Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Interpersonal Ethics of Global Inequality in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Sheridan, Derek

Full Metadata

Overview

Year:: 2017
Contributor:: Sheridan, Derek (creator); Lutz, Catherine (Advisor); Smith, Daniel (Reader); Fruzzetti, Lina (Reader); Mason, Katherine (Reader); Greenhalgh, Susan (Reader); Brown University. Department of Anthropology (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Ethics; race & ethnicity; China-Africa; Transnationalism; Migration; Empire; Mutuality; Inequality; trade
Extent:: vi, 312 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0M043VM

Files

Description

Abstract:: During the 1960s era of decolonization, the Chinese and Tanzanian governments framed the close relationship between them in the relational language of anti-imperial “friendship.” The recent expansion of Chinese investment, trade, and migration in Tanzania, however, is haunted by the specter of North-South dependencies in South-South connections. This dissertation examines how Chinese expatriates and ordinary Tanzanians themselves contend with these emerging mutualities and inequalities through the negotiation of the interpersonal ethics of social interactions. It is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, particularly among wholesale traders. I address situations which are generative of debates among Chinese and Tanzanians alike about the comparative privileges, vulnerabilities, and moral agency that Chinese expatriates have vis-à-vis ordinary Tanzanians. These situations include market competition and trading hierarchies between entrepreneurs, mistrust and interdependence between co-workers, the contested terms of material and emotional reciprocity between friends and strangers, and the art/ethics of petty corruption between expatriates and street-level bureaucrats. I examine these tensions through the perspective of their mutualities, by which I mean existential interdependencies between actors. Chinese and Tanzanians need each other to conduct business, but one’s individual agency can be either expanded or constrained by the agency of other actors. Such mutualities pose the ethical question of how to relate to others. I argue that the differing expectations people bring to these relationships is informed not just by “culture,” but also by inequalities. Expectations about how to act in turn bear on how Chinese and Tanzanian identities are performed, and how they are understood within global hierarchies of value. Drawing on long durée histories of Chinese-Tanzanian connections, the semiotics of social interaction, and the role of ethical and racial evaluation in everyday discourse, I recast specters and claims about “empire/non-empire” through the lens of how ordinary actors negotiate the interpersonal ethics of global inequality.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017

Content

Access Conditions

Rights: In Copyright
Restrictions on Use: Collection is open for research.

Citation

Sheridan, Derek, "Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Interpersonal Ethics of Global Inequality in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania" (2017). Anthropology Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0M043VM

Relations

Collection:

Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Anthropology department.
...