Description
Book SynopsisCollaborative Damage is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China''s global interventionsub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South.
The core argument in Collaborative Damage is that the different participants studied in the globalization processeslocal workers and cadres; Chinese managers and entrepreneurs; and the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologistsare 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
Trade Review
Engaging, candid, and at times amusing, Collaborative Damage makes an insightful as well as a delightful read.
-- Miriam Driessen * CHINA QUARTERLY *
The book aptly captures the social dynamics characteristic of Chinese investment and the inherent contradictions of transnational capitalism.In short, this book contributes a reflexive, insightful and gripping account of the practices and effects of Chinese extraversion.
* Inner Asia *
Collaborative Damage provides a distinctive approach both to the study of a controversial global phenome- non and to the practice of ethnographic writing.
* The Developing Economies *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Friendship Empire: How a Chinese Entrepreneur Failed to Make Friends in Mongolia
2. Whose Walls? A Chinese Mining Enclave in the Gobi Desert
3. Roads That Separate: How a Chinese Oil Company Failed to Detach Itself from Its Mongolian Surroundings
4. Strategies of Unseeing: The Possible Superimposition of a "Chinatown" on the Catembe Peninsula
5. Enclaves and Envelopes: Cutting and Connecting Relations in Sino-Mozambican Workplaces
6. Alterity in the Interior: Tree Scouts, Spirits, and Chinese Loggers in the Forests of Northern Mozambique
Conclusion
