SEAA Reads on April 2, 2022: "Prototype Nation: China and..."

 The inaugural SEAA Reads session will feature Sylvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020). This book was the 2021 finalist for the Francis L. K. Hsu book prize.

Quoting the award citation at https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/past-seaa-awards/

The book is centered on the city of Shenzhen’s maker culture. This is a form of do-it-yourself (or DIY) culture involving the creation or retooling of electronic technology, often initially pursued as a hobby but also sometimes pursued into the realms of entrepreneurial activity, venture capitalism and mass production. Professor Lindtner explores the state’s moves to co-opt the creative and experimental ethos of maker culture in its efforts to reimagine China as a place not only of fakes and knockoff products, but also as a principal site in the global imagination of technological innovation, one that both inspires and seeks to rival America’s Silicon Valley. Professor Lindtner interrogates the rhetoric of openness and egalitarianism surrounding maker culture—in which the possibilities of technological production supposedly rest publicly in the hands of many, not the corporate few—for how it reinscribes a Western imagination of China as exemplary difference, and for its continued marginalizations of individuals on the basis of gender, socioeconomic status and ethnonationality. Built upon a decade of ethnographic research in maker- and related spaces, rich in the stories of makers and entrepreneurs, but also, for example, the female office workers whose affective labor helps make these spaces viable, the book represents an important resource for understanding the growing competition in scientific and technological innovation between China and the United States. An innovative and ethnographically committed work, Prototype Nation offers important insight into our social and technological present and possible futures, richly manifesting and celebrating the potential of anthropological research within and across disciplinary boundaries.

=-=-= reader responses to follow in late March

 

=-=-= session comments to follow April 2 online session