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1. Reading The Backstreets in Ürümchi: Translation as Ethnographic Method and Practice of Refusal

Author:
Darren Byler and Andrew J. Nathan
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Northwest China in 2014, anthropologist Darren Byler found that a Uyghur language novel, The Backstreets, helped Uyghurs to narrate their own stories. By shifting the frame of the narrative of colonial violence away from the authority of the state toward the work it takes for the colonized to live, this difficult, absurdist fable gave young Uyghurs a way to articulate experiences of dehumanization and rage. With its English-language translation and publication, it also gave the novelist, Perhat Tursun, a way of refusing his own silencing through censorship and, ultimately, imprisonment. The Backstreets in Ürümchi is a novel by Perhat Tursun, a leading Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Perhat Tursun has published many short stories and poems as well as three novels, including the controversial The Art of Suicide (1999), decried as anti-Islamic. In 2018, he was detained by the Chinese authorities and was reportedly given a sixteen-year prison sentence. Byler was a cotranslator with ‘Anonymous,’ who disappeared in 2017, and is presumed to be in the reeducation camp system in northwest China. This event would be meaningful to students and faculty in many different areas of the university including the above proposed cosponsors, and students of China and Inner Asia.
Topic:
Culture, Minorities, Ethnography, Literature, Language, and Uyghurs
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Xinjiang

2. Stories of Kinship, Care, and COVID-19: Connecting Nepal and Himalayan New York

Author:
Sienna Craig
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labo abroad and Mustang-based tourism have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet, more recently, permanent migrations to New York City are reshaping lives and social worlds. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork and friendship with people in and from Mustang, The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York, the book on which this presentation is based, combines narrative ethnography and short fiction to explore how individuals, families, and communities care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging in and through diaspora, at the nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural change. This presentation will also discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the lives of Himalayan and Tibetan New Yorkers, and how regional cultural practices and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies are shaping responses to this pandemic. This event was organized by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program and cosponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.
Topic:
Agriculture, Environment, Diaspora, Ethnography, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
New York, Asia, Nepal, and Tibet

3. Therapeutic Politics of Care: New Ethnographies of Asia

Author:
Felicity Aulino, Nicholas Bartlett, Lyle Fearnley, Ting Hui Lau, Emily Ng, and Saiba Varma
Publication Date:
11-2020
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Abstract:
Care has become a crucial concern of anthropological inquiry, and current global conditions have renewed its poignancy. To paraphrase Lisa Stevenson, care involves an ethics of attending, corresponding to particular ways that someone (or something) comes to matter. The drive to care, as she and others have noted, is far from innocent, and may be filled with ambivalence whether in intimate or institutional forms. Connecting fieldwork from three provinces in China, Thailand, and contested Kashmir territory, this series brings together the authors of five new books and a dissertation to explore the therapeutic politics of care across multiple logics and scales.
Topic:
Ethics, Anthropology, Ethnography, and Care
Political Geography:
China, Asia, Kashmir, and Thailand

4. Ethnography of Sanitation in Small Towns: A Study of Angul and Dhenkanal, Odisha

Author:
Ranjita Mohanty and Anju Dwivedi
Publication Date:
09-2018
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
In the current sanitation policy discourse, cultural norms of purity and pollution are considered as major obstacles to toilet behaviour leading emphasis on behavioural change to orient people to use toilets. This study conducted in 21 slums in Angul and Dhenkanal, two small towns in Odisha, explores the sociocultural norms, behaviour and practices that influence sanitation in small towns. The study shows that culture doesn’t operate in isolation. Cultural interacts with multiple factors such as physical space in urban areas, resources people have to invest in toilet, essential infrastructure such as water, and cost effective technology that people can access. Culture influences these aspects of sanitation as well as gets influenced by them. The study highlights that people adapt in various degrees to their physical environment, thus compromising on cultural norms and beliefs but there are certain non-negotiable norms that are not compromised. This calls for decoding the cultural determinants of sanitation. The study suggest that for effective governance of sanitation, policies need to take the above mentioned factors into consideration, and create scope for understanding how culture works in a particular context and influences sanitation behaviour, choices, and practices of the poor. The study was conducted by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, under the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) Project on Urban Sanitation, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Topic:
Social Policy, Ethnography, Urban, Sanitation, and Pollution
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

5. Reversed Ethnography in the Reception of the Korean Wave

Author:
Hyeri Jung
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:
International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:
This paper unravels dynamic interactions between Korean popular culture and its fans in the United States, focusing on how cultural hybridity of the Korean Wave un/consciously facilitates soft power, and what sociocultural implications it might yield in global/international contexts. Employing various theoretical frameworks of globalization, critical/cultural media studies, hybridity, soft power, and fan studies, I take a qualitative methodological approach of what I call a reversed media ethnography: Examining the contraflow of Korean media culture on U.S. fans. I employ various qualitative and interpretive techniques including grounded theory to analyze the rich corpus of data I collected over a period of two years to examine the nature of transcultural media and fans of the Korean Wave in the United States. Overall, the findings of this paper suggest that the complex layers of hybridity embedded in Korean popular culture creates complicated webs of transculturality. The Korean Wave exemplifies strategically well-balanced cultural hybridity that arouses a certain feeling of affinity: Emotional proximity. Korean popular culture evokes continuous negotiations of identities and generates nonthreatening wholesome content that comfortably appeals to American fans with various ethnic, racial, social, and cultural backgrounds. The notion of uriness (we-ness in English), collective unity and solidarity, embedded in Korean popular culture and its fandom culture works as one of the multifaceted soft power in the eyes of American fans that leads to an alternative post-Western soft power. This study contends that it is not the so-called hybridized Korean popular culture per se that makes it transcultural, and global to some extent, but the often under-recognized vital agents in the global sphere: Legions of fans.
Topic:
Culture, Soft Power, Ethnography, and Music
Political Geography:
Asia, South Korea, North America, and United States of America

6. Exposition industrielle, production de réseaux et construction d’imaginaires : la Foire internationale du Müsiad et les représentations de l’Etat turc (Industrial Exhibition, Network Production and Construction of Imaginaries : the International Müsiad Fair and Representations of the Turkish State )

Author:
Dilek Yankaya
Publication Date:
11-2015
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Abstract:
Müsiad International Fair held in Istanbul in 2014 aroused great public interest due to the strong presence of political elites as well as to the mobilization of a large network of institutions, firms and media partners. International exhibitions are relevant fields to explore the formation of trade circuits and the creation of sociabilities, as well as to question the political and international issues central to the construction of trade networks and markets. This event appears as the representation of the Turkish state as it is formed under the AKP power. We witness a double trend of reconfiguration and of internationalization of the state constituting processes through the phenomena of increased interactions between private enterprise and public action on one side and the shrinkage of patronage networks on the other. Participating to this event therefore becomes a question of legitimization and delegitimization for private actors regarding these networks of power, the production of which is based on the presentation of economic and industrial productions and goes together with the creation of Imaginaries. The ethnographic study of the fair shows how industrial, cultural and symbolic representations bring about the production of two types of Imaginary, one related to the reinvention of the idea of the ummah across merchant networks and the other referring to the supremacy of Turkey as the carrier of this project.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Sociology, Political Science, Networks, State, and Ethnography
Political Geography:
Europe, Turkey, Asia, and Istanbul