Katherine Dimmery

Katherine Dimmery is an ethnographer of writing, exploring how human social engagements with and through aesthetic form contribute to the active creation of history. In particular, she investigates how written texts, as physical objects and also as socially prescriptive sites of social relations, take part in and illuminate such historiographic processes. Her  dissertation traces a modern history of Indigenous (“ethnic minority”) writing practices in southwest China’s Berdder valley, to consider how these practices have been and still are colliding with those of mainstream Chinese culture, drawing together approaches from cultural and linguistic anthropology, as well as history and folkloristics.