Movement in the spring of 2014, in particular, gained persistent visibility on national media and drew many first-time protesters to partake in acts of "civil disobedience." Throughout the process, participants continued to define what "public person" meant and what "public" entailed. Post Sunflower, some of them began to engage in small, dispersed, and sometimes personal acts to claim the right to the city. This paper focuses on the suren (novice) protesters during and after the Sunflower Movement to understand the way public order and civic rights are conceptualized in Taiwan in relation to the idea of public space and to explore how they envision and pursue city life in Taipei.
Man Kei Tam (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents an analysis of the changing human-soil relations between the Japanese state, citizens, and scientists, through the local practice of Madei (soil care) in Iitate, to grapple with the uncertainties of lingering radioactivity.
Paper long abstract:
In the toxic atmosphere filled with radiation released from Japan's melted nuclear reactors and sunken in farmlands and forests, farmers are now interacting and struggling with soil and other creatures to revitalize an environment that they want to make liveable again.
Iitate is a village in Fukushima demarcated as the forced evacuation zone shortly after the nuclear disaster. After its reopening in April 2017, I lived in Iitate to learn from farmers their actions in response to the state's patchy decontamination efforts. Attending to the practice of Madei, I witnessed how farmers negotiated the state's food safety standards implemented in the name of protecting public health. I ask: what is ordinary life in a radioactive atmosphere, and how can it be made possible?
I trace the collaborations between Iitate farmers, scientists/experts and Tokyo citizens who deploy innovative technologies to take care of the soils on which a new agriculture is experimented. Together, they designed this digitized agriculture to enfold the new givens concerning radiation—bodily permeability, abandonment of farmlands and state violence inflicted on farmers—into everyday realities embedded in juxtaposition and competition with the state's programs of revival and rehabilitation.
In Madei, the emergent human-soil relation repairs the breakdown of ecological cycles that farmers had practiced for centuries; it also opens up a temporality questioning a progressivist future envisioned by the state's technoscience, and re-animating an ordinary livelihood that I posit "contaminated but safe" in the altered ecologies of post-Fukushima Japan.
Sealing Cheng (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an ethnography of how intimate relationships with local Chinese women become key to African asylum-seeking men's transgressive struggles in crafting a plausible alternative present and future in Hong Kong.
Paper long abstract:
Asylum-seekers are, by definition, people who are neither here nor there, suspended in between citizenship regimes, waiting for a future with uncertainty. The asylum regime in Hong Kong ensures enforced destitution for these displaced populations. The small population of African asylum-seekers in Hong Kong, therefore, has been targets of not only institutional exclusion but social marginalization. Many of them have been stuck in an immigration limbo in Hong Kong for over a decade. Since 2010s, intimate relationships and marriages between African asylum-seeking men and local Chinese women have been increasing. In defiance of the delegitimization of their lives and self-worth, asylum-seekers engage in intimate relationships to reconstitute their livelihood and selfhood in displacement. These intimate bonds thereby constitute part of the transgressive struggles in crafting a plausible alternative present and future for asylum-seekers. Their intimacy with local women subvert the asylum regime that was designed for their exclusion - the very exclusion that renders suspicious their relationships with local women. Marriage, however, provides no easy exit from these men's limbo. These married couples often come to be conjoined in not only matrimony but also in their subjection to state scrutiny, as the Hong Kong government seeks to defend its legitimacy and powers as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. This paper is an ethnography of how intimate relationships become an integral part of asylum-seeking men's "counter-topographies" (Mountz 2011) in their pursuit of a plausible future in the Chinese city of Hong Kong.
Ju-chen Chen (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the bleak interpretation of the future of the current young adult generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond; and argues that such senses of despair are likely related to their class background and how they have been insulated from uncertainty and risks.
Paper long abstract:
In a 2018 music festival in Hong Kong, when Your Woman Sleep with Others, a Taiwanese band, sang their famous song, Teens Edge, the local audience cried on top of their lungs and sang together in Mandarin: "Give me a bottle of wine/Then give me a cigarette/Let's move on/I got plenty of time." The loud chorus, delirious excitement and touch of sorrow on the faces of this young crowd impressed me. Why were they so hopeless?
Your Woman Sleep with Others is one of the quickly rising groups in the Mandarin indie music scene that are labeled as voices of the Generation in Despair (Yanshidai). The lyrics of these bands often sarcastically depict a sense of hopelessness: there is no hope for a better future; nothing will change no matter how hard you try; just veg out. These bands often achieve immense popularity as the young adult audience believes that they "speak their hearts."
Strangely, these bands (and their fans) are not usually the most desperate group in their societies. Instead, they are often from a relatively stable middle-class background and have good educational capital. How exactly do they understand their future, for that understanding to lead to this sense of despair expressed through music? This paper aims to analyze this particularly bleak interpretation of the future and argues that such despairing perspective is likely intersecting with a class related culture that insulates and controls uncertainty. Is escaping a way to exercise agency?
Barbora Stehlíková (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University)
Paper short abstract:
On the example of the social generous network where the gift-giving is made without any obligation of counter-gift, I will illustrate what kind of social imaginaries of the "good life" are produced in relation to the gift-giving that promotes generosity, kindness and solidarity.
Paper long abstract:
Uncertainty caused by the economic crisis in 2008 lead the entrepreneur Buddhist and visionary Libor Malý to propose a new economic system. In this system the transactions should no longer be settled neither by money nor any other way. Instead, he proposed a gift economy, where the given gift does not require any counter-gift. For this reason, he founded a "social generous network" Hearth.net and put forward a new model of economic relations based on generosity and kindness. However, his vision does not exist on its own. It is reproduced by the users of Hearth who add further meanings to the original idea. How do these people perceive the gift and what kind of possibilities it gives to them? How does the gift fit in their imaginaries of future? What does the "good life" mean to them?
In my paper, I will draw upon the long-term research made at Hearth.net and I will examine the role of the gift in the search for the "good life". I will argue that it is not possible to think about the "good life" without taking the morality and ethics into account. Therefore, I will elaborate on the concept of moral and ethical assemblage (Zigon 2010) that evolves at Hearth. In the world where it is harder and harder to orientate oneself, the gift becomes an object to which the people can be attached socially as well as morally.
Grazia Deng (Brown University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on how Chinese migrant entrepreneurs forge unique models of race making and negotiate racial hierarchy in their everyday management of coffee bars in Italy. It shows how their racial practices complicate the seemingly monolithic, top-down racial hierarchy of a postcolonial Europe.
Paper long abstract:
Neighborhood coffee bars have become a new business niche for many self-employed Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Italy since the glooming economic downturn of the late 2000s. These coffee bars, serving as one of the main hubs of community socializing, are considered to be strictly associated with local identity and urban culture in Italy. They are also one of the few social spaces where marginalized social groups from various racial and ethnic backgrounds meet and interact with each other. The primary clientele in these coffee bars is often composed of retired working-class men, internal migrants, and transnational immigrants from North Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. How do Chinese owners and baristas, who are often racialized as ethnic Others, react to the distrust and racism from the mainstream Italian society about their cultural competence in coffee bar management? And meanwhile, how do they deal with the complicated racial and ethnic composition of their clients?
Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna, this paper will focus on Chinese migrant entrepreneurs' unique models of race making in these particular social spaces. It will argue that their management strategies are themselves racial projects in which racial dynamics are interpreted and represented through particular racial lines that they perceive. Their racial consciousness constitutes a new system of racial perceptions and hierarchy, which is strongly affected by but at the same time divergent from both Italian public discourses of race and racism and the common racial understandings in China.