Closer to Home: Yiwu in the UK
by Magnus Marsden While conducting research for the TRODITIES project in China, Afghanistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine I regularly meet traders from Afghanistan who talk about…
by Magnus Marsden While conducting research for the TRODITIES project in China, Afghanistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine I regularly meet traders from Afghanistan who talk about…
This guest post by Jon Kay, Curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures provides Jon with the opportunity to share the first…
This post in the recent series on December 2017 research and travel in Guangxi, China was written by Carrie Hertz, who also provided the photographs. In this post,…
By: Darren Byler In early March 2018 the influential Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut gave a series of readings in Seattle. Unlike in years past when Uyghur celebrities had…
by Magnus Marsden One of my most memorable evenings while conducting fieldwork in Yiwu, China in 2016 fell on 20th March, the evening of Nowruz, Persian New Year.…
I have been delayed in finishing up the series on the December 2017 trip to China that colleagues and I undertook. I am happy to return to the…
Skip ahead six paragraphs (bypass those marked with an hash mark #) if you want to go straight to the start of the fieldwork stories. If you would…
In the previous post in this series, I described how my traveling companions and I visited Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. (For the series in order, see 1, 2,…
After visiting The Museum of Women and Children (See part 3 here), our group checked in with the Beijing arts neighborhood known as 798. (For background on 798,…
This is the third 2017 China trip post. As in the two (1, 2) previous posts, it reports on adventures in Beijing with Jon Kay (my MMWC colleague)…
This briefer note is the second on our recent trip to China. The context for this travel will come (I hope) a few posts down the road. For…
This post is about a portion of my recent trip to China. The main focus of this trip was collaborative ethnographic research in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, but…
In memory of Edward S. Herman b. April 7, 1926, d. November 11, 2017 An inspiration that lives on, may he rest in eternal peace. From provoking potential…
In 2011, China’s state-run general content television channel, CCTV-4, launched a monumental 100-part series with a title that translates as “Borderland Journey” (边疆行). The premise of the show is…
By Caroline Merrifield (Yale) My friend Zhang is one of the head chefs at the fine-dining farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, China, where I did most of my dissertation…
By: Charlene Makley and Carole McGranahan Would you peer review manuscripts for a journal or press that politically censors its content? If your answer is no, then please…
Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning and Modernity in Rural China. Ellen Oxfeld. University of California Press, 2017. David E. Sutton Southern Illinois University The residents of Moonshadow Pond,…
While some have a deep history (library classifications, for instance), controlled vocabularies of diverse sorts are relatively new and some play an increasingly important role in a range…
Working with the graduate students participating in the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology is a pleasure. The students who are attending in order to gain skills for their…
by Magnus Marsden The brutal killing of up to 140 Afghan Army soldiers on April 22nd at an army base located near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in…
“Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” Donald Trump recently declared, “I’m both”. The only way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by…
A funeral home in Shanghai, China has started a 3D printing repair service in an attempt to repair damaged or disfigured corpses. Body mutilation is very common in…
Hong Kong and Hollywood face the challenges of a globalizing movie economy. Hortense Powdermaker’s analysis of a Hollywood movie industry driven by extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and crisis in…