The Wa people, who live between Burma and China, undercut many stereotypes about primitive mountain-folks. They are often labelled headhunters, but Magnus Fiskesjö’s new book, Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (Berghahn Books, 2021), confirms that taking head trophies is actually a recent borrowing from the Chinese army, where it was standard war practice, not a “primitive custom.” Also, the Wa were never isolated, but rather deeply integrated in the world economy for centuries—opium was a major export industry which helped sustain their independence until their ancient lands were annexed by Burma and China. Perhaps above all, the Wa people's fierce egalitarianism, their rejection of kings and hierarchies, as well as their deeply entrenched, armed autonomy based on their surprising wealth, pose a real challenge to the usual typologies of politics and economy.

Join Fiskesjö in a live, virtual Chats in the Stacks talk as he discusses his new book.

Sponsored by Olin Library, the talk is followed by a live Q&A.

Fiskesjö is an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University. His research engages ethnohistory, fieldwork, archival research, and social theories, and explores ethnic relations, ethno-politics, our fantasies of civilizations and barbarians as well as history and heritage issues in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America.

Dial-In Information

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5gBx1kM5ScCyaVi3P8Ctsg

Polson Institute for Global Development Seminar
A conversation with Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA

Professor Ching Kwan Lee explores the making of 'Global China' as an economic, cultural, and political phenomenon in this conversation with Jenny Goldstein (assistant professor of global development at Cornell) and Eli Friedman (associate professor and chair of international & comparative labor at Cornell)

Ching Kwan Lee is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA and author of three award-winning monographs on China: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998); Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007); and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her most recent co-edited volumes include Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019); and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (University of California Press, 2019).

Moderators:

Jenny Goldstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program. She works across the areas of political ecology, critical development studies, and human geography. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics (Nebraska, 2022).Eli Friedman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative and International Labor at Cornell University. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (Cornell 2014); and The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia, forthcoming Spring 2022).

The Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Institute for Global Development supports theoretical and applied social science research. We fund projects and working groups that address issues ranging from economic inequality to discursive politics, contributing to Cornell’s leadership in global development.

In Reencounters, Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations—hypervisible and deeply sensed—become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and postmemory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War’s illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies scholars.Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed “returnees,” and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember otherwise the continuing war.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her) is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Baik is the co-director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory (MEM-RES) at UCR; a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective; and a co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies book series at University of Michigan Press. She is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020) and is currently working on a creative nonfiction book based on oral histories with Korean diasporic activists.

Co-sponsored by: Public History Initiative (PHI), East Asia Program (EAP), Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (FGSS), Latina/o Studies, and departments of Asian Studies, History, and Performing & Media Arts (PMA) Part of the "Critical Moves: Performance in Theory & Movement" Series

What are the prospects for halting China’s mass atrocities in the Uyghur region, which are now entering their fifth year since the start in 2017? An update and discussion. Our special guest is Tursunay Ziyawudun, a survivor of the Chinese concentration camps in the region known in Chinese as Xinjiang. Translation will be provided by Rizwangul NurMuhammad, MPA student at Cornell and also affected by the atrocities. Faculty hosts and facilitators Magnus Fiskesjö, Anthropology and Allen Carlson, Government.

Co-sponsored by the China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program (CAPS), Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies, Comparative Muslim Societies, Anthropology, and the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS).

CEAS publications and EAP welcome author Scott Mehl, Colgate University to discuss his book, "The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry."

In "The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry", Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amidst fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse.

2021 > France/Japan > Directed by Pascal-Alex Vincent
The mangaka and anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon died suddenly in 2010, at the age of 46. He left behind a short and unfinished body of work, which is nevertheless among the most widely distributed and influential in the history of contemporary Japanese culture. Ten years after his death, his family and collaborators finally speak out about his work, while his heirs in Japan, France and Hollywood look back on his artistic legacy. Subtitled. More at carlottafilms.com/films/satoshi-kon-lillusionniste
1 hr 21 min

1999 > Japan > Directed by Satoshi Kon
An animated Japanese psychological thriller about a pop star whose transition to television actress irks one of her less-stable fans into stalking her. Subtitled. More at gkids.com/films/perfect-blue
1 hr 20 min