The scale of scatter: rethinking social topologies via the anthropology of �residual� China

• Autores: Chris Vasantkumar
• Localización: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, ISSN-e 1472-3433, Vol. 31, Nº. 5, 2013, págs. 918-934
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • After the �Bamboo Curtain� closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those �residues� of China beyond the control of the People�s Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthropology of �residual China� have potentially generative consequences for a rethinking of the after-actor-network-theory (aANT) focus on social topologies. In particular, these spatialities� simultaneous enactment of the presence and absence of Chineseness evinces parallels with and prompts revisions to the notion of a �fire topology�. These revisions in turn suggest the necessity of inventing novel topological models for (more-than-) human realities in order to work against both the creeping naturalization of after-actor-network-theory analytic frames in particular and the routinization of theory more broadly.