WRITING ROADS: WORKER STORYTELLING, KARMIC HAUNTING, AND THE MANAGEMENT OF CONSTRUCTION IN CHINA
Loading...
No Access Until
Permanent Link(s)
Collections
Other Titles
Authors
Abstract
On the edge of a sparsely-populated area in China’s countryside, a young worker with an excavator was shoving an unclaimed corpse out of the way of a highway under construction. Afraid of being seen by the nearby villagers, he hastily mixed the bones with trash and then dumped them a mile away under cover of night. It was not until later, when the worker died during construction, that the story of the corpse turning into a ghost and asking for the worker’s life, circulated in the field. Faced with the daily hazards of poorly regulated labor, workers tend to dramatize accidents, relating them to relocated corpses, disturbed animal dwellings, or old trees growing in tomb dirt. To workers, these ghosts haunt the construction; therefore, a machine malfunction must be redressed by local rituals, a coworker’s death may be a sacrifice for the moral insult to the land, and a bossy manager’s death is a divine punishment for the state’s disrespect of workers. Attending to Chinese workers’ affective responses to death, infrastructure, history, landscape and state power, this thesis aims to explore how ghosts speak to Han migrant workers in Xinjiang as they adjust to ever-expanding, dangerous, and sometimes fatal infrastructure projects by engaging not only with one another, but also with supervisors, local bureaucrats, company managers, and ritual specialists who actively participate in the construction.
Journal / Series
Volume & Issue
Description
65 pages
Sponsorship
Date Issued
2020-08
Publisher
Keywords
accident; China; construction industry; ghost stories; infrastructure
Location
Effective Date
Expiration Date
Sector
Employer
Union
Union Local
NAICS
Number of Workers
Committee Chair
Admussen, Nicholas
Committee Co-Chair
Committee Member
Nadasdy, Paul
Degree Discipline
Asian Studies
Degree Name
M.A., Asian Studies
Degree Level
Master of Arts
Related Version
Related DOI
Related To
Related Part
Based on Related Item
Has Other Format(s)
Part of Related Item
Related To
Related Publication(s)
Link(s) to Related Publication(s)
References
Link(s) to Reference(s)
Previously Published As
Government Document
ISBN
ISMN
ISSN
Other Identifiers
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Types
dissertation or thesis