Cliché anthropologists and the interactive probing of aspirations under market expansion

There was a moment in my fieldwork in China when I was prompted to rethink my position in relation to my interlocutors and the values they brought into play. More specifically, I became aware that their image of Western foreigners matched my profile as a wandering anthropologist with incoherent life...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American ethnologist Vol. 52; no. 1; pp. 64 - 67
Main Author: Hizi, Gil
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Arlington Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.02.2025
Subjects:
Anthropologists
Aspiration
global capitalism
Imagination
Noncitizens
Personhood
self‐development
self‐improvement
Social reality
urban China
Wandering
ISSN:0094-0496, 1548-1425
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:There was a moment in my fieldwork in China when I was prompted to rethink my position in relation to my interlocutors and the values they brought into play. More specifically, I became aware that their image of Western foreigners matched my profile as a wandering anthropologist with incoherent life trajectories. This was so even though, to some degree, they had difficulty translating their image of me into their social reality. Through my research on practices of self‐improvement, I came to see how, in expressing concerns about their personhood and ways of living, my interlocutors moved beyond the telos of business‐driven success. Analytically, I came to better understand how my interaction with them had productively constituted new discursive spaces of the imagination—spaces in which some of our worries were likely to unravel.
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ISSN:0094-0496
1548-1425
DOI:10.1111/amet.13380