Regional Sociology Commons^™

Conducting Ethnography In China, Leung-Sea, Lucia Siu

Prof. SIU Leung-sea, Lucia

Conducting ethnography in modern China can be highly fruitful, yet there are special-care items that seldom appear in methodology literature. Drawn from the author’s fieldwork in China’s futures markets in 2005, the first part of this paper discusses a list of practical items that ethnographers are likely to face: field access, the organizational culture of public and quasi-public institutions, obtaining trust, the scenarios of gifts and banquets, reliability of statistical data, politically sensitive areas, and personal safety.

The second part is a reflection on standpoint issues, namely Orientalism and nationalism. Ethnographers usually face tensions that arise from their roles, as …

Rules, Red Tape, And Paperwork: The Archeology Of State Control Over Migrants, 1850-1930, David Cook-Martín

David Cook-Martín

Conventional accounts of a drastic shift to migration restriction after World War I following a golden era of free movement obscure crucial processes of state formation around matters of administering migration. How and with what consequences did state control over migration become acceptable and possible after the Great War? Existing studies have centered on core countries of immigration and thus underestimate the degree to which legitimate state capacities have developed in a political field spanning sending and receiving countries with similar designs on the same international migrants. Relying on archival research, and an examination of the migratory field constituted by …