CHAIRPERSON
Prof Elaine Ho, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Despite the long history of Chinese migration to Chile from the 19th century, the term “Chilean Chinese” is largely unintelligible to most Chileans in suggesting a socially inconceivable reality. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2025 with diverse generations and individuals of Chileans of Chinese descent, in this presentation I describe and discuss how as “chinodescendientes” or “chinos”, their diverse processes of identifying with “Chineseness” inevitably involve its simultaneous embodiment, refraction, and displacement onto less than desirable “others”. Moving away from the focus on diasporic Chinese identities or transnationalism that examine how Chinese identities are imposed, challenged, or experienced, I suggest theorizing Chineseness in terms of racial value that can also be examined independently of racialized experiences. I propose a critical anthropology of Chineseness that can contribute to understanding the embodied and structural dynamics of power and stigma that Chineseness signals today.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Carol Chan is Associate Professor at the School of Anthropology at Diego Portales University and Deputy Director of the Millennium Nucleus on the Impacts of China in Latin America (ICLAC). She is the co-author of the book Chineseness in Chile: Shifting Representations in the 21st Century (2022, Palgrave Macmillan), author of In Sickness and Wealth: Migration, Gendered Morality and Central Java (2018, Indiana University Press), and co-editor of Migraciones, Etnicidades y Espacios (2019, Santiago: RIL). She has published widely on migration and (im)mobilities, racialization, gender, and interethnic conviviality.
