Economic anthropologists and sociologists have long established that commercial relationships are "embedded" in social and cultural processes. As various economies become increasingly globalized, there are new challenges for scientific understandings of how economic relationships can be established and thrive in contexts where entrepreneurs are informed by different cultural, social, and political expectations. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, scientifically grounded fieldwork, explores the practices and processes that do and do not lead to greater trust and mutually satisfying outcomes between individuals of varying national origins in emergent commercial markets.
Derek Sheridan, under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Lutz of Brown University, proposes to ask how everyday economic and social interactions between merchants and entrepreneurs of diverse national backgrounds shape both the understanding of international relations, and the implications these relations have for viable commercial networks in emergent markets. To answer these questions, the researcher will spend a year focused on Chinese migrants in Tanzania. Given the growing economic presence of Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, and the enormous importance of Africa's resources and economic growth to China's ascendency, this is an ideal context for studying how the emergence of important commercial relationships in the twenty-first century. The researcher will follow how Chinese-Tanzanian relationships develop and evolve in different contexts and under different conditions. Through fieldwork, he will trace how people evaluate each other, develop trust and/or mistrust in each other, and develop the everyday ethics and "rules of the game" that allow them to conduct business with each other. Through a combination of extended observation and interviews, the researcher will follow how people make sense of their experiences through stories, and how they share these experiences with others; and in the process contribute to popular knowledge in both China and Tanzania about Sino-African relationships. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would generate data significant commercial relationships between African and China, the understanding of which is critical to economic competitiveness.
