Our monthly colloquium resumes this September. These regular meetings are intended to facilitate discussion and exchange within the group. They will provide a forum to present and discuss work in progress and will occasionally be dedicated to organisational matters, such as plans for our DFG-Network „Anthropology and China(s): Co-constructions of Ethnographic and Academic Regions“ (2021–2024). 

The colloquium is informal and open to interested participants. It is held every third Friday of the month, from 12:30 to 13:30 pm (CET). To register and obtain the online link, please contact Gil Hizi (ghizi [at] uni-koeln.de) and Lena Kaufmann (lena.kaufmann [at] uzh.ch). Please also get in touch if you are interested in presenting in future! 

We will kick off the winter semester schedule with the following presentation:

Friday, 22 September, 12:30–13:30 Madlen Kobi (University of Fribourg), Pascale Bugnon (University of Geneva), Florence Graezer Bideau (EPF Lausanne), Gil Hizi (University of Cologne), and Ute Wallenböck (Masaryk University, Brno):

Chinas without fieldwork: Ruptures in access, creative ethnography, and the reassembling of regional anthropologies

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Friday, 20 October, 12:00-13:00: Zhang Yiming (Bielefeld University):

The Family Turn of Therapeutic Governance: Self-knowledge Production for „Happy“ Marriage/Family Building in Southwest China

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November: On-site conference at FAU Erlangen

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Friday, 15 December, 12:30-13:30: Liang Siran (TU Braunschweig)

Yaks Becoming Kin: An Ethnography of a Human-Yak Lifeway at 4800 meters altitude

Abstract

Drawing from my four months stay between 2021 and 2022 at a self-subsistence oriented yak-herding village and my bodily engagements with yaks in Nagqu (Tibetan autonomous region, China), I show how the human-yak relationship is established through attuning to each other in everyday life, a process that requires both yaks and humans to learn to live together. Based on my own learning of how to milk and herd yaks, I highlight the care involved in milking and the attunements to the changing seasonality on the grassland, contrasting to industrial animal husbandry where humans seek complete control over the biophysical elements. In addition, I present the ethics and reasoning in killing and liberating yaks. This chapter is an ethnographic account of a contemporary yak-human life way on the Tibetan highland, as well as a response to the mainstream criticism of the ‘low productivity’ of yak husbandry.

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Friday, 19 January, 12:30-13:30: Beatrice Zani (CNRS):

Inside the Global Supply Chain: Transnational Migrant Labor, Commodity Circulation, and Digitized Economies across Taiwan

Abstract

Taiwanese ports are paradigmatic sites to observe the new shapes of our globalised economic system. If global corporations are mostly pictured as the major actors of the global supply chain, in this talk I look at the invisible actors who daily contribute to its functioning: migrant maritime workers, by large employed and exploited in the shipping sector. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Taiwanese ports of Kaohsiung, Bali, and Kinmen, I examine the social, economic, logistic, and digital resources Indonesian, Chinese, and Filipino maritime workers mobilize to cope with inequality. To achieve upward social mobility, migrants get ‘connected’. Using online applications, and cooperating with multiple actors, on material and digitized economic circuits, they trade ‘small commodities’ and produce novel transnational and digital economies. Through a focus on the invisible workers of the global supply chain and their daily experiences of global work, and informal commerce, this talk sheds new light on the diversity of global economies, and on the role of digital migrant connectivity in shaping global trade and globalization.

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Friday, 16 Feburary 2024, 12:30-13:30: Niu Zhuo (FU Berlin)

Border Struggles around the China-Myanmar Border in the Post-pandemic Time

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Summer Semester 2024 Preview

Friday, 19 April 2024, 12:30-13:30: Liu Nanxi (LMU München)

Economic activities of Bolivian traders and entrepreneurs in China in the context of China-centred globalization

Friday, 17 May 2024, 12:30-13:30 (tba)

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Friday, 21 June 2024, 12:30-13:30: Chen Yicheng (FU Berlin)

Social relations and the politics of development in Hainan

Friday, 19 July 2024, 12:30-13:30 (tba)

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