The Ethnography of China: New Directions

Catalog description

The course provides a critical overview to the anthropology and ethnography of contemporary China. Beginning with the emergence of ethnology in China in the 1920s and 1930s, students will be introduced to some of the key figures in the pre-revolutionary period of China, and the key concepts, theories, and frameworks that emerged during this period in dialogue both with Soviet and British anthropology. The course then turns to the socialist period, and considers early Maoist approaches to the social sciences, and the state project to identify and classify China's minority nationalities in the 1950s. The post- Mao reform era (1978 to the present) witnesses the globalization of China and the flourishing of a wide range of new kinds of ethnographic projects. This section of the course will pay particular attention to issues of transformations in class, gender, and ethnicity, the study of rural to urban migration, the anthropology of China's urbanization, environmentalism, commodification and consumption, and the study of development in China's ethnic border regions. 001349