Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization
About this ebook
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.
About the author
Mikkel Bunkenborg is Associate Professor of China Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Morten Nielsen is Research Professor at the National Museum of Denmark and Director of the Research Center for Social Urban Modeling. He is coeditor of The Composition of Anthropology.
Morten Axel Pedersen is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Not Quite Shamans.
