Self and Otherness: The Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China

Author: Liu Xin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: In The Otherness of the Self, Liu Xin takes the commercial practice logic of a coastal city in South China as the research object. Through ethnographic descriptions of three types of people (officials, merchants, and prostitutes), she interprets the stories they tell about themselves or others, thereby revealing the structure of the self in contemporary China. The distinctive feature of this book lies in conducting fieldwork with urban space as the analytical object, implicitly or explicitly critiquing the classic anthropological research model that focuses on villages as the analytical object. The focus of the ethnographic description is no longer people's actual experiences but the stories they tell. Contemporary China is undergoing profound transformations, and during these changes, the personalities of Chinese people are undergoing significant shifts. They change themselves constantly, and it is even easy for them to become different people in terms of personality—this is what the author refers to as the otherness of the self.