Sinosphere and Global Civilisation

ReleaseTime:2023-10-13 Publisher:Department of Sociology Reading:19

Symposium on Sinosphere and Global Civilisation

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Time: 17 Oct 2023  (Tuesday)  10:00am-17:30pm  (Beijing Time)

Venue: Nanhua Garden, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University

Language:  English

Hosted by Institute of Anthropology, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University


Programme




9:50-10:00  Registration




10:00-10:05  Theme Briefing

 Liang Yongjia(Zhejiang University)



10:05-11:05  1st Session


Keynote Address

Moderator:Kurtuluş Gemici

(Zhejiang University)

10:05-10:55

Instiling a Heaven on Earth

Frederick Damon

(University of Virginia)


10:55-11: 05

Question & Answers



11: 05-12:05  2nd Session


Keynote Address

Moderator):Shen Yang

(Zhejiang University)

11:05-11:55

Zhejiang in Ten Thousand Years

Liu Bin 

(Zhejiang University)


11: 55-12:05

Question & Answers



12:05-13:00  Lunch Break




13: 00-14:00  3rd Session


Keynote Address

Moderator:Liu Zhaohui

(Zhejiang University)

13:00-13:50

Elevator Installation in Shanghai’s Elder Communities: A Social Technology Perspective 

Pan Tianshu

(Fudan University)


13:50-14:00

Question & Answers



14:00-15:00  4th Session


Keynote Address

Moderator:Aga Zuoshi

(Zhejiang University)

14:00-14: 50

Transnational Foodways in Southeast Asia: How the diaspora refines and redefines itself through food and faith 

Saroja Dorairajoo

(Yunnan University)


14:50-15:00

Question & Answers



15:10-15:20  Tea Break



15: 20-16:20 5th Session


Keynote Address

Moderator: Yang Weiling

(Zhejiang University)

15:20-16:10

"Living Next Door to the Dead": The Suspension of Funerals, the Postponement of Burials and the Hygienic Concept of the Corpse in the Late Imperial Shanghai

Tang Shenqi

(Fudan University)


16:10-16:20

Question & Answers



16:20-17:00  6th Session

Moderator: Liang Yongjia

(Zhejiang University)


Roundtable Discussion

Frederick Damon, Liu Bin,Guo Yi,Jiang Lu



17:30-19:00  Dinner







Speakers and Abstracts

Frederick H. Damon

       With a BA from Duke University (1970) and PhD from Princeton University (1978) Fred Damon taught and researched from the University of Virginia from the 1976-77 academic year through the 2021-22 academic year. He has conducted about 49 months of research in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, the region of the Kula Ring, and much of that on Muyuw, Woodlark Island. He has spent close to a year in China, much of that in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. He has published two books, co-edited two others, and written any papers mostly using Kula Ring data to discuss issues in ethnoastronomy, Chaos and exchange theory, historical ecology and other matters largely derived from the structuralist tradition in anthropology.

Title:Instiling a Heaven on Earth

Liu Bin

    Professor at the School of Art and Archaeology of Zhejiang University. He is director of the Institute of Cultural Heritage, Museum of Art and Archaeology, and Image Data Laboratory of Art and Archaeology. Graduated from the Department of History of Jilin University in archaeology in 1985, he has long been working on the front line of archaeology, and was once the director of the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Zhejiang Province. He has lead and participated in the excavation of many major archaeological sites, and discovered the ancient city of Liangzhu in 2006-2007. He is a highly accomplished scholar in Chinese prehistoric archaeology and prehistoric jade culture, as well as in the study of the origin of Chinese civilization, archaeology of large sites and the construction of archaeological site parks. Among many awards, he is the recipient of the national best worker in the sector of national cultural heritage, and a leading talent in liberal arts under the National Ten Thousand People Plan.

Title:Zhejiang in Ten Thousand Years

Pan Tianshu

   Professor Pan Tianshu received his B.A. in English from Fudan University in 1989, his M.A. in Area Studies from Harvard University in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2002. He taught at Georgetown University and the Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) from 2002-2005, and served as the Director of the Fudan-Harvard Center for Collaborative Research in Medical Anthropology in 2007. Since 2012, he has been Professor at the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University. He is interested in medical anthropology, urban community and business ethnography. His major publications include Twelve Lectures on Development Anthropology (2019), Ten Essays on Contemporary Anthropology (2012), Neighborhood Shanghai (2007), Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person (with Arthur Kleinman et al.), among others.


Title & Abstract:

Elevator Installation in Shanghai’s Elder Communities: A Social Technology Perspective 

“Gerontechnology” and “smart aging” have become buzz words in the official discourse on the urgent need of designing and promoting state of the arts product to improve the quality of life for China’s graying population. In this project, elevators installed in Shanghai’s senior communities are treated as form of actually existing “gerontechnology” that will provide much needed assistance for elders who have climed stairs on bad needs for years. Drawing upon insights from ethnographic fieldwork in againg neighborhoods in Y subdistrict of Yangpu in Northeast Shanghai, this project explores the discrepancy between desire to showcase the development of senior-friendly technology and the gaps of delivering promises to improve the quality of caregiving for the elders in working class neighborhoods. While identiying failure factors accounting for elevator installations, this project attempts to offer solutions to the problem based on findings from ethnographic field research. 

Saroja Dorairajoo

       Saroja Dorairajoo is Distinguished Professor at the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University. She received her PhD at the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. She has conducted fieldwork in Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Singapore, and has taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on gender, health, food, and environmental issues, and she was one of the first scholars to discuss ecological sustainability and consumption in terms of Asian values. Prof Saroja Dorairajoo is currently focusing on diabetes and civic healthcare in Singapore, and has expanded her explorations of traditional medicine in Asia to include Chinese, Malay, and Indian traditional healthcare systems.


Title & Abstract:

Transnational Foodways in Southeast Asia: How the diaspora refines and redefines itself through food and faith

In this presentation, I explore how diasporic Chinese in Southeast Asia refine and redefine self and personhood through food and eating. I explore how Chinese food gets transformed in the Southeast Asian countries of Singapore and Malaysia where an influx of Hui-Muslims has redefined the meaning of Chinese food to both Han Chinese and non-Chinese Muslims. The entry of faith into the food scene in these two countries redefines Chinese identity in the eyes of non-Chinese Malay-Muslims who have viewed the diasporic Chinese with disdain. Does Islam then put a positive spin on this disdain-filled attitude towards the Southeast Asian Chinese is what I seek to explore in this presentation.

Tang Shenqi

Title & Abstract:

"Living Next Door to the Dead": The Suspension of Funerals, the Postponement of Burials and the Hygienic Concept of the Corpse in the Late Imperial Shanghai

Since the middle and late 19th century, due to the tradition of funeral culture in Jiangnan, as well as the development of population mobility, commodity trade, and regional or industrial organizations, the suspension of funerals and the postponement of burials have become a daily cultural landscape in Shanghai's urban space. In the local health concept, "shi qi" is a primary knowledge system to understand the mortality, the corpse and the order of life and death. The ethical care of corpse, and the regional integration, as well as the religions and the rituals involved, are important methods to eliminate “shi qi”, maintain order of life and death and reaffirm social ethics and morals. In the process of burial, the health of the living is also one of the key issues taken into consideration, but the means of dealing with it are abstract, moral and even mystical. At a time when bacteriology was not universal, local notions of hygiene dominated perceptions of sanity and filth, order and disorder, as well as purging and chaos.




List of Participants

Aga Zuoshi

Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities, Zhejiang University

   

Frederick Damon

Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia

   

Saroja Dorairajoo 

School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University

   

Kurtuluş Gemici   

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

   

Guo Yi

School of Arts and Archaeology, Zhejiang University

   

Liu Bin  

School of Arts and Archaeology, Zhejiang University

   

Liu Zhaohui

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

   

Liang Yongjia   

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

   

Jiang Lu  

School of Arts and Archaeology, Zhejiang University

   

Pan Tianshu   

Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University

   

Shen Yang

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

   

Tang Shenqi   

Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University

   

Yang Weiling   

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University