A Chinese Case Study in Using Psychoanalysis for Ethnography

In this article I explore a surprising conversation that I had with a Chinese Muslim woman named Sheng Lanying. Her persistent tendency to see images of Mao that were no longer present led me to examine how personal, emotional meanings informed her experience of nation-building. After providing basic historical context about the Chinese revolution, I present the conversation between Sheng and me. Then I discuss how anthropologists can use, and have used, psychoanalysis for ethnography. I next apply the psychoanalytic approach that I find most useful to Sheng’s memories. I conclude with a discussion of what anthropologists can gain from integrating psychoanalysis with ethnography

Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China

This article charts the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explores the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes. In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating. While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status

The Qur'an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of Chinese Muslims (Hui) when the first full ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? But perhaps the fact that such a translation appeared so late in the history of the Muslim community in China, who have had a continuous presence since the ninth-century, is the best starting point. For it would be possible to address the relationship between the sacred text (as well as language) and identity among minority groups in a different way. This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined then embodied in literary texts authored by two prize-winning Chinese Muslim authors: Huo Da (b. 1945) and Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948). While Huo Da, who does not have access to the Arabic language, alludes to the Chinese Qur’an in her novel, The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), transforming the its teachings into ritual performances of alterity through injecting Arabic and Persian words for religious rituals into her narrative of a Muslim family’s fortunes at the turn of the twentieth century, Zhang Chengzhi, who learned Arabic as an adult and travelled widely in the Muslim world, involves himself in reconstructing the history of the spread and persecution of the Jahriyya Sufi sect (an off-shoot of the Naqshabandiyya) in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and in education reform in Muslim communities, inventing an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition and informed by the history of Islam not in China alone but in the global Islamic world, especially Arabic Islamic history

An Artist in the Making

A commissioned documentary shot about a black dancer and choreographer in Philadelphia. I was co-author, cinematographer, and editor. --author supplied descriptio

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711. S. Broad Street: Black Dance Pioneers is a documentary short about a neighborhood-based black dance school in Philadelphia. I was facilitator for research, production, and post-production, and I helped shoot and edit the film. Also a documentary short.-author supplied descriptio

China’s Industrial Heritage Without History

Twenty years after the Chinese authorities decided to radically reform the country’s state industry, where does public memory of the nation’s socialist industrialisation reside? What aspects of the socialist path to modernity do officials or private citizens monumentalise, if any at all? To what extent does China’s contemporary heritage movement encompass its socialist industrial history? This essay offers an initial attempt to answer such questions