Ignorance volontaire et savoir empathique en Chine contemporaine : Désaccords dans la relation d’enquête après l’incendie de Daxing

Lecture by Lisa Richaud, Doctor of Anthropology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and 2025-2026 fellow-researcher at Paris IAS as part of the ‘Humans and Humanity’ seminar for Master's 1 and 2 students in the Department of Anthropology led by Professor Albert Piette at Paris Nanterre University.

Lecture in French. Open to the public.
On site only.

Presentation

As part of the ‘Humans and Humanity’ course in the Master's programme in Anthropology at the University of Nanterre (lecturer: Albert Piette), this presentation will examine the emotional and cognitive phenomena of wilful ignorance – and related processes such as credulity and incredulity, scepticism, disbelief, etc. - as they may unfold in the face of state violence. The theme will be addressed using ethnographic material collected during a 2017-2018 survey of rural migrant workers in Shanghai, in a context where official discourse and ‘urban development’ policies have relegated migrant populations to the status of ‘low-end populations (diduan renkou)’. How can we understand why some people detach themselves from this reality, and what does it mean for the ethnographer to take this detachment into account in the research relationship?

The question of ignorance is not new in the social sciences: in recent years, it has emerged as a subject of research in both anthropology and Chinese studies, particularly in relation to forms of self-preservation, but also to the agency that it can counterintuitively bring to subjects in vulnerable situations. The aim will be to question the paradox inherent in voluntary ignorance, particularly when it occurs in the context of the relationship between the ethnographer and one of their interlocutors.

A specific situation will be at the centre of the analysis. In 2017, a violent fire broke out in one of the urban villages in the southern suburbs of Beijing. Inhabited mainly by rural migrant workers, the area was the subject of a vast eviction campaign, amplifying the consequences of the deadly fire for individuals who were already in a highly precarious situation. While committed citizens were able to deploy various activism strategies to document these circumstances while avoiding censorship, images of the mass departures were reappropriated and misused for other purposes on social media. The starting point for this intervention is the reception of these misappropriated images by one of my interlocutors, and the latter's incredulity at the evictions. We will examine the relationships between wilful ignorance, empathetic knowledge, and affective (in)justice.

More information: https://www.parisnanterre.fr/