ABSTRACT
This chapter speaks to Chris Rumford’s thought on globalisation and strangeness, as well as to the colonial encounter and its presence in the current day. It also reflects his influence and encouragement to use storytelling as a mode of drawing out analysis, especially that of objects. The ‘story’ of the ship-in-a-bottle will unfurl via ethnographic vignettes – a seaside town resident who longs for the days before immigrants arrived, and a Chinese manufacturer keen to gain the best profit margin from sales to the West. These will ground a discussion of the place of strangeness and familiarity in the current globalised and globalising era. Specifically, this discussion will focus on the multiple experiences of globalization embodied by one single object, thus challenging the ‘one-world’ hypothesis by allowing a view from China in to the (typically) Eurocentric debates on globalisation. It will also question what best to do with experiences of strangeness, and to what extent the comfort of familiar things is acceptable in a globalised world.
