Original link: https://tyingknots.net/2022/08/knotting-proposals-1/
On July 25, 2020, Yushengzhi published its first article , and it has been two years since then. To celebrate Xiao Yu’s 2nd birthday, we will continue the “knotting story painting” that was carried out on the first anniversary: co-creation by sharing stories and ideas with each other.
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Last year’s collective creation focused on ropes, knots, and solutions, and three episodes of wonderful content (the first , the second , and the third ) have been launched. This year, we invite you to share with the theme of ” Anthropological topics I want to explore ” (see the link for details). This issue is the first sharing on this topic.
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Friends who are interested in participating, please send the content to: [email protected]
Risk Culture on the Railroad
Steal the starry sky in the bottle
I’m an undergraduate majoring in political science, but I wanted to switch to anthropology when I was about to go to college. I have methodological anxiety, and the wonderful ethnography produced by the field method of anthropology makes me, a layman, feel a very fresh and different wonderful life when I open the book: so there is such a way of living!
If I get a chance to get into the field. I wanted to go to the Depot where my family works and see how they see risk as real, personal actors. I know that foreign airlines and pilots have a unique risk culture or risk burnout (it seems to say so), so what do train drivers in our country think of it? This is the day-to-day life of my family around me, but I don’t know much about it.
There is a tweet on the “Theoretical Outline” public account about risk normalization and pilots feeling powerless. It mentioned that “under the guidance of high-risk technology culture, even in the face of questionable evidence, it may be justified and normalized, which has contributed to the decline of collective judgment and inadvertently constituted a disaster.” Follow the rules of engineers cause tragedy because of this organizational culture. And the pilots at the individual level have great responsibilities, little power, and face enormous pressure. “Many pilots are quite dissatisfied with the company’s administrators, forming a confrontation between the “field team-management team”.”
But what about looking at our railways through this lens? Because I am not a practitioner and have no relevant technical knowledge, I can only provide my understanding: the management of the railway department supports “would rather stop by mistake”, that is to say, even as long as the driver sees the bamboo on the roadside, it may fall over. You can park directly under the car, and this kind of behavior will be rewarded with money. However, after all, the train is a behemoth, and parking is not as simple as a single brake. If the operation is improper during the parking process, the money will be deducted. So there is a contradiction here: support can be said to stop at any time, but strict management of the parking process makes the parking itself less “anytime”, and the driver can only adapt to the changes in the work process. I haven’t done any specific research, so I don’t know what kind of organizational culture this contradiction has formed, let alone its impact on production safety.
Rural society in the post-epidemic era
Extraordinary
I want to explore what rural society will look like in the post-epidemic era? How has the life of the villagers changed? How to revitalize the countryside in a more practical process? In the book “Three Rural Issues and Reflections on the Century”, teacher Wen Tiejun talked about the problems of pursuing Western-led industrialization through introverted self-accumulation, which has caused various ills in Chinese rural areas. Therefore, how to make the villages go from being dependent to self-growth is also a question I want to know.
“I believe that the reason why anthropological papers are flooded with data collection is not that it is highly valuable and interesting, but that it comes from the attitude of ‘when in doubt, collect the facts.'” After reading the book “The Naive Anthropologist” At the time, this sentence has been haunting my heart, only by seeing the facts, can we prescribe the right medicine. And the fact-finding process itself brings me great joy.
I like to deal with all kinds of people, I will observe those subtle details, people’s reactions, capture all changes in the state of the environment, what a fun thing, connecting people, feeling specific people, is also rebuilding nearby. The topic I want to explore is the countryside in Yunnan. I hope to use my footsteps to measure the countryside in Yunnan and see the people living in this land. Complete research with professional ability with problem awareness. Although I am just an individual, my observation may be like a solid brick that can stand verification and can build a project building of “Yunnan Rural Survey” with other teachers and friends, so that people can truly feel the society The practical application of academic disciplines and the vitality of rural Yunnan.
Foot bath city
Killie Ho
Foot bath city, this is the space I want to conduct field research; Foot bath city female technicians, this is the object I want to study. I didn’t have any specific questions to go with, I just wanted to experience their lives in person, just like that day I was walking aimlessly to the foot bath center near my home on an unremarkable day, and then I met she. At our first glance, her complexion and facial features tell her the secrets she holds.
She is from Daliangshan, a Yi girl who ran away from home. In her hometown, the girl will get married when she is 16 years old, and then she will do housework, have children, and take care of children at home, and will never leave her for the rest of her life. In order to break free from such a life, she was even fooled by her companions to the red light district in Hebei at first, but she did not want to do a job without dignity, which went against her original intention of leaving home, so she went to several cities without a penny, Finally came to Chengdu and became a technician in an ordinary foot bath center. These are her brief recaps of her own life to me during our brief two “bell” conversations.
Working in the foot bath city is faced with verbal sexual harassment and physical sexual harassment from male customers once a day on average. For passers-by outside the window, this is just a place for relaxation and entertainment, but for the female workers here, it is the best space for gender-based violence to appear. Although she would avoid and even slap the other person when she was angry, but she could stop it once, and she knew that there would be another time. As long as she continued to work here, she had to be ready to resist the aggression every day, so the situation has changed. gradually become numb.
To do a foot bath, the usual steps are to soak the feet first, then press the feet, and massage the whole body after about 45 minutes. Physical contact with a stranger, even if she’s of the same sex as me, took a long time for me to settle in. Watching her earnestly pick up my feet and wipe off the water stains for me, I felt red in the face at first, but then I put my trust in her because she brought me a sense of security. Then I felt as relaxed as a baby would in a mother’s swaddling, though the years of pain in my cervical and lumbar spine as the joints pushed and pulled made me scream.
I am 22 and she is 22; I am a woman and she is a woman. We did not know each other, but in the private space where only the two of us existed, cultural exchanges, physical collisions, and emotional connections took place. Under these conditions, ambiguous meaning was born. But the next second my Enron turned into misery: she treated a dozen strangers, or more precisely, strangers who were a potential threat to her, the same way she treated me every day. She is going to touch their feet, their necks, their waists, will they fall in love with her? Will you respect her? Or will it hurt her?
Gender, ethnicity, and body, in my long study life, the three most important topics for me have been neatly brought together in the space of Foot Bath City. Maybe one day I will be the best folk documentary director, but first I want to focus my camera on the ordinary she.
The impact of urban spatial planning and infrastructure on daily life
Cai Jionghao
My own professional direction is the history of modern thought and culture. For many years, I have been wandering in the world of words, trying to understand the ideological origins that have shaped many social changes since modern times. Recently, I feel more and more that the various changes in modern times are all-round, originating from the driving force at the level of ideas and concepts, and finally intervening in daily life in the form of “transitivity”, and the regulated daily life will be directly or indirectly. Indirect ways shape people’s ideas and basic spiritual outlook.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the material space planned and constructed based on modern technology and relying on modern countries and professionals has become the basic situation we live in. This physical space consists of visible buildings, roads, street lamps, electric poles, signal towers, and invisible pipelines buried underground. These buildings and infrastructure have changed the spatial texture of the city to a considerable extent, and re-specified people’s life style, and on this basis, they have shaped new interpersonal relationships and even emotional expressions. In recent years, scholars in the field of humanities and social sciences have begun to pay attention to modern physical space and infrastructure from different perspectives, and many wonderful works have emerged. What I am particularly concerned about is how the knowledge possessed by professionals or technical elites transmits their own ideas to the practical level, and how ordinary people experience, understand and even build on these new physical spaces and infrastructures. Inheriting memories and sustenance feelings. To explore this topic, it may be necessary to go deep into the “field” in the anthropological sense from two directions: the first direction is to walk into the streets, to actually participate in observation near various planned urban spaces and infrastructures, to obtain local first-hand experience and the “local knowledge” of local residents, and try to explore the differences between the spatial landscape experience and historical memory possessed by local residents and the planning leaders in the time dimension (see Figures 1-8 and explanatory text); The second direction is to enter the world of professional elites and acquire their professional perspectives and relevant subject knowledge to understand the divergent interests and knowledge lines behind the production process of these planning schemes and the differences in the positions of various parties in practice, which requires humanities Researchers with a social science background enter professional institutions and groups of people whose professional backgrounds are quite different from their own to conduct more detailed observations and records (see Figure 9 and explanatory text).
Picture 1 on the left, a painting by a painter in the small park district of Shantou; picture 2 on the right, the demolition site in the small park district of Shantou 
Picture 3 on the left, the arcade after the reconstruction of the block; Picture 4 on the right, the street scene after the reconstructionFigures 1 and 2 are the paintings of a local artist and the demolition site I photographed in the Xiaoyuan District of Shantou in July 2021. According to the artist’s description, this district was not a unified style of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China before the renovation, but a city with different shapes. interface and running a business. After the start of the neighborhood renovation, this area was “Disneyified” and became a local historical and cultural business card and an online celebrity landmark for foreign tourists to punch in. It is worth noting that the historical memory of Shantou in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, when Shantou opened its port in modern times, was focused and magnified, and there was a lot of tension between this and the actual memory of local residents, as shown in Figures 3 and 4. The facade and business signs (mostly local names in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China), and the lanterns hanging in the arcade mark the year when Shantou opened its port: 1860.
Figure 5: Railway pier near Chongqing Jiuquhe Wetland Park, August 2021 
Figure 6 Railway pier near Chongqing Jiuquhe Wetland Park, August 2021 
Figure 7: Chongqing Rail Transit Line 2 trains and stations, August 2021 
Figure 8 Chongqing Rail Transit Line 2 TrainFigures 5 and 6 are the railway piers and crowds I photographed on the bank of the Jialing River near the Jiuquhe Wetland Park in Chongqing in August 2021. Figures 7 and 8 show the trains and stations of Chongqing Rail Transit Line 2. Concrete piers of railway bridges, light rail trains, and stations as modern transportation infrastructure have become an important part of the urban landscape here. A considerable part of the crowd carried out various leisure activities under the bridge piers, and took pictures to record the moments of the train passing through. The understanding and use of the bridge pier landscape by the visitors should not be the original intention of the infrastructure designers in these two cases.
Figure 9: Quanzhou West Street, July 2021Figure 9 shows the Quanzhou West Street and Bell Tower I took in July 2021. Many sites in the ancient city of Quanzhou were included in the World Cultural Heritage List that month. During the inspection in Quanzhou, I went with my high school classmate, engineer Cao Enbo, who is currently working in the Shenzhen branch of the China Planning and Design Institute, and communicated with him. From him, I gained a lot of professional knowledge in urban planning and the perspective of observing the protection experience of the ancient city of Quanzhou. . He thought at the time that the urban renewal and protection he had seen in Quanzhou could be called: “Another possibility for Chinese cities.”
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