Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization

What happens when collaborating development actors and ethnographers fail to agree on the interpretations of the very object/subject at the heart of their collaboration? Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization, by Mikkel Bunkenborg Morten, Nielsen Morten, and Axel Pedersen, is an anthropological feat that provides a fresh perspective on Chinese globalization through case studies of relationships among Chinese migrants and local residents in Mongolia and Mozambique. The book engages the cases as sites of anthropological knowledge production useful for understanding, critiquing, and achieving—or not—shared meaning where there is conflict of interpretation and meaning construction as participants and researchers experience them in the field. The book creatively contends with the largely visible but underengaged pattern of misunderstandings and their consequences for not only Sino-local relations but also for collaborating anthropologists. More so, the authors maintain authorial transparency and reflexivity while staying critically engaged with their positionality. By refusing...