Tom McDonald

How the World Changed Social Media

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.

The role of self-gentrification in sustainable tourism: Indigenous entrepreneurship at Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site, China

ABSTRACT This article examines three forms of tourism gentrification within the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces UNESCO World Heritage Site in Yunnan, China. The Indigenous Hani and Yi communities who populate this remote mountainous area possess distinct cultural practices that have supported the rice terrace ecosystem for centuries. This article uses interviews and non-participant observation conducted with inhabitants and newcomers to analyse the gentrification within the site. We argue that Indigenous cultural practices, and consequently rice cultivation in the area, are threatened by gentrifier-led and state-led gentrification, combined with high levels of outward migration of Indigenous persons. This poses a significant threat to the sustainability of tourism there, to the survival of the traditions and culture of the Indigenous inhabitants and could compromise the sites World Heritage Status. Some Indigenous people are, however, improving their socio-economic standing – and becoming “middle-class” or “gentry” – particularly through adopting entrepreneurial strategies gleaned from their encounters with outside-gentrifiers and tourists. This article proposes the concept of “self-gentrification” as a way to describe individuals who seek to improve themselves and their own communities, while threatened by gentrification, and offers ways to promote that concept to help conserve both heritage landscapes and Indigenous ways of life.

Desiring Mobiles, Desiring Education: Mobile Phones and Families in a Rural Chinese Town

This chapter draws on ethnographic data to examine the relationship between mobile communication technologies (especially mobile phones) and learning in a small rural town in North China. Building on a wide body of literature that emphasises the enduring importance of education within Chinese culture, this chapter demonstrates how contemporary attitudes towards learning become constructed and expressed through mobile phone use. The chapter illustrates how most rural parents regard mobile phones as having an adverse impact on their offspring’s academic achievement and are keen to limit their usage. Young people nevertheless continue to find ways of accessing and using mobile phones, including creatively appropriating such devices for their own (formal and informal) learning. The chapter calls for greater consideration of the multiple domains of society that such technologies cut across – including school, family and elsewhere – in order to expose the specific instances where mobile telecommunications interact with educational ideals.

Senses, Sociality and Salons: Medicinal Hospitality in a Chinese Hair-Dresser's Salon

ABSTRACT Recent calls for a revitalisation of the study of hospitality as central to anthropological theory have focussed on the material, affective, moral and cosmological aspects of hospitality. This paper argues that any such theory of hospitality should also afford consideration of how hosting practices can also be a form of medicinal experience, showing how in a Chinese hair salon these experiences ricochet into ideas of well-being by drawing on discourses and practices that are grounded in Traditional Chinese Medicine. This paper argues for an understanding of the dispersed and diffused nature of Chinese medicinal practices and concepts throughout society, while still taking into account the specificities and logics of the Chinese medical tradition. The concept of ‘medicinal hospitality’ helps to understand the social nature of these ostensibly medical treatments, and how they use the creation of distinct sensory experiences which are shared between groups of customers to generate social relations.

Contemporary Comparative Anthropology – The Why We Post Project

ABSTRACT This paper confronts the disparity between a tradition that has defined anthropology as a comparative discipline and the practices which increasingly embrace cultural relativism and the uniqueness of each fieldsite. It suggests that it is possible to resolve this dilemma, through creating a vertical structure that complements the horizontal task of comparison across fieldsites. This vertical structure is composed of different methods of dissemination which make explicit a series of steps from a baseline of popular dissemination which stresses the uniqueness of individuals, through books and journal articles with increasing degrees of generalisation and comparison. Following this structure leads us up through analysis to the creation and employment of theory. This allows us to make comparisons and generalisations without sacrificing our assertion of specificity and uniqueness. We illustrate this argument though a recent nine-field site comparison of the use and consequences of social media in a project called ‘Why We Post.’

“Cowboy Cloth” and Kinship: The Closeness of Denim Consumption in a South-West Chinese City

Abstract This article examines the effect of the fabric denim in objectifying kinship in the city of Kunming, China. It is argued that denim has been particularly efficacious due to its ability to insert itself into traditional Chinese kinship notions of nurturance. Parents were seen to gift denim to their children with the object of instigating a change in the lives of the younger generation, coupled with the knowledge that a change in material circumstances would be necessary to achieve such transformation. At the same time, the younger generations denim also provoked a “kinship gulf” between children and their parents, which parents appeared keen to close by purchasing and wearing denim of their own (although not without a degree of ambivalence, reflected by the presence of inactive jeans in parents’ wardrobes). In this remarkable situation denim was seen, firstly, as the tool for creating generational disjuncture through traditional means and subsequently as the prospective solution to overcome this disjuncture. It is argued here that denim moves us to consider the study of kinship as the study of “closeness,” a term that affords the consideration of objects in the milieu of intimate social relationships.