We are pleased to announce our CfP for the upcoming DGSKA/GAA conference in Bremen (27-30/09/2021):
Workshop 26. „Seismic China – Environmental Shifts and Radical Reorientations in China-World Relationships“
Charlotte Bruckermann and Lena Kaufmann
Chair: Jean-Baptiste Pettier
„Let China sleep, as when she wakes, she will shake the whole world.“ Napoleon’s 1816 prediction has come to pass. This shaking left neither China itself, nor the diversity of Chinese encounters with the world, very quiet. In this panel, we question how Global China faces the systemic environmental changes its own development is provoking, as well as how these transformations reverberate through and with other societies, shifting relationships and the very “grounds” on which they rely. Building on the idea of a seismography of ontological and epistemological transformations, we explore what happens when understandings of the world that are taken for granted fall short or start rupturing, as happens with China’s development.
In novel events, past patterns no longer hold, prediction becomes shaky, and the voice of prophecy prevails (Ardener 1989). Moments of crisis and rupture breach intelligibility. However, experiences of “others” located “elsewhere” or in “another time” may provide, if not fully formed patterns, at least traceable paths and potential trajectories of how these world-shaking events and paradigmatic ruptures could unfold. Chinese understandings of the environment have always emerged in exchange with other visions of the world, in the past and today, inside and outside of fringes and borders. From disinterest to appropriation and denial to reinvention, environmental relationships are being transformed through cultural, political and economic engagements as China goes global. New ruptures and assemblages provoke questioning of the inequalities involved in the interactive processes between human as well as nonhuman actors. Interrogating moments and experiences of rupture, spatial and social mobility, encounters and conflict, this panel will explore the dynamic interplay between China and the world shaking the Anthropocene.
Please circulate!
Send your submissions to charlotte.bruckermann[at]uib.no , jb.pettier[at]gmail.com and lena.kaufmann[at]uzh.ch until 15 February 2021.
For the full conference call and submission details see:
https://www.dgska.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CfP_Tagung-2021-1.pdf
On behalf of the workshop organising team:
Charlotte Bruckermann, Jean-Baptiste Pettier, Lena Kaufmann
Ethnologie Chinas 