@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3824},
      author = {Siegel, Jacob Joseph},
      title = {THE BULLSHIT MACHINE: RACE, LABOR, AND CHINESE EXPATS IN  TANZANIA},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2022-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {I met Pei in October 2021 completely by accident through a  Chinese classmate in a seminar on the state in Africa.  After she heard me talk about my research, this classmate  mentioned that she had some friends who had spent time  working in various African countries. Eventually, she  referred me to Pei, who was willing to participate in an  interview. As it turned out, Pei had spent the previous  year in Tanzania, working as a manager for Star Media  Tanzania LLC (hereafter Star Media). Star Media is the  local subsidiary of StarTimes, a Chinese multinational tech  company involved in digital television software, hardware,  and content. In our very first conversation over WhatsApp,  Pei explained that he had read Jane Guyer’s work and he was  a great fan of James Ferguson and David Graeber; he even  intended to apply to the same program in which I currently  work, the MA Program in the Social Sciences at the  University of Chicago. In line with his anthropological  interests, he had travelled to Tanzania in order to do  amateur fieldwork. Two months after our original WhatsApp  conversation, we talked via Zoom for over two and a half  hours about his findings. My invocation of David Graeber’s  2018 book Bullshit Jobs in this essay is deliberately based  upon his own labelling of his work: “[Me: How do you feel  about the work that you were doing for the company?] The  work? Ah, it’s definitely a bullshit job. I cannot help  anyone…What I do is just– I believe you also have this  experience: someone knocking at your door, ‘Please buy  this, please buy this, our product is very good, it will be  helpful to you,’ but indeed you really don’t want it. But  they keep begging you, ‘Please buy this,’…Yeah I think I  just disturb people and I have done nothing meaningful.”  Graeber defines a “bullshit job” as, “…a form of paid  employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or  pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its  existence even though, as part of the conditions of  employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this  is not the case.” (Graeber 2018, 9-10). Pei’s description  certainly meets Graeber’s understanding of what constitutes  a bullshit job; he feels his work is not meaningful,  perhaps even irritating to customers, but he must pretend  otherwise. However, unlike most of Graeber’s interlocutors,  he is not working a bullshit job in his country of  residence, he is not working a bullshit job in the Europe  or North America, and he entered into this job with a  unique willingness to confront its bullshittiness. Pei says  of the other employees, “Personally, for me, I think my job  is a bullshit job. But for most of my colleagues, the  company gives them money and that’s enough…” Given  Graeber’s adamance about the methodological seriousness of  self-reported bullshit work, I do not doubt that Pei’s job  was actually bullshit, but Pei also distinguished himself  from his colleagues, who may not have felt their jobs to be  bullshit. On this subjective element, Graeber writes, “All  I'm really saying here is that since there is such a thing  as social value, as apart from mere market value, but since  no one has ever figured out an adequate way to measure it,  the worker's perspective is about as close as one is likely  to get to an accurate assessment of the situation.”  (Graeber 2018, 10). This observation holds true as long as  most workers doing a given bullshit job have a similar  common sense of social value. Yet, as Pei maintains, he did  not necessarily have the same sense of social value as his  colleagues and this distinction allowed him to perceive  bullshit where his colleagues saw a paycheck. So, why was  he there? Why were his colleagues there? And why did I want  to know?},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3824},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3824},
}