G Mathews
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 800 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | G Mathews |
| NOMBRES | G |
| APELLIDO | Mathews |
| FIRMA | MATHEWS G |
| AFILIACIONES | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9437-5246 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 71 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 221 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 70 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Global Hong Kong
Anthropology in Hong Kong
This entry examines the history of anthropology in Hong Kong, considers the present situation of anthropology in Hong Kong, and explores the future prospects of the discipline in the territory
Beyond ‘Productive Aging’
Hong Kong anthropologists within global neoliberalism and national and local politics
There are global neoliberal pressures on the academy that are more or less faced by anthropologists around the world. To what extent are anthropologists required to publish in English in SSCI-ranked journals to keep their jobs and get promoted? But there are also distinctly national and local pressures to some extent counteracting or eclipsing these global pressures. In this article I explore these counteracting pressures in the context of Hong K…
Comparing the situations of anthropologists around the world as to publication and evaluation criteria
In January 2022, the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force "Making Anthropology Global" was formed, consisting of Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, P.-j. Ezeh, Shannon Morreira, Yasmeen Arif, Chen Gang, Gordon Mathews (chairperson), and Takami Kuwayama, reporting on Chile, Norway, Nigeria, South Africa. India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The task force met via Zoom once a month during 2022 and early 2023, with ass…
Gender and Life after Death in the United States, Japan, and Particularly China
Two of my former graduate students and I have in recent years been doing research on senses of life after death or its lack in the United States, Japan, and China.We interviewed some 120 people of all ages and walks of life in each of three cities, Denver, Sapporo, and Guangzhou, and analyzed and compared all that they told us.This research will be published as a book in January 2023.1 In this brief account for Nan Nü, we first sum up our larger …
Asylum seeking in Hong Kong as a rite of passage
This article, based on interactions and interviews within a class of mostly African asylum seekers in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions over the past 17 years, examines their asylum-seeking as an extended rite of passage, one that eventually led their lives in a more fulfilling direction than asylum-seeking as generally portrayed in the academic literature. Some of these former asylum seekers in Hong Kong have returned to their home countries; some …
A Cross-Cultural Study of Mask-Wearing During the Covid-19 Pandemic
During the Covid-19 epidemic, Japanese and Chinese have overwhelmingly tended to wear face masks, while Americans have not. Why? In this paper, based on ethnographic interviews with members of these three societies as well as examination of mass media and scholarly reports, I provide a preliminary interpretation of this question. I first consider social psychologists’ large-scale analyses of collectivism versus individualism; China and Japan are …
China’s Globalization from Below
The anatomy of loneliness
The anatomy of loneliness: suicide, social connection and the search for relational meaning in contemporary Japan." Asian Anthropology, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–3
African trading brokers in China
African trading brokers in China buy knock-off or copy goods and move them through customs via bribery to African ports; this trade, although illegal, brings desired global products to Africa. This paper, based on interviews with African trading brokers, examines how the internet and Covid-19 have affected their trade. African customers can now find out the accurate prices of goods; computerized customs regimes make bribery difficult; and Covid-1…
Anthropology in Hong Kong According to the GSAP
This paper examines what the Global Survey of Anthropological Practice reveals about anthropology as practiced in Hong Kong, and notes that the statistical data offered by Hong Kong Anthropological Association members does not reflect professional anthropology in the city. This is because the Hong Kong Anthropological Society is a non-professional association dedicated to bringing anthropological knowledge to a larger public, with an astonishing …
Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential
Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumMarshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential Comment on Sahlins, Marshall. 2022. The new science of the enchanted universe: An anthropology of most of humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Gordon MathewsGordon MathewsChinese University of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPe…
China in the world
Confucius Institutes have been a lightning rod in the U.S., especially since the well-known critiques of Marshall Sahlins: they have been seen by some as embodying the malignant efforts of the Chin
Places of Otherness
This article looks at two urban landscapes critical for mobility within the Global South: Eastleigh, Kenya, and Xiaobei, China. While different, they are both centers of global trade that attract migrants seeking livelihoods, and are also regarded with great ambivalence within the countries that host them. We explore this ambivalence, showing how it links to fear of the “others” who animate them, and to broader politics in which migrants become c…
The Hong Kong protests in anthropological perspective
This brief report discusses the Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 in terms of cultural and national identity. It examines how Hongkongers have had no concept of what it means to belong to a nation throughout their history; but because of the ham-handed efforts by the Hong Kong government to enforce Chinese national identity, many young Hongkongers have reacted by embracing a different "nation": Hong Kong. It also examines how many young Hongkongers…
An Anthropologist at the Hong Kong Protests
Pursuits of happiness
Introduction: Anthropology, Happiness, and Well-Being Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo PART I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Chapter 1. Why Anthropology Can Ill Afford to Ignore Well-Being Neil Thin Chapter 2. Is a Measure of Cultural Well-Being Possible or Desirable? Benjamin Nick Colby PART II: WELL-BEING IN SMALL-SCALE SOCIETIES Chapter 3. Well-Being Among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon: Health, Missions, Oil, and ProgressA Carolina Izqui…
Negotiating Autonomy in Greater China
Found in Transition
Destination China
The Practice of Concern
The World in Guangzhou
Why Japanese Anthropology is Ignored Beyond Japan
Dream trippers
This is a richly absorbing book. In investigating Daoism in China, Dream Trippers examines the perspectives of Daoist Chinese monks on the Chinese holy mountain of Huashan, American New-Age pilgrim
How Africans Pursue Low-End Globalization in Hong Kong and Mainland China
This article looks at the livelihoods and lives of African traders coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. These traders are practising "low-end globalization", involving small amounts of capital, and semilegal or illegal transactions under the radar of the law. The article first considers who these traders are, portraying them as, typically, members of the upper crust of their home societies. It then considers these traders in Chungking Mansions, Hon…
Hèunggóngyàhn
On 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China after a 150-year interlude as a British colony. This transition is not only political in nature, it is also a cultural transition. At present, two broad constructions of Hong Kong cultural identity vie for the allegiance of Hong Kong's people: “Hong Kong as a part of China” and “Hong Kong as apart from China.” These constructions of identity present are reflected in vying constructions of identity p…
The Stuff of Dreams, Fading
African Logistics Agents and Middlemen as Cultural Brokers in Guangzhou
This article begins by asking how African traders learn to adjust to the foreign world of Guangzhou, China, and suggests that African logistics agents and middlemen serve as cultural brokers for these traders. After defining “cultural broker” and discussing why these brokers are not usually Chinese, it explores this role as played by ten logistics agents/middlemen from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As logistics a…
The Hong Kong protests in anthropological perspective
This brief report discusses the Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 in terms of cultural and national identity. It examines how Hongkongers have had no concept of what it means to belong to a nation throughout their history; but because of the ham-handed efforts by the Hong Kong government to enforce Chinese national identity, many young Hongkongers have reacted by embracing a different "nation": Hong Kong. It also examines how many young Hongkongers…
Taking Copies from China Past Customs
This paper seeks to add to our understanding of “low-end globalization” by exploring the processes through which copy goods are transported from China to various African countries. It begins by discussing low-end globalization and high-end globalization, different forms of globalization involving different forms of regulation and morality. It then considers copies, knock-offs, and contraband and their distinctions, and discusses African logistics…
How to Evade States and Slip Past Borders
This paper analyzes how traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers inHongKong and southChina experience and evade the state. It does this by utilizing two ofAnanyaRoy's key ideas-the organizational logic of informality, and "unmapping" as an informalization of the state. It considers the organizational logic of informality by examining the individual strategies followed by traders, overstayers, and asylum seekers in their conduct of low-end globali…
Between World Anthropology and World Anthropologies
East Asian Anthropology in the World
Ecologies of comparison
Ecologies of comparison is an ethnography of Hong Kong's environmental movements and controversies of the late 1990s coupled with a theoretical meditation on the nature of comparison, and the gener
On the Referee System as a Barrier to Global Anthropology
In the present paper, I first discuss the lack of a truly global anthropology in the world today and consider why such a world anthropology does not exist. I then offer a more personal account, based on my experience as an editor of an international journal attempting, to some extent, to counter the hegemony of the American anthropological core. Finally, I look at the referee system and argue that, for all its benefits, it nonetheless serves to p…
Names and identities in the Hong Kong cultural supermarket
African trading brokers in China
African trading brokers in China buy knock-off or copy goods and move them through customs via bribery to African ports; this trade, although illegal, brings desired global products to Africa. This paper, based on interviews with African trading brokers, examines how the internet and Covid-19 have affected their trade. African customers can now find out the accurate prices of goods; computerized customs regimes make bribery difficult; and Covid-1…
The Pursuit of a Life Worth Living in Japan and the United States
What makes life worth living? Why do we go on with life? These questions are matters of individual psychology, but they are also cultural and social: selves and society ever construct and justify one another. Most selves in a given society find life worth living along certain paths, such as work and family; society, in turn, provides means through which selves can construct and legitimate their lives as lives worth living. Based on extensive inte…
Comparing the situations of anthropologists around the world as to publication and evaluation criteria
In January 2022, the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force "Making Anthropology Global" was formed, consisting of Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, P.-j. Ezeh, Shannon Morreira, Yasmeen Arif, Chen Gang, Gordon Mathews (chairperson), and Takami Kuwayama, reporting on Chile, Norway, Nigeria, South Africa. India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The task force met via Zoom once a month during 2022 and early 2023, with ass…
Africans in Guangzhou
Introduction to Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 4/2015: Africans in Guangzhou
Beyond ‘Productive Aging’
An Anthropologist at the Hong Kong Protests
Why Anthropologists Don't Reach the Public
I have been asked in this essay to review two recent books of Thomas Hylland Eriksen and to place them in the context of contemporary debates in anthropology. The first two sections of this review essay discuss the recent Eriksen book Overheating, and the co-edited book Identity Destabilised, outlining the books’ core arguments. Bracketing these reviews, the essay examines the larger issue of anthropologists and the general public. It asks, now t…
Anthropological Knowledge and Styles of Publication
This entry discusses how anthropological knowledge has been contested throughout the discipline's history, in terms of theory and ethnography, and the different characterizations of anthropology as a science or as a discipline more akin to history. It then turns to who speaks in anthropology and the shift over half a century from European and American men investigating their countries' reservations and colonies to a discipline where women and men…
Les traders africains à Kong Hong et en Chine
Fence, flavor, and phantasm
This paper explores senses of 'Japaneseness' among Japanese musicians today by considering the words of 32 musicians—from koto and shakuhachi masters to jazz saxophonists, rock guitarists, and classical and electronic composers—in a provincial Japanese city. Their diverse senses of cultural identity are analyzed through three metaphors through which they express themselves: Japaneseness as a fence, walling off Japanese from change and foreignness…
Japan's Alternative Modernity in a Globalizing World
Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference, and the Critique of Modernity. John Clammer. Japanese Society Series. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001. 272 pp.Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought: The Evolution of the Concept of Jinkaku in Moral and Educational Discourse. Kyoko Inoue. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. 262 pp.Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Haru…
Names and identities in the Hong Kong cultural supermarket
The Pursuit of a Life Worth Living in Japan and the United States
What makes life worth living? Why do we go on with life? These questions are matters of individual psychology, but they are also cultural and social: selves and society ever construct and justify one another. Most selves in a given society find life worth living along certain paths, such as work and family; society, in turn, provides means through which selves can construct and legitimate their lives as lives worth living. Based on extensive inte…
The Stuff of Dreams, Fading
What makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans make Sense of Their Worlds
Hèunggóngyàhn
On 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China after a 150-year interlude as a British colony. This transition is not only political in nature, it is also a cultural transition. At present, two broad constructions of Hong Kong cultural identity vie for the allegiance of Hong Kong's people: “Hong Kong as a part of China” and “Hong Kong as apart from China.” These constructions of identity present are reflected in vying constructions of identity p…
What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds
Here is an original and provocative anthropological approach to the fundamental philosophical question of what makes life worth Gordon Mathews considers this perennial issue by examining nine pairs of similarly situated individuals in the United States and Japan. In the course of exploring how people from these two cultures find meaning in their daily lives, he illuminates a vast and intriguing range of ideas about work and love, religion, creati…
What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds
Japanese Bankers in the City of London
Global Culture/Individual Identity
Most people still think of themselves as belonging to a particular culture. Yet today, many of us who live in affluent societies choose aspects of our lives from a global cultural supermarket, whether in terms of food, the arts or spiritual beliefs. So if roots are becoming simply one more consumer choice, can we still claim to possess a fundamental cultural identity?Global Culture/Individual Identity focuses on three groups for whom the tension …
Rising Suns, Rising Daughters
Japan's Alternative Modernity in a Globalizing World
Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference, and the Critique of Modernity. John Clammer. Japanese Society Series. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001. 272 pp.Individual Dignity in Modern Japanese Thought: The Evolution of the Concept of Jinkaku in Moral and Educational Discourse. Kyoko Inoue. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001. 262 pp.Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Haru…
On the Tension Between Japanese and American Anthropological Depictions of Japan
Fence, flavor, and phantasm
This paper explores senses of 'Japaneseness' among Japanese musicians today by considering the words of 32 musicians—from koto and shakuhachi masters to jazz saxophonists, rock guitarists, and classical and electronic composers—in a provincial Japanese city. Their diverse senses of cultural identity are analyzed through three metaphors through which they express themselves: Japaneseness as a fence, walling off Japanese from change and foreignness…
Context and Consciousness in the Practice of Transnationality
Hong Kong, China
1 The Significance of Hong Kong 2: Fleeing the Nation, Creating a Local Home, 1949-1983 3: Rejoining the Nation, 1983-2006 4: Representing the in Hong Kong Mass Media 5: Hong Kong Schools and the Teaching of National Identity 6: Hong Kong People's Changing Comprehensions of National Identity 7: How American, Chinese, and Hong Kong University Students Understand Belonging to a Nation 8: Hong Kong People Encountering the in South China 9: Hong Kong…
Pursuits of Happiness
Multiculturalism in the New Japan
Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within Nelson H. Graburn, John Ertl and R. Kenji Tierney (Eds) New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2008 ix + 252 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84545-226-1
Collaborative Colonial Power
Hong Kong Mobile
Les traders africains à Kong Hong et en Chine
On the Referee System as a Barrier to Global Anthropology
In the present paper, I first discuss the lack of a truly global anthropology in the world today and consider why such a world anthropology does not exist. I then offer a more personal account, based on my experience as an editor of an international journal attempting, to some extent, to counter the hegemony of the American anthropological core. Finally, I look at the referee system and argue that, for all its benefits, it nonetheless serves to p…
Ghetto at the Center of the World
Understanding Japanese society through life after death
In this article based on extensive ethnographic interviewing of eighty-six Japanese adults, I analyze the different ways in which they understand life after death, and consider the societal implications of their views. I examine senses of life after death as based in communion with departed family members as linked to practices of ancestor veneration and ideologies of Japaneseness. I consider heaven/hell or reincarnation as linked, through the id…
How Africans Pursue Low-End Globalization in Hong Kong and Mainland China
This article looks at the livelihoods and lives of African traders coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. These traders are practising "low-end globalization", involving small amounts of capital, and semilegal or illegal transactions under the radar of the law. The article first considers who these traders are, portraying them as, typically, members of the upper crust of their home societies. It then considers these traders in Chungking Mansions, Hon…
Ecologies of comparison
Ecologies of comparison is an ethnography of Hong Kong's environmental movements and controversies of the late 1990s coupled with a theoretical meditation on the nature of comparison, and the gener
Sociology (45 obras) · Political science (38 obras) · Law (28 obras) · History (25 obras) · China (23 obras) · Anthropology (17 obras) · Japanese History and Culture (17 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Art (14 obras) · China's Global Influence and Migration (14 obras)