China Multiple: More-Than Ethnographic Regions and Side-Fields

"China multiple" is a notion inspired by science and technology studies that aims to grasp the materiality, multiplicity and effects that China achieves in practice. It turns attention to how different versions of China are assembled in practices that produce regional expertise. China is produced as ethnographic region by anthropologists, but in other versions by various actors in academia and beyond: as political regime, nation and state by political science, as civilisation by historians, as language community by philological studies, as national economy by economists, as socio-natural environment by geographers, as genetic population by geneticists, but as statistical population by bureaucrats, etc. We thus suggest to understand China (and similar objects) as “more-than ethnographic region” and to focus on the interactions (competition, overlap, parallel existence, ...) between multiple versions (rather than images) of China. This shows that not just content matters but also the material composition: the methods, technologies, skills and kinds of data that go into producing different Chinas. The notion of “side-fields” offers an analytical vocabulary to understand how the multiple versions of a more-than ethnographic region interact in academia. It builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, Michel Foucault’s work on discursive formations, but also acknowledges the multifaceted materiality of different Chinas.