EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 19 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 217 The time-space compression, real time updates and interconnectivity enable constant engagement with the field and informants regardless of one’s physical presence. In fact, social media become an ethnographic place/field in its own right where the researcher spend considerable time gathering information, observing, engaging and interacting with other scholars and informants in different ways. In this paper I will discuss how digital technologies, in particular social media platforms, have changed the ways many of us conduct research, gather information, and interact with informants, and both the possibilities and the practical and ethical challenges. I will use examples from my own research on social media as well as examples for other scholars’ work. The paper is written as I still grapple with many new issues and learn by doing, and I therefore look forward to discussions and exchanges of experiences with colleagues. Varriano Valeria (University of Naples L’Orientale) Milk in TV Key words: food, TV, cooking show, food policy, tradition The way of eating differentiates men from animals and highlights differences among them. Food has a peculiar symbolic value in every culture, but, through the TV screens, it creates a complex mechanism in which the food policy of the country plays an important role. An interesting example is the role played by Chinese culinary programs after the 2008 scandal over baby milk formula tainted with melamine. This case highlights how political discourse has been crystallized in the production of two currents of works, which are only apparently distant. On the one hand, the “culinary narrative” of food as a symbol of wealth, of the modernity reached by the internationalized and globalized middle class living in the cities, performed by heroic figures of cooks who struggle for supremacy of one taste. On the other, documentaries where we find an imaginary real Chinese culinary tradition — in which apparently alien products (such as milk) find their rightful place — providing viewers with a representation of reality that justifies food policies in the framework of a so-called tradition.