Review: Puer Tea
Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic. Jinghong Zhang. University of Washington Press. 2014 Yingkun Hou (Southern Illinois University) Many scholars believe that the province Yunnan, in southwest…
Tag: china
Does Anthropology Have a Point?
Even as I attempted to (re-)present my research as anthropological, on its journey into the public sphere and a wider audience, it was interpreted and reinterpreted as ‘international…
A Gallery Talk at Sam Noble Museum in Conjunction with the Putting Baskets to Work in Southwest China Exhibition
I will be doing a gallery talk at the Sam Noble Museum on Sunday, June 24 at 2:00 pm in the Higginbotham Gallery, which is where the exhibition…
Gil Hizi flips to page 99 of his dissertation
My dissertation deals with pedagogic programs for self-improvement in a city called Jinan, northeast China. I focus on workshops that cultivate interpersonal “soft” skills, namely emotional expression…
A Quick Trip to Beijing
Late last month, I was fortunate to have a chance to return quickly to Beijing as a member of an Indiana University delegation visiting the Chinese Academy of…
Documentary Review: “The China Hustle” is a Problematic Cautionary Tale
What if the Chinese “economic miracle” were proven to be, like so many other alleged miracles, a mass of illusions? What if savvy American investors were actually shown…
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…
The Mallet: Making a Maul in a Baiku Yao Community
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…
Fieldwork: Highlights from the Textile Group
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,…
Another Scene in the Fight Against Islamophobia
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…
From the Field: Persian New Year in Yiwu and Iranian Special Tea in Karachi
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.…
Fieldwork: Highlights from the Basketry and Architecture Group
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…
Fieldwork: Introduction (12/13-18)
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…
The Ethnic Costume Museum at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (12/9)
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,…
Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, Revisited, Again (12/9)
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,…
The Museum of Women and Children | 中国妇女儿童博物馆 (12/9)
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)…
The Temple of Heaven | 天壇 (12/8)
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…
The IU Gateway Office and Tsinghua University Art Museum (12/8)
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…
Populism, Nationalism, Globalization, and Imperialism: A Thick Review of 2017
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…
On Edge: China’s Frontiers in a Time of Change
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…
Spirit, Monster, Table and Tongue
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…
Peer Review Boycott: Say No to Political Censorship
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…
Review: Bitter and Sweet
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,…
On the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names; AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus
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…