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Vol. 70 No. 2 (2026): New Anthropological Sensibilities

Articles and essays

My Own Orient: Visual Autoethnography from Central and Eastern Europe as an Analysis of Cultural Entanglement

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35757/KiS.2026.70.2.9
Submitted: July 17, 2025
Published: June 30, 2026

Abstract

This article presents an autoethnographic case study based on a visual analysis of Instagram posts created during a research scholarship stay in Tianjin (China). Its aim was to examine how a Central and Eastern European student and Instagram user, originating from a country that has itself been subject to Orientalization, may nonetheless unwittingly reproduce Orientalizing visual tropes when representing Chinese culture. The dataset comprises 364 photographs and video clips and was analyzed using Heewon Chang’s critical autoethnographic framework in combination with Gillian Rose’s tools for visual analysis. The findings indicate that, despite an explicitly stated intention to represent local realities critically and reflexively, certain portions of the visual archive align with aesthetic patterns of exoticization and visual distancing. This dynamic is interpreted through Milica Bakić-Hayden’s concept of “nested Orientalisms,” a stratified structure in which peripheral cultures replicate hegemonic Western gazes when engaging new Others. The author under-scores the value of reflexivity and critical analysis of visual practices in research on tourism, social media, and the representation of the Global South.

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