Session 15 - class discussion

Session 15 – Circulating subjects:

This session reviewed the circulation of people / bodies and its links to the circulation of objects. The class discussion largely revolved around Chu’s ethnography. There was general consensus that the book was an excellent read, a good balance of theory and ethnography. Carol suggested that we could maybe read Chu’s thesis as a comparison with the book to inform ourselves on approaches to ‘data, theory and methods’. Another takeaway in terms of research methods was how Chu dealt with the issue of standpoint and methodology.

The book discusses ‘migration’, a topic that is the subject of inquiry in a number of disciplines. However such literature tends to view the process of migration as an instrumental and migrants as agents of development. They are perceived to be a group of people who make rational decisions on the basis of a cost – benefit analysis of staying at home versus emigrating. On the contrary Chu demonstrates that migration as a social process in its own right.

Thus ‘migration’ is not a homogenous entity though it may look like one from a macro-level perspective. At the micro level a migrant’s social and cultural background has a bearing on the process of migration, both before and after emigration. Chu’s Chinese (Fuzhonese) subjects represent an entanglement of the provincial and global - they nay seem worldly and cosmopolitan but their value systems are very much traditional.

We then discussed how the concept of transnationalism as highlighted by Appadurai and Akhil Gupta no longer seems tenable. Migration as a process that contributes to de-stabilisation of place bound cultural identity is no longer seen as an indicator of globalisation. Chu plays with the perception of ‘cosmopolitan subjects’ as those not tied to any particular cultural identity as opposed to ‘transnational migrants’ who are rooted to their culture and create ethnic enclaves at their destination. 

Chu’s work ties the concepts of mobility and migration to older anthropological concepts of value, kinship and gender. For the Fuzhonese, desire plays out at multiple levels and kinship and community remain central concepts. As typically assumed migration does not displace but just modify family structures. Thus ‘migrants’ are not independent agents but very much part of the social structure and the current focus is on how they navigate this structure.