ABSTRACT:

This paper moves from the observation that "China" is not only marginal in anthropological theory-making: it remains strikingly absent from an ethnographic perspective too. Scholars of Global China have already noticed a discrepancy between how much "China" lingers in everyday discussions, yet how seldom Chinese actors are actually encountered. "China," here, is certainly not absent, but it is also not entirely present -- it functions as a background, often taking the contours of an abstract opportunity or looming threat. This paper reflects on this particular absent presence of China through two case studies: the amber markets in Poland's Gdansk and Mexico's Chiapas. Here "China" -- in the form of capital, promise, and material actors -- is both present and absent in peculiar ways. In Gdansk, economic slow-downs and the Covid-19 pandemic have re-cast relationships between Polish and Chinese actors. In Chiapas, "China" is profoundly affecting the amber market despite its absence. Through those (missed) encounters, I develop the notion of ethnographic absent presence, and introduce a new project on global amber circulations across extraction, trade, and science.

BIO:

Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. His research concerns infrastructure, global circulations, and the environment, and he has worked in Western China, Southeast Asia, and the Italian Alps. He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project "Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene" (2023-2028), and the author of Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).