Summary of SEAA Reads, session 15 from February 7, 2026

Seeking A Future for the Past; Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City by Philipp Demgenski (U.Michigan 2024) open access epub or PDF

This evening our circle counted five colleagues in all stages of scholarly life, from graduate school and fieldwork to emeritus point of view. Laurel Kendall hosted and began by describing the Hsu Book award committee’s highlights, along with some of the defining features of this long-term ethnography composed of long periods in residence and intermittent returns, too. The formal commendation appears among SEAA past awards for the Hsu Book Prize. Unlike other ethnographic observers of the tension between developers and heritage/preservation advocates, the author weaves in many, many more voices and experiences: the colonial period families and individuals in residence (with or without documented title to the property), urban migrants (with or without registration/working and residential permission), civil servants, tourists, former residents now rehoused elsewhere in the city, and so on. Above all the book has coherence and consistency, despite the many voices and the vagaries of the pressures for and against preserving the traces of the former German colony in Qingdao. There is a narrative arc over the 10 year period of study.

    Other responses from readers included praise for researching outside the biggest mega-cities, recording the lives outside the metropole. The fine balance between “flow” (daily life’s messiness) and “control” (sharply defined issues and options) was well presented to readers. The economics of sustaining long-term research for a young scholar also entered into the conversation - ways that a non-Chinese social scientist can fit into the fieldsite (rapport as a German citizen looking at a former German colony seemed reasonable and natural to interviewees) and into the Chinese higher education system.Other anthropologists who have an organic connection to their fieldsites were mentioned: S. Tambiah (Sri Lanka), Nakane C. (Japan), EE. Evans-Pritchard (England), S. Ortner (Long Island high school reunion), Margaret Mead (USA). Also considered in the discussion group was the dialogic experience of fieldworker shaping the picture on site, while also being shaped from those personal and professional experiences. The process of (long-term) fieldwork and the product are bound together intimately; what readers engage with expresses both the manner and methods of the ethnographer as well as the guiding questions and real-life encounters along the way.

    As to the risks of spending too much time to build relationships and get to know the subject in the field, several dimensions were identified in the Zoom meeting: the field site itself changes, including those figuring prominently into the researcher’s own understanding of the subject matter, the scholarly trends and sources to engage with may go into directions different to one’s own research design, the many layers of personal and professional life may deflect the original project, one’s foundational questions may shift or no longer seem productive, leading to a reorganization of the material gathered over the years. As an advisor one line of guidance to a student is to finish the dissertation and refigure it as a book of wider interest. But then go back for a “sequel” to revisit the contacts and themes from the distance of a few years. One can revisit for a final “at the time of this writing” update chapter to the book, but the best advice might be “there is always a 2nd book” in one’s foundational fieldwork experience; you need not capture everything or have an authoritative last word in the first publication. Witnessing a fluid situation across many years and with the vantage of multiple stakeholders as Demgenski does, one needs to recognize that ethnographic publishing is chimerical.

    The larger subject of ethnography as a literary genre to write and to seek out for reading; and as a platform to present disparate voices, and the many forms of observation (visual, physical, published, audio) also came up in the discussion. Its authority comes from sustained and close-up relationships, as well as context given to the multiple viewpoints taken into account when the participant-observer puts everything into a single account. Readers who see the subject of Qingdao preservation zones “before” and then see the changes “after” may be puzzled at the result; how things came to be as they are. Only by reading Demgenski’s account of the processes, the players, the rhythm and logic, the forces pushing one direction and another, and the sense of successive “after” horizons can a reader appreciate the tissue of relationships and ideas, pressures and aspirations of stakeholders and bystanders that connect the “before” to the “after” in this part of the city.

     In seeking to document and understand the “heritagization” phenomenon is today’s China and in the regional hub of Qingdao, the author describes himself as “heritage agnostic,” not knowing but yet curious about the competing viewpoints for and against keeping remnants of the old colonial days. Other ethnographers may find themselves entangled or implicated in the positions of one side or another, but by his “agnostic” position he listens with interest and respect to all sides. With so many sources and so many years of observation, Demgenski’s storytelling ability to know a good beginning and good ending succeeds in giving the readers a satisfying sense of conclusion to the project even as the ultimate fate of the neighborhood he describes is uncertain.

     Social class was another tangent we discussed, since it affects the upbringing of all anthropologists and thus their own lens on the people they document and get to know in the field. In the particular context of China and its course of events with the Chinese Communist Party - first championing Worker Dignity and rights but in Demgenski’s time much shaped by consumerism pressures and impulses - the matter of social class seems to be an intermittent factor, sometimes in the foreground (residents confronting bureaucrats) and other times in the background (little documented or not immediately relevant).

     Another topic from the book is “authenticity.” Preservationists see value in the original fabric of the long-ago times. Developers see value in remaking something in the image of those original structures, but not in the worn down materials themselves. Small business owners sometimes see the past as raw material to use for present purposes, repurposing original spaces for today’s needs and enrichment. From there we talked about Artificial Intelligence fabricating visual material in still or moving images so that one person’s authenticity can compete with the actual, original historical fabric or residual traces. Even documentaries don’t always tell viewers when a scene is a reenactment or dramatized version (or AI fabricated one). To be fair, some of the old ethnographic pictures were staged and all of those taken in studios were posed, due to the slow photographic processes required: no “point and shoot” pocket-size equipment in the time of Edward S. Curtis, for instance. And even the publicly shared idea of what features count as authentic can change (e.g. The Invention of Tradition), as the case of hula in Hawai’i demonstrates: from voice accompaniment to Western instrumentation to plastic lei and skirts that are vested with nostalgia.

     When “authentic” and ethnographic and empirical can be questioned or falsely compared to A.I. generated imagined sequences and scripts, then how will new ethnographers and those coming after them engage their subjects in the field and then their readers on the page? This question of advising grad students organizing their fieldwork came into the discussion, since the circumstances of Demgenski’s long-term study are hard to imagine for most other young anthropologists. Like everything else changed by the Internet, fieldwork conditions for researcher and the people she or he is getting to know have changed since the time of Seeking A Future for the Past; Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City. And surveys of those who complete a Ph.D. program in anthropology show that a slim percentage obtain gainful employment in higher education or research centers private or public.So the majority gain employment in some other way. The term from Hawai’ian was offered as a cover term for all this upheaval: hulihi’a.

     Toward the end of the session, the group talked about the several different ways for an anthropologist (or trained scholar of any kind) can fulfill their interests and put to good use their skill set for documenting, interviewing, and synthesizing the things that come into focus. Some are natural public speakers who engage audiences face to face or online. Others are best as writers and thinkers who interact across disciplines. Some are gifted as teachers - not just of texts but of larger matters, too. And some of us are untethered from an institutional base, still writing and documenting for public consumption.

     The case of Philipp Demgenski’s ethnography of the many stakeholders in Qingdao’s relationship to its past raises many issues about conducting ethnography, presenting complicated stories, and what happens after the work is out in the world for others to read - intended audiences and unexpected ones, too. Certainly, this work exemplifies the excellence that the 2025 Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize recognizes.

The next session of SEAA Reads will be APRIL 4, 7:30 PM EST: Michelle Ho (2025). Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies (Duke University Press) DISCUSSION LEADERS: Xinyu Guan and David Kwok Kwan Tsoi