活動內容
Brendan Galipeau（高進榮）等人
謝力登（本院民族所助研究員）
活動網址: 相關連結
研討會緣起、主題、目的:
Anthropologists
have conceptualized world order in multiple ways; as “empire,” “world system,”
the “global,” and more recently, the “planetary.” These different ways of
conceptualizing have reflected changing emphases in anthropological theory on
power, agency, representation and/or ethics, but not only have they also
reflected subaltern political and ethical commitments, but also the imprint of specific
geopolitical circumstances. However, the contingent character of affinities and
antagonisms may be unspoken, shaping assumptions, yet disavowed by reference to
more encompassing categories like “empire” for describing the global condition.
While these categories and their commitments have been most intelligible in the
Euro-American centers of “global” theory, they become increasingly troubled and
fraught in varied discussions about “global China”. The rise of China in the
world has provoked controversies over whether the tools developed to study and
critique Euro-American hegemony can be extended to China, or whether these
tools must be rethought completely. Underlying these controversies is not only
the non-isomorphism of political, economic, and cultural hierarchies at
different scales, but also complicated matters of the personal, political, and
ethical commitments of researchers, interlocutors, and institutions in an
increasingly fractured and imperiled world.
The goal of
this conference, bringing together anthropologists working in and around
(global) China, from Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Okinawa, to
Zambia, Tanzania, South Africa, and North America, is to take controversies
over the use of critical geopolitical categories as a lens for understanding
experiences and epistemologies of world. If anthropologists embody a liminal or
contradictory state of both inheriting and reproducing the coloniality of knowledge
production while also identifying with or even embracing forms of anti-imperial
ethics/politics, what does it mean today to take a critical stance vis-à-vis
empire in difficult-to-simplify contexts where “anti-imperial” critiques from
some positions are entangled with varied “imperial” forms of knowledge from other
positions? What is the relationship between theorizing political, economic,
racialized, and gendered inequalities and the practice and affects of global
affinities and antagonisms when the sense that economic and geopolitical
hierarchies are shifting makes the isomorphism of hegemonies harder to assume?
How do global processes, politics, and inequalities become visible or invisible
as conceptual entities, and how are they authorized?
Dedicated
studies of empire have usually tended towards macro-level theorizing; from
typologies of imperial types, to Marxist debates over measuring scales and
vectors of global value transfer, to the philosophy of “All-under-heaven.”
While Catherine Lutz has called on anthropologists to study “empire in the
details,” this conference asks how empire is theorized from the details. We are particularly interested in everyday
geopolitical theorizing. How do people, including academics, imagine world
order? The presentations and discussions will examine how “Global China,”
“Chinese Empire,” and “US/Western empire” are conceptualized in diverse ethnographic sites, and the implications
for how anthropologists conceptualize world order and navigate an increasingly
fractured and imperiled world.
