Organised by The Hong Kong Anthropological Society in association with The Hong Kong Museum of History*
An anthropological lecture by Angel Naydenov

Date: Friday, 13 December at 7:00 p.m.
Place: Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
All are welcome! Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.
The lecture is conducted in English.

China’s Sichuan Province provides an excellent ethnographic case for rethinking human time in relation to social recognition. Hiding in plain sight, the region’s familiar hedonistic ethos entails a particular construction of selfhood that negates both hierarchy and accumulated time. For such negation to be possible only certain aspects of the self (sensory, playful, comic) are recognised as relevant to its realisation. Sichuan’s hedonistic disposition is thus marked by an emphasis on concrete recognition between potentially equivalent subjects. It exists alongside a second logic of abstract recognition: that of linear progress and competition, in which hard work and struggle in comparison to abstract others by reference to formal measures (wealth, property, education) orient the self toward future gratification. These two logics underline a basic existential tension between presentism and linearity in Chinese society and suggests that the way selves ascertain their worth socially is fundamental to their sense of being in time.

Angel Naydenov’s research examines the entanglements of time, value, and selfhood in rural China. His first book manuscript, Rhythms of Realisation: Time, Value, and Recognition in the
Mountains of Southwest China, is based on 17 months of fieldwork in Sichuan and explores the dominant value pursuits through which subjects seek self-realisation and thus find their way in time.

About the speaker:
Before his appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute for the Humanities (RIH), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Angel Naydenov received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2023. He had previously been trained at the London School of Economics (M.Sc. China in Comparative Perspective, B.Sc. Social Anthropology).

For more information, please contact Stan Dyer on 9746 9537 or anthrohk@gmail.com,
www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas , www.facebook.com/hkanthro,@HKASTalks
* The Museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.