再见，中国！Later, Chinagator! Selected Journal Entries

Zaijian! 再见！So long!

















So we bid a fond adieu to the great cities of China. Well, Shanghai and Beijing, at least. Everyone kept a journal of some kind or another, and here are a few tidbits.

Perhaps the most disturbing observation that was put forward by more than one of our speakers and many casual conversations was this: The majority of the population does not have the training or ability to innovate. I winced every time I heard this... how can this be true? Aren't there some universal attributes to humankind that include this innovative spark, even if hidden? So, back to the question: What is our hurry? Might our assessment of their innovative abilities be skewed by our western influence?
--T. James


The air is nice and cool, there is construction for a new station (I think) or something very large. I have never seen so much scaffolding in a single city in my life. The expensive jobs use steel scaffolding and the less expensive ones use bamboo. If you fell, it would take weeks for you to bounce off of all the bars and finally hit the ground the webbing of the scaffolding is soooooo tight. There are five huge cantilever cranes in the background on this job. I made the right decision to take this trip. I wish I would have planned better so I could see more. I am glad I didn’t plan better or I would have missed the adventure.
I have to wonder........
-- G. Brest


Where is the real China? not the fancy car dealerships, the pretty buildings, the fancy hotels. It's like the Stepford wives, sometimes it's too right? K. Cubbage

I could not see the China I read in books and news media. I saw a China, a capitalist society that is no different that the big western cities. Of course I did not visit the rural places where 800 million people still live.
-- R. Peru


Lastly, Mr. W with [mega-retailer from US in China] indicated that the Chinese are looking for companies that have a sense of social responsibility (i.e. give back to a support the local community – don’t be low profile about what you do “make some noise” per J. Wang with Wal-Mart). In addition, they are looking for companies that understand the environment and sustainability.
-- M O'Grady

The people there were amazing and so nice. I still have a hard time realizing that we were in a metropolitan area, but the people seemed like they were from a rural background and were glad to talk with you and ask you where you were from and what you were doing in China. --A. Jones

The wall itself is definitely one of those "bucket list" items of things to see - one of the man-made wonders of the world. The section we visited has been preserved, and attracts huge throngs of tourists. In fact while the wall itself was great to visit, the crowds actually took away from the experience. There were many times when walking portions of the wall, where the sea of people was so thick, that it was impossible to see anything, or for that matter do anything other than be shoved along with the crowd as it moved. Still, I can say I've 'been there, done that'. --E. Dzuik



There are other blogs, too! I don't have a decent catalogue (and can't figure out how blogspot catalogues the blogs that I follow: I should check that. Leave me a comment and I'll link to your China blog, too! Thanks for a memorable trip, gang!



And for the record, Per was not sharing beer with this migrant worker guy, but Ken did accept a cigarette from him. *cough*

Learning, Creating, and Laughter

I finished up our day with this little story, which seemed to fit the way the day (happily) felt here at UMKC.

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.