Chinese society and culture

News

published: 6.09.2024

Book release: Une après-midi à Shanghai. L'enfance et la question anthropologique de l'âge

"Une après-midi à Shanghai. L'enfance et la question anthropologique de l'âge" is the latest publication by China Horizons researcher Camille Salgues (Sciences Po) on the lives of rural migrant children in China (in French).

Description from the back cover of the book: "Obviously, it is not an afternoon on the Bund that you should expect here, that's not the Shanghai I'm talking about. Rather, it's the Shanghai of Lu Xun's "weeds": run-down apartment blocks between redevelopment areas, where Chinese parents from the countryside have come to live. That's where I investigated the lives of their children, not only for an afternoon but for three years - although with this title I wanted to capture something of those long moments spent hanging out together. That's where we will follow the threads of these small lives, through the encounters and places of ethnography that organise the research and the book".

The concern to (re)open the discussion of childhood in the social sciences is carefully woven into these wanderings, like a book within a book, as the system of subtitles suggests. Each chapter is an opportunity to focus on a key moment in what could be a reflection on childhood or, rather, on the anthropological question of age, approached from the perspective of childhood.

Description from the back cover of the book

See also an interview (in French) with Camille Salgues on his book >>