Being outside, finding oneself
Channel: Gabriele de Seta
Date: 2018-05-01

by Gabriele de Seta, 2018

During the last leg of my fieldwork in Chinese cities, I took a couple of weeks of holiday in a tourist town near Shanghai. After a couple of days, a young woman sitting next to me at a gathering with friends drew me into an intimate recounting of her life story. Yangyang’s life trajectory, condensed in a short but intense encounter, haunted my dissertation without ever finding a place in it. Her first-hand account of displacement keeps troubling my fieldwork experiences as a reminder of the incommensurabilities sparked by the precarious collisions that characterize living in the tangle of mobilities and precarities that China is today.

Premiered at "Displacements", the 2018 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.