Mountain, State, Minority: China's Landscape as Post-Alteric?

Date
Tue March 8th 2011, 4:15pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies
Location
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
Mountain, State, Minority: China's Landscape as Post-Alteric?
Speaker:

CEAS COLLOQUIUM SERIES, WINTER 2010-11

NOTE NEW DATE: MARCH 8TH

Louisa Schein Associate Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

In this talk anthropologist and longtime researcher of ethnopolitics Professor Louisa Schein puts forward a contemporary “post-alteric” formulation of China’s social imaginary, one in which the state and the Han are less polarized with the rural remote. Schein adventurously combines interpretation of three disparate instances – the 1990s film Postmen in the Mountains (Na Shan, Na Ren, Na Gou), ethnic tourism in the Miao mountains, and the media packaging of a Guizhou pop star as an image ambassador. Through this juxtaposition, she revises her earlier formulations of “internal orientalism” to consider a more recent image of state and masses, minorities and Han, urban and rural less in terms of otherness and as increasingly co-imbricated in envisioning China’s social landscape.

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