Prof. Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and has assumed teaching, research, and visiting scholar positions at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Beijing University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Yang is interested in issues of modernity, such as the break with traditional orders and the collective anxieties, ordeals, and insanities of modernity. Yang's cultural and geographical region of specialization is China and it's offshoot cultures and diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. She also works on the Anthropology of the State: the proliferation of the cultural logic of the state in modernity, state organizational structures, state and transnational economies, ancient state forms, and everyday forms of civil society and counter-state movements. She has analyzed the historical significance of guanxi practices or the gift economy in the context of state socialist society in China. Her book on gift and state economies in China won the American Ethnological Society First Book Prize in 1997. With a five-year National Science Foundation research grant, she conducted fieldwork in rural southeast China on the revival of popular religion and lineages as forms of indigenous civil society in rural Wenzhou. A Chiang Ching-kuo research grant enabled comparative fieldwork on popular religion in Taiwan.
Another research interest is the development of mass media and popular culture (print, film, television, videotape, VCD, telephone, Internet, etc.), their social impact especially in non-Western contexts, and the construction of new transnational forms of subjectivity through transnational movements of media. A recent research paper analyzes the relationship between satellite television, nation-state territoriality, and the Mazu goddess pilgrimage from Taiwan across the Straits to Meizhou Island, Fujian Province. Yang's interest in media is not merely from the point of view of textual analyses of media, but also in the production end of media. She has made two ethnographic/documentary videos, one on the revival of popular religion in rural China, the other on urban women in China which was presented at the Creteil Women's International Film Festival in Paris, France.
She has also published and taught on issues of gender and feminism, such as the gendered domestic and public spheres, state feminism, consumer sexuality, state masculinity, and the question of transnational feminist movements.
She has taught the core graduate seminar (Anthro 229C) "Contemporary Issues in Cultural Anthropology," and other courses such as "Anthropology of Gender," "Mass media, Gender and Transnationalism", "Modernity and East Asia," "Anthropology of the State," "Religion, Modernity, and Politics", "Elements of Traditional Chinese Culture," and "Contemporary Chinese Society."
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| "Public and Private
Realms in Rural Wenzhou, China" 1995 50 minute documentary, distributed
by U.C. Extension Media Center, Berkeley.
|
"Through Chinese
Women's Eyes" 1997 50 minute documentary, distributed by Women Make Movies,
New York City.
View a Quicktime clip of this documentary! View a review of this documentary in ARD: The Anthropology Review Database. |
Updated May 9, 2003
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