Collaborative damage : an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization

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Bibliographic Information

Collaborative damage : an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization

Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, Morten Axel Pedersen

Cornell University Press, 2022

  • : hardcover

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-266) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Collaborative Damage is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention-sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South. The core argument in Collaborative Damage is that the different participants studied in the globalization processes-local workers and cadres; Chinese managers and entrepreneurs; and the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologists-are intimately linked in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension. The authors call this "collaborative damage," which crucially refers not only to the misunderstandings and conflicts they observed in the field, but also to their own failure to agree about how to interpret the data. Via in-depth case studies and tragicomical tales of friendship, antagonism, irresolvable differences, and carefully maintained indifferences across disparate Sino-local worlds in Africa and Asia, Collaborative Damage tells a wide-ranging story of Chinese globalization in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Friendship Empire: How a Chinese Entrepreneur Failed to Make Friends in Mongolia 2. Whose Walls? A Chinese Mining Enclave in the Gobi Desert 3. Roads That Separate: How a Chinese Oil Company Failed to Detach Itself from Its Mongolian Surroundings 4. Strategies of Unseeing: The Possible Superimposition of a "Chinatown" on the Catembe Peninsula 5. Enclaves and Envelopes: Cutting and Connecting Relations in Sino-Mozambican Workplaces 6. Alterity in the Interior: Tree Scouts, Spirits, and Chinese Loggers in the Forests of Northern Mozambique Conclusion

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