Event details

Anthropology Guest Lecture Series

Before “the chain” became the dominant figure for understanding the dynamics of supply and demand in the 1980s, fluvial landscapes have long undergirded logistical projects for building out and maintaining the infrastructural channels of commerce and travel, especially around estuarial or delta zones where rivers meet the sea. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic engagements with the original “development deltas” of Post-Mao China linking coastal SEZs (Special Economic Zones) along the Pearl, Min and Yangtze rivers to global exchange, this talk offers an estuarial take on what scholars of modernity and supply chain capitalism have described as a “liquid” world full of uncertainty and volatility. But in lieu of a theory of universal flux, the talk focuses on the temporal politics of constancy that make fluvial landscapes thinkable in terms of supply chains and in turn, actionable as valued lifeways to be developed and sustained along the logistical junctures of upstream, downstream and the offshore.

Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Her book, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society and the 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China's Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work will analyze the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the temporal intensities and rhythms of people and things on the move between Southern China and the United States. A graduate of NYU’s Program in Culture and Media, she is also currently completing video projects related to her fieldwork as well as developing two new ethnographic foci: (1) on Chinese soundscapes, especially in relation to the changing qualities and valuations of the Chinese concept of renao (热闹, a bustling scene, social liveliness or, literally, “heat and noise”). (2) on the politics and poetics of logistics, especially in relation to e-commerce driven innovations in moving goods, people and information according to increasing aspirations for on-demand, seamless "fulfillment." This includes launching the collaborative research project, "Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds," the cross-platform online discussion of #Logistics in the Time of Covid, and the Spring 2022 issue of Roadsides on #Logistics.