Veils of Global Health:the Visual Politics of the Cigarette Industry in and outside of China
Monday, October 13, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383 Talk by Matthew Kohrman, Stanford University
This talk examines the visual legibility of a notorious product’s supply chain. Few products have been criticized more than cigarettes in recent years. Meanwhile, the factories that make cigarettes rarely get problematized. What optics have helped these key links in the cigarette supply chain to be overlooked? Using a comparative approach, the talk addresses that question, drawing upon new mapping techniques, fieldwork, and social theory. A corporate impulse to hide from public health measures, particularly recently created global mechanisms of tobacco control, is not the only mechanism at work. Cigarette factory optics have been coproduced by multiple processes, some common to all forms of manufacturing. Cigarette makers, moreover, do not always run from global tobacco control. Nor have they been avoiding all other manifestations of biopolitics. Rather, in various ways, cigarette makers have been embracing biopolitical logics, conditioning them, even using them to manage factory legibility. Matthew Kohrman joined Stanford’s faculty in 1999. His research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment
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The End(s)of Compassion:Buddhist Charity and the State in Taiwan
Thursday, October 16, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383
Talk by Julia Huang, National Tsing Hua University
C. Julia Huang is a Professor of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and currently a Visiting Scholar at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University. Huang has published articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, Ethnology, Positions, Nova Religio, the Eastern Buddhist, and the European Journal for East Asian Studies. Her book, Charisma and Compassion:Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement(Harvard University Press, 2009)is an ethnography of a lay Buddhist movement that began as a tiny group in Taiwan and grew into an organization with ten million membership worldwide. Based on fieldwork in Taiwan and its overseas branches in Malaysia and the United States, Charisma and Compassion offers a vivid ethnography that examines the movement’s organization, its relationship with NGOs and humanitarian organizations, and the nature of its Buddhist transnationalism, which is global in scope and local in practice. The successful blending of charisma and compassion and the personal relationship between leader and devotee are what define the movement.
Part of the Civility and Civil Society in Taiwan Lecture Series, Spotlight Taiwan
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Thursday, October 09, 2014 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383 | |
Interpreting the relationship between the Qing empire and inland Eurasia raises crucial questions about the Qing empire itself and its connection to global currents. For this reason, historians have continued to experiment with different perspectives on the study of this massive region. This talk will review some past approaches, and consider the prospects for developing a more integrative perspective on the role of the Qing in early modern Eurasian history, with a particular focus on Inner, Central, and South Asia.
Matthew Mosca is Assistant Professor in the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History at the College of William and Mary. His primary research interest is the development of historiography on Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Empire between 1650 and 1900 in a Eurasian context. His book From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy:The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China(Stanford UP)in 2013 .
Seminar series, Eurasian Empires & Central Asian Peoples:The Backlands in World History, is co-sponsored by the UCLA Program on Central Asia and the Center for Near Eastern Studies. | | | |
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Global Religious Changes and Social Life in China and Taiwan |
Thursday, October 09, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 AM Bunche Hall 10383 | |
This talk discusses four of the most important global trends in religion as they have affected Taiwan and China's Jiangsu Province:the removal of religion from politics(secularization), the attempt to confine it to a purely religious sphere(religionization), the increased interest in textual authority and religious self-consciousness(rationalization), and an increase in the direct physical manifestations of belief through unmediated physical experience(embodiment). A comparison of the two cases shows the importance of global trends and local culture over the century-long political divergence that separates them.
Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. His most recent book is Rethinking Pluralism:Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (with Adam Seligman, 2012).
This talk is part of the Civility and Civil Society in Taiwan Lecture Series, Taiwan Spotlight Program | | |
Thursday, October 09, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 AM Bunche Hall 10383 | |
This talk discusses four of the most important global trends in religion as they have affected Taiwan and China's Jiangsu Province:the removal of religion from politics(secularization), the attempt to confine it to a purely religious sphere(religionization), the increased interest in textual authority and religious self-consciousness(rationalization), and an increase in the direct physical manifestations of belief through unmediated physical experience(embodiment). A comparison of the two cases shows the importance of global trends and local culture over the century-long political divergence that separates them.
Robert P. Weller is Professor of Anthropology and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. His most recent book is Rethinking Pluralism:Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (with Adam Seligman, 2012).
This talk is part of the Civility and Civil Society in Taiwan Lecture Series, Taiwan Spotlight Program | | | |