- Titel
- “Agents of Translation”
- Untertitel
- West African Entrepreneurs in China as Vectors of Social Change
- Zitierfähige Url:
- https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-998568
- Schriftenreihe
- Working paper series / DFG Priority Programme 1448 Adaptation and Creativity in Africa
- Bandnummer
- 4
- Erstveröffentlichung
- 2014
- Abstract (EN)
- China-Africa relations continue to attract substantial academic interest. In addition to the activities of large-scale state-directed enterprises, the social and economic conditions and practices of both Chinese actors in Africa and African actors in China have gained increasing prominence in recent years. Yet, these transnational businesspersons tend to be portrayed in a negative light, with the incompatibility between their business practices and their new environments being emphasized. The isolation, exclusion and, consequently, the limits of social and economic cooperation between the two groups are some of the major themes of the literature.1 In contrast to this, our paper focuses less on the structural description of the encounter between Africans in China and their Chinese counterparts and more on the semantic dimension. Having already established that the Chinese in Africa impact on the local social order by force of their mere presence rather than any close interaction with the local population (Giese and Thiel 2012, Marfaing and Thiel 2013), we set out to describe how the growing number of African actors traveling to China potentially trigger shifts in attitude and practice upon and through their return by translating and incorporating their commercial and intellectual experiences in and with China into their life at home. Our initial hypothesis2 assumed transnational African traders regularly moving between West Africa and China to be the main actors of this translation, with longer-term African residents in China merely influencing their encounter.3 Our fieldwork in China, however, quickly showed us that the division between resident and traveling actors could not be upheld. Ghanaian and Senegalese agents residing in China maintain close relations to their home countries and regularly exchange ideas and goods with those at home. Furthermore, observing that their encounters with China are arguably much more intimate and intensive than those of their short-term visiting compatriots – not only allowing them deeper insights into the workings of the Chinese business environment and society, but ultimately also greater interpretative authority – we reconsidered these actors not as a mere structuring factor in the China experience of transnational traders but as key translators in their own right. Thus, drawing on our first set of data from this project phase, our aim in this paper is to analyze which elements of their encounter with China our informants deem worthy of selection for later reintegration and adaptation into the context of their home societies.4 We apply the term “translations” to describe the “processes of transfer” at work in African individuals’ encounters with Chinese everyday life – that means, all the “interconnected articulations, practices and positionings” developed to interpret, assimilate and integrate these Chinese experiences (Wolf 2008). The space in which African entrepreneurs operate is understood as a field of forces where only those properties are considered that are significant to the individuals concerned. The latter permanently apply strategies of adjustment, confronting the new with their own conformity. Bourdieu (1979) describes this as the struggle for distinction (i. e., the dynamics of transculturation), whereby an actor monopolizes all forms of capital (social, cultural, and economic) to become an agent of translation. This allows the agent to adapt new experiences to his or her social, economic and cultural context and to communicate these experiences and have them bear fruit, always maintaining the power this capacity procures. Like a decomposition or deconstruction of the elements of the translation process, the stages in this process are the core focus in our case study of African entrepreneurs in China, whose capacities to adapt their experiences to the context of their home societies we perceive as the trigger of dynamic socioeconomic change back home. In the following sections, we will present our methods, describe the corpus of our interviews, and introduce our field sites. We will then describe the characteristics of our group of informants in terms of both their business activities and their social organization in China. This is, on the one hand, to deconstruct the false notion of a homogenous group5 of Africans in China and, on the other hand, to illustrate the factors that shape our informants’ options for economic and social activities and therefore their experiences with Chinese people or things. Finally, we will present our analysis of selected objects of translation defined by our informants as worthy of incorporation into everyday African life. We end by presenting our initial conclusions on the relevance of these translation potentials more generally. As one of our Senegalese informants put it (interview LM n° 19 on 19.6.2013 in Yiwu), the encounter between Africa and Europe is so old and the impact on African social life so deeply engrained in everyday life that the encounter between Chinese and Africans presents a new opportunity to understand mutual contributions and discoveries between two cultures and the transition and adaptations of ideas between them.
- Freie Schlagwörter (EN)
- West African Entrepreneurs, Agents of Translation, Social Change, China
- Klassifikation (DDC)
- 300
- 960
- Herausgeber (Institution)
- DFG Priority Programme 1448 Adaptation and Creativity in Africa, Leipzig
- Version / Begutachtungsstatus
- eingereichte Version / Preprint
- URN Qucosa
- urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-998568
- Veröffentlichungsdatum Qucosa
- 20.10.2025
- Dokumenttyp
- Forschungsbericht
- Sprache des Dokumentes
- Englisch
- Lizenz / Rechtehinweis
