Yichen Rao

YICHEN RAO, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid research on writing on “Financial Cyborgs: Money, Desire, and Machinic Lives in Digital China.” The book draft is about how the development of financial technologies is remediating Chinese people’s embodied relationships with money and shaping people’s ideologies and desires for a good life over the past decade, and it situates the discussion in ethnographic material about how thousands of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms in China have become digital Ponzi schemes that have ruined the life savings of millions of Chinese people. The analysis focuses on the semiotic, cybernetic, psychic, socio-economic, and political processes that led middle-class investors to believe in something that was “too good to be true” and low-income people to continuously borrow money from these “easy credit machines” in order to gain social respect. At the theoretical level, this book revisits this classic debate in anthropology about personhood and agency through the human-machine assemblage. It renews the largely unexplored “cyborg anthropology” regarding the hybrid of machine and organism by positioning the cyborg subject as a social assemblage in a rapidly developing, large-scale, non-Western society.