*Editor’s Note: 10:00 p.m. March 20 – This story has been edited throughout.
The Italians and the Chinese have exchanged labor, goods and knowledge in the textile industry extensively in recent decades, a professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz said.
Dr. Lisa Rofel presented the results of her extensive research to an attentive group of about thirty people on Tuesday evening in Heroy Hall. Rofel was chosen to speak for SMU’s 18th annual George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology.
Rofel, an expert in Chinese culture, has worked in collaboration with Sylvia Yanagisako, an Italian expert, since 2002 to understand commodity chains and globalized capitalism as it pertains to the fashion industry.
“This is not a comparative study of Italian and Chinese capitalism, but a study of the coproduction of Italian-Chinese transnational capitalism,” Rofel said of her analysis.
Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna, an assistant professor of anthropology at SMU, helped organize the lecture and looked forward to learning about Rofel’s research.
“This is a project that is soon to come out as a book, so we were very excited to hear more about it,” Sternsdorff-Cisterna said before the meeting.
Rofel said she believes that collaboration with colleagues is essential to creating a better understanding of culture, and admitted that the body of research in this study was too large for any one anthropologist to take on alone. Their book, entitled “Made in Translation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion,” examines different areas of capitalism like privatization and labor value in the context of the fashion industry. It will be published soon from Duke University Press.
Students like SMU sophomore Austin Inglett found the lecture to be highly technical in its language and subject matter while remaining interesting and informative. He attended the program as part of an assignment for his studies in the Markets and Culture major.
“My biggest take-away from today was that I need to brush up on my vocabulary, I suppose,” Inglett joked. “However, I did learn a lot more about the relationships between the Chinese and Italians.”
