[HKAS seminar] Familiar Strangers: Social Media and the Outsider in Chinese Kinship

Title: Familiar Strangers: Social Media and the Outsider in Chinese Kinship

Speaker: Tom McDonald (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong)

Date and time: 18 January 2017, 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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Anthropological accounts of social relations within Chinese society have traditionally viewed both kinship and familiarity as the basis of relationships between persons, which has inevitably led to the exclusion of strangers from the majority of attempts to theorize such relations. This lecture draws on ethnographic evidence collected during 15 months of fieldwork studying the impact of social media use in a rural Chinese town, which revealed the nature of these novel relationships with strangers which are facilitated by social media, showing how these encounters need to be understood in relation to the specific rural context in which participants reside.

Through these ethnographic cases and observations, this lecture will argue that participants do not position strangers that they meet on social media outside of their network of social relations. Instead, the mediatized relationships offered by social media come to represent a ready source of potential friends with whom they are both eager and willing to interact. On occasion, it is actually these strangers who individuals feel they can most easily confide in, and share intimate feelings – or experiences – with.

This lecture will thus conclude by arguing that improved models for understanding Chinese social relationships are needed, which are capable of understanding the stranger as integral, rather than antithetical to sociality.

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker. For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, www.facebook.com/hkanthro.

[HKAS seminar] When the Sun Sets in the Land of the Rising Sun: Psychoanalytic Theory and Sexual Behavior in Japan

Title: When the Sun Sets in the Land of the Rising Sun: Psychoanalytic Theory and Sexual Behavior in Japan

Speaker: Jermaine R. Gordon-Mizusawa (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Date and time: 8 Dec 2016, 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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Information on sex in Japan especially in the media is conflicting and contradictory. One image is sexualized with soaplands, enjo-kosai or compensated dating, and erotic manga; while another is of sexual repression. In 2008, Japan Today reported the lowest in frequency of weekly sex (34%) and sexual satisfaction (15%). The Guardian's Abigail Haworth in 2013 alarmingly claimed that young people in Japan have stopped having sex altogether, and Business Insider (2015) characterized Japan as experiencing “celebacy syndrome”. However, a BBC “Sex in Japan” documentary in 2008, and in 2015 a series of “special reports” on JK (Josei Culture or compensated dating with adolescent girls) by VICE News and reports in the Japan Times about “high school walking” say otherwise. 

Mr. Gordon-Mizusawa provides an anthropological and psychological analysis of sexual behavior in Japan by examining over 10 years of ethnographic interview data collected by the speaker, focusing particularly on first sexual experiences and subsequent behavior. He also looks at how Western media and academia portray sexual behavior in Japan and explores the meaning of “virginity” as a culture-bound phenomenon. Audience members will also participate in interactive activities during the talk. 

Jermaine R. Gordon-Mizusawa is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His reseach interests include first-sexual experience and sexual behavior in Japan and East Asia using person-centered ethnography, psychoanalytic interview techniques and psychoanalytic theory. He is also interested in child and human development. 

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker. For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, www.facebook.com/hkanthro.

[HKAS seminar] Make it look Nice, Make it Trustworthy: Ecological Farmers in Farmers Markets in Shanghai

Title: Make it look Nice, Make it Trustworthy: Ecological Farmers in Farmers Markets in Shanghai

Speaker: Leo Pang (PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London)

Date and time: 5 Oct 2016, 7:00 p.m.

Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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In the face of nation-wide social distrust due to widespread concern about food safety in China, Mr. Pang sheds light on the relationship between the ecological farmers (“eco farmers”) and customers at farmers markets in Shanghai in an era where an abundance of food choices is available to consumers. While ecological food has yet to catch on owing to the high price of ecological produce compared to that of conventional produce and lack of certification, the eco farmers’ efforts to grow safe and healthy produce have been welcomed by the educated urban middleclass. Pang outlines the strategies that eco farmers use to gain the trust of and appeal to these educated, affluent consumers who are willing to pay the higher prices for the produce at farmers’ markets, and how these strategies may conflict with the farmers’ individual ethos.

Leo Pang is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. This talk is based on his PhD thesis research.

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, www.facebook.com/hkanthro, @HKASTalks.

[HKAS seminar] At the edge of sleep: Insomnia, Time and Social Lives in Hong Kong

Title: At the edge of sleep: Insomnia, Time and Social Lives in Hong Kong
Speaker: David Tong (M.Phil. research student, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date and time: 7 July 2016, 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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We all sleep; sleep is also commonly understood as an innate and private behavior devoid of socialization. Ethnographic studies of sleep in different societies however reveal its cultural variations. Together they join the force in questioning the 8 hours sleep, which is commonly naturalized and mythicized in post-industrial societies. Such a conceptual turn further invites us to reconsider the contemporary experiences of insomnia, which affects at least 1/10 of Hong Kong population. How is our distress over the loss of sleep exacerbated by the allocation of sleep in our society? Being at the edge of sleep, insomnia does not only entail individual distress, but further the social and temporal misalignment with the society. Yet in the process of mediating such misalignment, we will also discuss how people involve in the alternative ways of everyday life.

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, orwww.facebook.com/hkanthro.

[HKAS Seminar] “Keep Catwalking:” Education and Beauty Pageants of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Title: “Keep Catwalking:” Education and Beauty Pageants of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong
Speaker: Chen Ju-chen (Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong) 
Date and time: 25 February 2016, 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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Domestic helpers in Hong Kong are often homogenized, exoticized, and stigmatized as people who live without purpose beyond remitting money home. Ethnographic research shows that, on Sundays, foreign domestic helpers often actively juggle personal chores, association board meetings, birthday parties, church volunteer work, and beauty pageants. This talk addresses a puzzling phenomenon: the motivation behind active participation in costly and time-consuming beauty pageants and, therefore, getting little rest on the designated “rest days.” Focusing on beauty pageant participations, this talk argues that similarly baffling individual aspirations – such as college education and working overseas as a maid – need to be understood within a much broader context of the Philippine’s class structure, colonial cultural legacy, discourse of modernization and global capitalist institutions.

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, or www.facebook.com/hkanthro.

[HKAS Seminar] Caring for the Heart: Grassroots Psychosocial Therapy in Post-3.11 Japan

Title: Caring for the Heart: Grassroots Psychosocial Therapy in Post-3.11 Japan
Speaker: Isaac Gagne (Postdoctoral Fellow, CUHK’s Department of Japanese Studies)
Date and time: 12 November 2015, 7:00pm
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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Four-and-a-half years since the 2011 disaster in Japan, over 190,000 people remain displaced, and many still struggle with physical, social, and psychological trauma. In response to post-disaster challenges, a combination of secular and religious volunteer movements have emerged, addressing distinct yet overlapping dimensions of caring and community-building for survivors through what they call “care for the heart.” In this presentation I discuss my ongoing fieldwork on these different forms of “grassroots psychosocial therapy” operating in-between psychiatric, religious, and social spheres. I talk about how as a movement of non-governmental, non-medical “average citizens” who volunteer to listen to and console other “average citizens” suffering from the disaster, these groups have become a grassroots force for social support, community-building, and reflexive psychotherapy, both for survivors and for the volunteers themselves.

Isaac Gagné is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CUHK’s Department of Japanese Studies working on religion, morality, gender and identity in Japan.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, or www.facebook.com/hkanthro.

[HKAS Seminar] Urban Volunteers in Rural China: Imagining the Nation, Encountering the Other, Transforming the Self

Title: Urban Volunteers in Rural China: Imagining the Nation, Encountering the Other, Transforming the Self
Speaker: David Palmer (Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong) 
Date and time: 29 October 2015, 7:00pm  
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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In the past decade, a growing number of urban Chinese, primarily university students and graduates, have gone to rural and ethnic minority regions of Western China to act as volunteer teachers in schools, for periods ranging from a few days to a few years. Based on interviews, field research and media narratives of volunteers, this talk will propose an anthropological analysis of this form of volunteering as an Othering encounter in which cosmopolitan and rustic, urban and rural, Han and ethnic minority identities are highlighted and negotiated. This Othering encounter is a process that involves multiple stages, beginning before the volunteers’ departure, unfolding during the period of service in the remote locale, and continuing after the return to urban life. Through this process, concerns with effecting lasting educational change are eclipsed by the frustrations and joys of engaging with local people and their realities. Volunteering becomes an experience of self-reflection and individual transformation; at the same time, it becomes a ritual of solidarity that enacts the unity of the Nation, dramatizing and reconciling the divisions between its people.

Dr. David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor and head of the department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2008. After completing his PhD in the Anthropology of Religion at the Institute for Advanced Research in Paris, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient), at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas, or www.facebook.com/hkanthro.

Is Death the End? Senses of Life after Death in Guangdong

Death appears to be the ultimate threat to our lives and senses of security. People in different parts of the world, with different religions and local beliefs, offer diverse depictions of an afterlife. On July 2, the Hong Kong Anthropological Society had invited Allie Kwong, an MPhil student of our department, to give a talk on “Is Death the End? Senses of Life after Death in Guangdong”. Allie has been doing research on the topic and had interviewed people in Guangdong to see how they envisioned their lives after death, in what contexts their imaginations were situated, and how their senses of life after death related to their understanding of life.

Allie presenting her research at the Hong Kong Museum of History

Allie’s informants included believers, agnostics and non-believers of life after death. Use of specific terms and concepts by non-believers revealed the forces that shaped their non-belief. These forces included the materialist and atheist education in the socialist era, the celebration of science and hierarchy created between science and “superstition”. Beliefs in life after death was considered and “superstition” by many. It was associated with the rural population and negative traits such as being “uncultured” and “uneducated”. For the believers of an afterlife, rather than adhering to a single doctrine, they constructed their own version of life after death by selecting different themes from available resources. Allie identified two conditions that encouraged such process of personalization and privatization. First, the religious policy in the reform era created a hierarchical plurality in the religious field. A diversity of religious views have been allowed for choice in contemporary China. Second, the stigma that supernatural beliefs continued to carry contributed to the privatization of beliefs in life after death.

Allie argued that there are relationships between senses of life after death and how individuals understand or lives their life. First, senses of life after death influences individuals’ lives. Beliefs in reincarnation, paradise and hell, and heaven and hell provided believers moral guidance and motivated believers to perform good deeds, while beliefs in spirits inflicted emotions and influenced decision making of the believers by supernatural agents’ direct participation in believers’ life. Non-believers spoke of the moral freedom that non-belief granted, which allowed them to be more “practical” and “flexible”. Second, individuals’ senses of life after death may be a reflection of their emotional bonding with the deceased. In turn, the imagination/belief of afterlife or its absence help them make sense of their feelings towards the deceased, how they should position themselves in the relationship and how they should proceed with life. Finally, senses of life after death becomes a means through which people imagine a better China, one that is morally regulated as they feel that today is not.. A number of interviewees, believers and non-believers believed that if more people in China believed in reincarnation or heaven and hell, China would become a better place. Allie argued that this statement, unsupported empirically, had to be understood as a response to the “moral vacuum” resulted from the end of a single dominant code of ethics and the emergence of heterogeneous values since the fall of the communist ideal.

Around 40 people attended the talk and audience showed great interest in the topic. They raised questions about symbolic immortality through descendants and nationalism, the differences between Guangzhou and Hong Kong people in their attitudes towards life after death, the social and economic pattern of believers and non-believers, and how the research influences the researcher in return. The discussion was lively and engaging. In short, Allie’s talk addressed the deepest fears of individuals in Guangdong and discussed how societal values and individuals’ senses of lives influenced each other. Individuals’ imaginations reflected their pursuits in life, their attitude to life, and the social values they internalized.

[HKAS Seminar] Is Death the End? Senses of Life After Death in Guangdong and Hong Kong

Title: Is Death the End? Senses of Life After Death in Guangdong and Hong Kong
Speaker: Kwong Miu Ying (Mphil student, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date and time: 2 July 2015, 7:00pm 
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui 

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Death poses an ultimate threat to our lives and our sense of security in this world. Life after death has always been a point of concern among people in different parts of the world and various religions and local beliefs offer diverse depictions of what an afterlife is like. This talk explores how individuals in Guangdong and Hong Kong envision what will happen to them after they die. Guangdong, like many other parts of China went through the socialist era when religions and supernatural beliefs and practices were banned. While the atheist education in that period has produced numbers of non-believers in the afterlife and even atheists, many seem to be increasingly interested in this issue since the reform era. Graveyard and related businesses are now heavily invested in. Offerings for the deceased have grown in variety to include the most up-to-date models of cell phones. What do these trends tell us about changes in senses of afterlife among Chinese in recent decades? Compared to Guangdong, people in Hong Kong have enjoyed relative religious freedom, although the government favored Christianity among other religions under the colonial rule. Its historical trajectory gives rise to a different scene in terms of senses of life after death. Based on months of in-depth interviews, this talk addresses individuals’ deepest fears and how they tackle them with or without an imagination of an afterlife.

The lecture is conducted in English. All are welcome. (Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.)

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com.

Coming of Age with “Internet Addiction”: Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters

Since 2005, “internet addiction” has been treated as a mental disorder in China. Treatment camps for internet addiction are widely established across China to save Chinese youths and their families. Yet, the media depicts the “dark” side of these unauthorized institutions, and discloses the series of physical tortures suffered by the youngsters being sent to these centres.

Rao Yichen presenting his research at the Hong Kong Museum of History

Rao Yichen, an MPhil student of our Department, had delivered an anthropological talk* on the topic “Coming of Age with “Internet Addiction”: Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters” at the Hong Kong Museum of History last Thursday. He conducted three-month ethnographic fieldwork in a treatment camp to find out whether or not the news were doing justice to these institutions, what kinds of treatments, effective or not, the youngsters had received, and how these camps had informed us about Chinese society.

Living room of the youngsters in the treatment camp

The camp he conducted fieldwork at employed different therapeutics and set up various units—drillmaster team, psychological group, clinical unit, nursing unit, leisure activity group and parents group—to treat the youngsters. Uniformity and discipline were emphasized in the camp, in which the youngsters had to follow a daily schedule, wear military uniform and receive training. Pleasure control had been viewed as the key, since these youngsters were believed to have problem in impulse control. Yichen highlighted the use of Morita therapy (森田療法) in the camp, which was a Japanese therapy designed for patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder. The therapy commonly took a month. At first, the youngster would be isolated in a single room with no one to talk to, and left to his or her own mind. He or she would be given a pen in the second week to write anything, which could be reflections or creative writings. In this treatment, the soul could either be the prison, or the other way round, the savior of the body.

The youngsters and their parents attending psychological lectures together

Yichen noted that the youngsters had invented their local currency—the piece of bread distributed after dinner—in the treatment camp which enabled them to exchange and reciprocate. The “bread system” informed social actions and helped the youngsters to establish relationships, hence contributing to the formation of a community in the camp.

The whole treatment required six months for completion. Length of the treatment period was important—the youngsters might attach to the institution if they stayed there too long, or could still be at the stage of conversion if the duration of the treatment was too short.

Yichen concluded that the term “internet addiction” was only meaningful in the context. Different societies had their own ways in controlling the “abnormalities”. What shall not be overlooked was the discourse that subjected youngsters to “internet addiction” in the first place.

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*The talk was jointly presented by The Hong Kong Anthropological Society and the Hong Kong Museum of History. The list of upcoming talks can be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas/. The talks are free of charge and open to the public.

[HKAS Seminar] Coming of Age with "Internet Addiction": Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters

Title: Coming of Age with "Internet Addiction": Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation of Chinese Youngsters
Speaker: Rao Yichen
Date and time: 28 May 2015, 7:00pm
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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"Internet addiction" has been treated as a mental disorder in China since 2005. The past ten years have witnessed the rise and fall of a national campaign to "rescue" the 24 million "Internet addicts" in China. Some of them sat in an internet café for days or weeks without eating or drinking. Some committed suicide as a result of one quarrel after another with their parents. Some killed their parents as they "lost their sense" in the world on-line. Treatment camps for internet addiction were established across China under the mission of saving Chinese youths and their families. However, the media coverage of these institutions "disclosed" their "dark" and disruptive sides. Young people sent to these centers were said to have gone through a series of physical tortures - some were even trained to death. Based on three months' ethnographic fieldwork in a treatment camp based on different therapeutics, this talk gives an inquiry into the discipline and resistance, the institutional encounters and the subject formations of the youngsters who underwent the treatment of "internet addiction".

The lecture is conducted in English. All are welcome. (Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.)

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com.

[HKAS Seminar] The Awareness of Technological Choices: Chinese Elements Adopted by Khmer Ceramic Craftsmen in Angkor, Cambodia

Title: The Awareness of Technological Choices: Chinese Elements Adopted by Khmer Ceramic Craftsmen in Angkor, Cambodia
Speaker: Sharon Wong Wai-yee
Date and time: 23 April 2015, 7:00 p.m. 
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui 

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Khmer ceramics unearthed in Angkor can be traced as cultural roots to provoke local awareness of local identities and traditions. However, Chinese influence is usually portrayed as a straightforward case of one-way cultural diffusion, especially how Chinese ceramic craftsmanship influenced the Khmers during the ninth to fourteenth centuries. In this talk, a concept of technological choices on the study of Chinese elements adopted by Khmer ceramic craftsmen in Angkor will shed light on our imagery of cross-cultural exchange in the past.

Sharon Wong Wai-yee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include historical archaeology, and China-Southeast Asian cultural interaction in pre-modern period. She was trained in archaeology and gained her PhD at the National University of Singapore and M.A. from the School of Archaeology and Museology in Peking University.

The event is jointly presented by the Hong Kong Anthropological Society and the Hong Kong Museum of History. All interested are welcome. For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com.

Flyer of the seminar

[HKAS Seminar] Gifts to a Former Mentor: Hong Kong's contribution to the rise of China and the consequences of that rise for the current relationship

Prof. Alan Smart from the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, will be giving a talk on Gifts to a Former Mentor: Hong Kong's contribution to the rise of China and the consequences of that rise for the current relationship on the coming Wednesday. Make sure that you do not miss this great learning opportunity.

Title: Gifts to a Former Mentor: Hong Kong's contribution to the rise of China and the consequences of that rise for the current relationship
Speaker: Alan Smart
Date and time: 4 March 2015, 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

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The event is jointly presented by the Hong Kong Anthropological Society and the Hong Kong Museum of History. All interested are welcome.

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com.

[HKAS Seminar] Shampoo in China: Development, Consumerism and Modernity

Professor Joseph Bosco is giving a talk this Thursday on Shampoo in China: Development, Consumerism and Modernity, presented by The Hong Kong Anthropological Society in association with The Hong Kong Museum of History*. If you missed his talk in CUHK in March this year, you would not want to miss this one!

Title: Shampoo in China: Development, Consumerism and Modernity
Speaker:  Joseph Bosco
(Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Time: Thursday, 12 December, 2013 7:00 p.m.
Venue: Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, Hong Kong Museum of History, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Free! All are welcome! (Space, however, is limited to 139 seats)
The lecture is conducted in English

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This talk seeks to understand consumerism by examining the rapid adoption of shampoo in China since 1979. Before the economic reforms, the same bar soap used for laundry was used for washing the body and hair, and it was rationed. In the 1980s, many domestic soap and shampoo brands emerged, but after 1986, products made by multinational companies became popular. Many consumer advocates in the West have argued that the quality differences between different brands are slight. Yet some “foreign” brands (made in China) cost three times or more than local brands. Why are people willing to pay a premium for fancy soap and shampoo, when in most cases only the user knows what type of soap he/she has used? Why pay more when most consumers cannot tell the difference? What images and ideals are consumers buying with each bar or bottle? What does the rapid adoption of shampoo in China tell us about consumerism and the prospects for sustainable development?

Following the talk, you are invited to a self-paying dinner with the speaker.

For more information please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537
Email: anthrohk@gmail.com
URL: www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas
FB: www.facebook.com/hkanthro
Twitter: @HKASTalks
*The museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.

HKAS Highlight: Sailors on Container Ships in a Neoliberal Era

Mr. Andrew Wu Liang
Former M.Phil. student, Anthropology Dept., CUHK
"Sailors on Container Ships in a Neoliberal Era: 'Breadwinners', 'Guards' and 'Prisoners'"
Invited Talk at the Hong Kong Anthropological Society
21 March 2012, Hong Kong Museum of History
 

In an age where most anyone of means can obtain any sort of manufactured goods. Shipping remains the major mode of transport for goods across the world. In his talk, Sailors on Container Ships in a Neoliberal Era: "Breadwinners", "Guards" and Prisoners", Wu Liang covers the lives of sailors on container ships. Wu illustrated the hardships of life in the open sea from the isolation, to the physical strain as shipping companies continue to seek ways to minimise expenses and downsize. The goal of manning a ship at minimum cost often means that crew members are drawn from all over the developing world from Eastern Europe to East Asia. The result is a mish-mash of ethnicities on these polyglot crews. Comradery is often reduced to a formality due to cultural differences. Close friendships are difficult to form, as crew composition is constantly changing.

Wu’s most notable point is the irony that seafarers, who bring the fruits of globalisation, are denied some of globalisation’s greatest benefits like easier international communication and travel. While many of us receive news from loved ones from continents away at the click of a mouse, it takes low ranking seafarers days and sometimes weeks to receive the same news when they are at sea. Calling friends and family is rare, as the cost of satellite technology is expensive and mobile phone reception is nonexistent at sea. While, increasing travel afforded by cheaper airfares has allowed more and more people to see the world, seafarers are seeing less of it than ever before. Wu noted that seafarring has and still continues to be promoted as a career path for those seeking to see more of the world, yet seafarers are less able to see the world than in previous eras, as on shore leave has become increasingly limited due to shorter stops at ports as ports seek to maximise their efficiency in the neoliberal era.

Through his years of fieldwork, Wu Liang manages to use his study to give voice to the hardships faced by these unsung heroes of globalisation. In doing so he shows the importance and relevance of ethnographic studies in giving voice to those whose voices are not heard.

For more information please visit the Hong Kong Anthropologist to see a copy of Andrew’s research paper on which this talk was based.

Leo PANG
M.Phil Candidate
email.leopang[AT]gmail.com

HKAS Highlight: The Manila Hostage Crisis and Hong Kong Interethnic Relations

Ms. Candy Hiu Yan Yu
M.Phil Candidate, Anthropology Dept., CUHK
"The Manila Hostage Crisis and Hong Kong Interethnic Relations"
Invited Talk at the Hong Kong Anthropological Society
29 February 2012, Hong Kong Museum of History

First year MPhil candidate, Candy Yu gave a talk based on her undergraduate research on how the Manila Hostage Crisis affected the relations between Filipinos and Hong Kongers. Yu examined this relationship on three levels – the individual level specifically focussing on the relationship between Filipino Domestic Workers and their Employers, the societal level and the international level with the dynamic between China, the Philippines and Hong Kong in wake of the crisis.

While noting that there have been many cases of abuse by employers, Yu found that there were many cases where employers realised that the crisis had nothing to do with their employees. She pointed out cases where employers stood up for their employees when the helpers were the target of abuse when shopping. Yu noted that there was a parallel discourse on internet forums that was much more derogatory in the wake of the crisis. Yu argued that this is because many of those on the internet forums did not have domestic helpers and had never met any Filipinos, thus the only image of Filipinos that they have is the media’s portrayal in the wake of the crisis.

Yu’s coverage of the international level illustrated the precarious position of Hong Kong in international affairs. She focussed on Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s inability to reach President Benigno Aquino, who dismissed Chief Executive Tsang as not being on the same standing internationally. Yu argued that this showed that despite Hong Kong not being a nation state, Hong Kongers did not want the Chinese government to intervene on a diplomatic level, reflecting a wider societal suspicion towards Mainland China.

Yu’s talk shows how anthropology can be used to examine current events such as the Manila Hostage Crisis. With the use of interpretive anthropology, analysing the Manila Hostage from multiple perspectives of the individual, society and international relations, Yu was able to shed light on several issues such interethnic relations to the political position in Hong Kong.

For more information please visit the Hong Kong Anthropologist to see a copy of Candy’s research paper on which this talk was based.

Leo PANG
M.Phil Candidate
email.leopang[AT]gmail.com