This chapter reflects the main ‘lesson’ I drew from the experience of doing a PhD in Bailey’s department at Sussex – the lesson being the virtues of understanding ‘big level’ phenomena by ‘soaking and poking’ at street level. I’ve written a lot about the World Bank with this approach. My chapter starts with reference to Tomas Piketty’s recent Capitalism and Ideology, in which he gives ‘ideology’ (or ‘mindset’ or ‘world view’) much more causal role – in income/wealth inequality trends – than other economists do. Then on to the Washington Consensus ideology, dominant in western capitals since 1980s, about appropriate public policies for developing countries. My interest is in how its dominance has been protected, via ‘the social construction of reality’. Then to ethnography – of a particular two-day meeting at UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade & Development, based in Geneva) I attended in 2012, on ‘rethinking trade policy’ with some 30 people (as I recall, offhand). I bring out how little rethinking there was, by design. The ‘rethinking’ meeting confirmed the Washington Consensus – which is all the more striking, because UNCTAD is the one UN development agency meant to be run by and for developing countries.

In this chapter the author reflects on his experiences of respondent validation following a publisher’s acceptance of a book proposal, which was based on ethnographic fieldwork he had conducted with a social work team for his doctoral thesis. The author was surprised to find that the participants in his study were initially resistant to the idea of the publication of the book, and he experienced guilt as he realised that he had presented two distinct versions of himself to participants: his affable ‘field self’ and the more critical ‘author self’. The author’s experience of leaving, and then returning to, the field has provided insight into the way that social life can create conflicting selves that exist authentically, depending on the social context. The self is a dynamic, performative process, not a state of being, and its forms coalesce according to people, place and time. Most of the time, we shift between selves smoothly and without giving our fragmentation thought. Doing ethnography can force us to confront the dissonance of different selves that are equally real and authentic, because, by its very nature, it requires that we encounter the field self from the perspective of the authorial self. Engaging in respondent validation lays the otherwise hidden ‘author self’ bare to participants, and this provides an unsettling challenge for the management of field relations.

This chapter focuses on Thatcher’s 1982 visit to China to discuss the Hong Kong question and to promote British commercial interests. Coming as it did three months after Britain’s victory in the Falklands War, Thatcher journeyed east with the intention of extending British rule in Hong Kong beyond 1997. Thatcher’s negotiating tactics were to play up the ‘confidence card’ so as to justify continuing British administration, and to stress Britain’s moral obligations to Hong Kong people, while dismissing Hong Kong’s economic value to Britain. Although Deng Xiaoping made it plain that sovereignty was not a matter for discussion, the visit succeeded in securing his agreement to open diplomatic talks on Hong Kong’s future. The second part of the chapter examines how Thatcher seized every opportunity to advance British commercial interests in China. The construction of the Guangdong nuclear power plant, which involved China, Hong Kong, and British companies supplying the conventional island and other equipment, was one such example. By 1982, Anglo-Chinese trade had not increased to the target level envisaged by the 1979 economic cooperation agreement. This raised a few question marks about Britain’s competitiveness in the increasingly globalised economy.

International human rights law guaranteed the ‘right to a nationality’ following the World Wars, reinforcing the assumption that legal nationality was a social good that guaranteed political membership and rights protection. Yet today we see troubling shifts in how states view citizenship and nationality rights; at the individual level, denationalisation (the involuntary loss of citizenship) is increasingly used as a method to punish enemies and reward others, thus de-valuing the concept of citizenship as a fundamental right and instead positing it as a privilege. At the group level, denationalisation sometimes targets entire identity groups in the quest to create and isolate ‘strangers’, particularly in times of rising nationalism. In this chapter, Lindsey N. Kingston challenges the belief that legal nationality is always a social good and contends that legal nationality – the assumed marker of political membership in our world system – can be weaponised. First, modern citizenship and its ensuing documentation exist in many communities with deeply harmful consequences. Second, citizenship is approached by some political leaders as both a reward for exceptionally good deeds and a punishment for bad behaviour deemed threatening to the state. Third, the statelessness that results from the revocation or denial of citizenship serves as a method for the erasure of specific identity groups.

This chapter looks at the Thatcher government’s approach to democratic promotion in China and Hong Kong, and its responses to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. It was the neoliberal assumption that economic reform would lead to political liberalisation in China. But as this chapter argues, Thatcher was a ‘pragmatic neoliberal’, who held an instrumental view of democracy and preferred evolutionary change to radical revolution. In the wake of Tiananmen, Britain pursued a ‘dual-track’ approach by condemning but not isolating China. Thatcher and British diplomats stuck to a policy of engagement with China, not least due to Britain’s responsibility to Hong Kong up till 1997. The second section of this chapter examines how, since 1984, the Thatcher government had been accelerating the development of representative government in Hong Kong, which was regarded as the most effective weapon against Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong affairs after 1997. The drafting of the Basic Law since 1985, and then the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, sharpened the debates on the pace and scope of democratisation in Hong Kong. Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of globalisation did not include democratisation. For all their contending visions of globalisation, both Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping were pragmatic enough to restore normalcy in Anglo-Chinese relations not long after the June Fourth killings, and to accommodate Hong Kong opinion by guaranteeing a degree of democracy in the Basic Law.

The role of the curator has gradually shifted from someone concerned with conservation and care of objects, to a creative force behind thematic exhibitions. The curator thus becomes an auteur in his/her own right. The surge in archival references at the turn of the twenty-first century coincided in large part with the escalation of thematic exhibitions created by well-known curators. Additionally, many of the texts that launched and developed the idea of an archival moment in art practice were written by curators, and the very notion of the archive was theorised as a connective framework that, like curating, brings disparate parts into a whole. This chapter discusses the connection between the notion of curating and the notion of the archive, and considers both how the archival artist is often viewed as a curator, and how the curator is described as being more like an artist. The practice of restaging historical exhibitions and exhibiting well-known curators’ archival material is considered part of the archive art phenomenon and indicative of a desire to historicise and grant authority to curatorial practice. Critical and pragmatic concerns are also shown to be behind various curatorial practices – by artists and curators – as these often purport to exhibit previously hidden or under-represented material.

This chapter discusses different modes of reflexivity accompanying (re)entering and (re)leaving the field. The focus is a specific ‘intermission’ in fieldwork; how it shapes the field and becomes a moment of transition in reflexive thinking. The details are from an ethnographic study of homeless outreach workers in Manhattan. The discussion is of realising the potentialities of the boundaries of this fieldsite – which are anthropologically clear (geographically and temporally) but sociologically blurry (exploring ‘homelessness’ as a subject) – and are affected by different modes of reflexivity. This emphasises the significance of an ‘intermission’ as a time to develop sociological reasoning and review how ‘the field’ might be getting done. The chapter discusses how ‘intermissions’ provide the opportunity to engage in at least three modes of reflexivity: Anthropological/Ethnographic, Philosophical and Ethnomethodological. This addresses how leaving the field – geographically, temporarily and permanently, and reflexively – can assist the researcher in seeing the field and the social phenomena. The idea of an ‘intermission’ is not intended as a methodological prescription but as a conceptual tool for thinking reflexively with ‘initial observations’ and, further, as an ongoing process of reflexivity and analysis throughout the research process both in and out of the field. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how leaving the field in combination with such reflexive concepts might enable the researcher to identify social resources and social phenomena, and distinguish this from preconceived notions; making way for a deep engagement with the ethnographic method, the fieldsite and fieldnotes as data.

This chapter focuses on the protracted and difficult Hong Kong talks during 1984. Britain’s negotiating objectives had shifted to securing the highest degree of autonomy for Hong Kong and continuity of its systems after 1997. The plenary sessions were supplemented by the intense meetings of the working group and the ad hoc group. While Britain had abandoned all claims to constitutional links with Hong Kong, the Chinese remained sensitive to any issues that had to do with sovereignty. This chapter details how the two delegations overcame their differences over the timetable of an agreement, the establishment of a joint group in Hong Kong during the transitional period, post-1997 constitutional arrangements, and so forth. Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe played a proactive role in injecting fresh momentum into the negotiations through visits to Beijing. So did Deng Xiaoping’s personal intervention and his concessions to Britain help to break the impasse over the outstanding issues. When she flew to Beijing to sign the Joint Declaration in December 1984, Thatcher was convinced that Hong Kong’s free-market capitalism – the essence, if not the ‘form’, of British rule – would be preserved and insulated from socialist China after 1997.