Summary
Transference and Creation of Naxi Traditional Culture by Modern and Global Processes
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Now if I may ask you to join our fellow cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, who did not get funding to do field work with a remote beautiful people, but took what was then considered the dullest job at the Financial Times: following credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations: Gillian Tett, who analyzed the social relations and artifacts of the tribe of testosterone charged "I win big if we win, I lose nothing if you lose" derivative traders. Whether it was that she alone understood, or merely that she alone reported, she has made the case for the analytic utility of our way of looking at things previously not exactly forboten to us, but things, like modern and global economic processes, where our observations were at best tolerated as those of artistic, interesting amateurs. I ask you to join us in looking at us: our social relations and artifacts. As I am not with you, I can only chart my own; but I beg you accept my petitition to serve as a proud "native informant."
You will notice from the chart, I have made Kumming the center hub. Red lines denote person to person contact, trusted and mutually beneficial exchange relations not monetized, not quantified. These are known in English as "old school" connections. Green lines denote "new school" electronic connections, also trusted and mutually beneficial exchange relations not monetized, nor quantified. This is a very different tribe from the one Gillian Tett studied where London and New York competed as to which was hub and which was node, but both red and green connections were far more robust than between other nodes, like Rio de Janeiro, or Stockholm, or Kumming.
I will elaborate on three connections between nodes. Berlin does not link directly to Kumming but old or new school connection. I chart it however because it was an artist from Berlin, Peter Prinz, who encouraged me to present the point about labor time I could not get across to academics nor activists as art, and promised to exhibit it in his gallery in Birmingham, Alabama if I would promise to open it on the world wide web at the same time. If I had not done that I would not have connected (green line) to the China Study Group) located in Boston, nor have brought the art as my part of the International National Conference on Marxism 2001 in Kumming, as a result of which I promised to see that Gao Feng's art on the Naxi was seen in the U.S.
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| Al Sargis(left), Gao Feng(center), Xiao Sa(right) |
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| The second essential in my Naxi Nexus is that between Boston and Kumming. I cannot think of the proper term from classical anthropology to describe the functions performed by Albert Sargis, who organized and sustains the China Study Group, and Xiao Sa, now Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. Neither to my knowledge have been directly deeply involved in the study of Naxi traditional culture. But the connections and nodes these two have spawned have become what the "new school" analysts call so "robust" that the network will survive regardless of connections breaking and nodes blinking out. Notice there is no red line, person to person "old school" connection between Atlanta and Boston. I did not meet Sargis in person until Kumming conference, at the same time I met Xiao Sa. The green, new school, connections were definitely the most important to my involvement in the transference and creation of naxi traditional.
culture.
Which brings us to the third set of connected nodes: between Kumming and Atlanta, Kumming and Corpus Christi, Kumming and Albuquerque, even Kumming and Telluride, Colorado, where I am writing today. This is the connection between the computer of Hu Ying and mine. We have never met. Yet our collaboration is the most productive and satisfying I have enjoyed in my 70 years as an academic sociologist, activist in the American feminist, civil rights, and labor movements, and artist.
I am asking her to tackle a new collaboration with me, which depending on her time and yours she may briefly cover
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| Peggy Dobbins(left), He Ping(right) |
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| Dobbins(L) Dongba(R) at Naxi Cultural Center in Lijiang |
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