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Recycling gifts in a Chinese city: Authenticatingreal and fake goods, destabilizing social relations
An anthropological lecture by Adam LIEBMAN
Friday, December 4 at 7:00 p.m.
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
All are welcome! Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.
The lecture is conducted in English.
“Gift recycling” thrived amid the rapid economic growth of early 21st-century China. The largely unregulated urban trade emerged to re-circulate gifts that bosses and government officials received in excess, especially high value cigarettes and alcohol. The still prevalent but declining economic sector has thus long been associated with corruption, while also providing opportunities for the circulation of counterfeit goods. Authenticating real and fake goods is therefore an essential aspect of the industry. The many actors involved in producing, exchanging, and halting the circulation of inauthentic gift-products generates a milieu of uncertainty, which can extend to cast doubt on the authenticity of social relationships grounded in the mutuality of gift exchange. Based on ethnographic research in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, we analyze the different strategies that gift recyclers use to authenticate goods. Doing so shows how a market that is intimately tied to regulating social relationships reorients trust and bends to accommodate widespread uncertainty and suspicion. We end by drawing parallels with the current proliferating circulation of “misinformation,” “deep fakes,” and other AI-generated outputs that are similarly intended to deceptively pass as “real.”
Adam Liebman is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently completing a book titled Uncontained: Scrap Worlds in and Beyond China.
For more information, please contact [email protected], www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas,
www.facebook.com/hkanthro,@HKASTalks
* The Museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.
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Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong
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