755 Library Road, Rochester, NY 14626

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Professor Biao Xiang

Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Neijuan: Ambition and Exhaustion among Chinese Youth

The 2024 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture addresses the search for existential meaning in China and addresses questions such as how personal ambition became an unquestionable virtue and an obligation, subsequently a social basis of China’s four-decade rapid growth, which in turn caused widespread feelings of powerlessness. Guided by two key notions used in the Chinese debate, namely neijuan (literally inward-rolling, or the anthropological concept of “involution”, meaning endless competition that is hard to exit), and shengminli (life force, or the self-managed capacity to act), the lecture develop a perspective that youths can use for themselves to analyze the condition that they feel trapped in, in a way that may help them to step out of neijuan and augment their life force.

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