Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization

Collaborative Damage is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention, Sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia, to provide new empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South. The core argument is that the different participants studied are intimately linked in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension, calling this collaborative damage.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 294 pages
Publication date: 15 February 2022
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Collaborative Damage is an innovative ethnography that explores Chinese globalization through a comparative analysis of data from two fronts: Sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Drawing upon their extensive fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen offer fresh empirical insights into neocolonialism and Sinophobia in the Global South. At the heart of Collaborative Damage lies the central argument that the diverse participants studied in the globalization processes—local workers, cadres, Chinese managers, and entrepreneurs, as well as the authors themselves, three Danish anthropologists—are intricately interconnected in paradoxical partnerships of mutual incomprehension. The authors refer to this collaborative damage, which encompasses not only the misunderstandings and conflicts they observed in the field but also their inability to reach a consensus on how to interpret the data. Through in-depth case studies and poignant tales of friendship, antagonism, irreconcilable differences, and carefully maintained distinctions across disparate Sino-local worlds in Africa and Asia, Collaborative Damage unfolds a comprehensive narrative of Chinese globalization in the twenty-first century.

Weight: 452g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501759833