Hong Xincheng 洪鑫诚

Education:
PhD Exchange, Nanyang Technological University
Graduate Exchange, Waseda University
M.A. by research, National Taiwan University
B.A., Wuhan University

Research interests:
Local History and Chinese Migration (internal and external); South China; Historical Anthropology

Introduction:
I am a PhD student who wishes to write commoners’ life stories combining historical and anthropological perspectives. I love PC games with a good worldview and vision of history (eg. Age of Empires) by which you learn how the world is interconnected and how civilizations evolve. Slam Dunk and Naruto are my favorite animations, with the former it influenced me to become a basketball player and the latter echoes my understanding of the dynamics in human relations, as well as war and peace. Before my PhD career, I had work experience as a Think-tank researcher, columnist and also devoted myself to several projects of Social Entrepreneurship. Among them, Café Topophilia is both a local cultural space and my diasporic practice as a seasonal returnee to my hometown with like-minded partners who are also young migrants.

Supervisor: Prof Kenneth Dean, A/P Kwee Hui Kian

Thesis Title: Livelihoods, Kinship Adaptations, and the Transformation of Migrants’ Hometown: Local Life and Mobility from a Chinese Village in and beyond Quanzhou

This is a study of my family’s hometown village and my native clan community linked to the broader contexts of Chinese migration. With a special focus on the internal migration within Quanzhou and link it to the broader context of Hokkien and Chinese migration, I wish to unveil the real complexity of local worlds as well as migrants’ everyday practices for livelihoods throughout the long history; and by inviting voices from marginalized groups in traditional historical writing—mostly women and the under-class, we get a chance to save local history from elite and male dominant narratives, and based on that, get a step closer to the panorama of Chinese migration. Inspired and encouraged by predecessors of “anthropology at home”, I take “the most arduous anthropology” as a journey of self-knowledge for “the most valuable achievement of a fieldworker”. I see my “study at home” itself as a kind of bodily diasporic practice - which is also highly relevant to my research interest and may spark lively knowledge.