Anthropological accounts of social relations within Chinese society have traditionally viewed both kinship and familiarity as the basis of relationships between persons, which has inevitably led to the exclusion of strangers from the majority of attempts to theorize such relations. This lecture draws on ethnographic evidence collected during 15 months of fieldwork studying the impact of social media use in a rural Chinese town, which revealed the nature of these novel relationships with strangers which are facilitated by social media.
Through these ethnographic cases and observations, Tom McDonald will argue that participants do not position strangers that they meet on social media outside of their network of social relations. Instead, the mediatized relationships offered by social media come to represent a ready source of potential friends with whom they are both eager and willing to interact. On occasion,the stranger as integral, rather than antithetical to sociality, and it is actually these strangers who individuals feel they can most easily confide in, and share intimate feelings – or experiences – with.
Familiar Strangers: Social Media and the Outsider in Chinese Kinship
Hong Kong Anthropological Society, Tom McDonald
Date: 7pm, 18 January, 2017
Venue: Hong Kong Museum of History
Tickets: Free
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