1
so good afternoon everyone my name is
2
michael berry i am the
3
director of the center for chinese
4
studies i'd like to
5
welcome all of you to our center for
6
chinese studies scholars forum
7
this is a quarterly series that we've
8
been hosting here for
9
a little over a year at ucla where we
10
like to bring together scholars from
11
disparate fields
12
across the ucla campus at different
13
career stages working on different
14
disciplines
15
to try to create new connections
16
and really to create us
17
a community of scholars working on
18
chinese studies here at ucla
19
uh so often we kind of all get stuck in
20
our own disciplines and don't
21
jump out of that and um and this is what
22
we're trying to do here is build a
23
greater sense of community for
24
all of our scholars and so when you look
25
at the speakers today and realize that
26
everyone is coming from a very different
27
area and there's no unified theme that
28
is very much intentional we're trying to
29
mash things up and mix things up
30
and create a little bit of synergy
31
between uh different
32
people on campus and so it's my great
33
honor to
34
introduce our speakers for today our
35
first speaker is professor nancy levine
36
from the department of anthropology here
37
at ucla
38
she has been studying the impacts of
39
transitions to a market economy and
40
government-sponsored land privatization
41
on family and society among ethnic
42
tibetan nomadic
43
pastoralists since 1994.
44
this research has involved brief stays
45
among different
46
pastoral groups in gansu province
47
sichuan province and qinghai province
48
and in prior years she conducted
49
research on the impact of government
50
reforms
51
on family structure and domestic economy
52
among
53
agriculturalists in the western tibetan
54
autonomous region
55
her early research took her to tibetan
56
speaking communities in north
57
western nepal for a total of more than
58
three and a half years and involved a
59
focus on marriage and household systems
60
and population dynamics
61
[Music]
62
and our other speakers professor sean
63
metzger and wang yo a phd candidate i
64
think i'll introduce each of them just
65
before they speak
66
and besides giving your presentation in
67
the spirit of
68
sharing i also want to introduce ever uh
69
encourage everyone to maybe say just a
70
few words about your research in a
71
broader context
72
maybe before your specific presentation
73
but without further ado let me begin
74
with professor levine
75
and then i will come back to introduce
76
our next speaker
77
okay so you can hear me yes later
78
okay so i'm going in it's part of the
79
talk i'll talk about the
80
the special challenges i face working
81
among tibetan pastoralists in china
82
but let me get going if i can get going
83
here whoops yes
84
okay let's see yeah i'm going to have to
85
try a different presentation aha here we
86
are
87
okay so this is the first one
88
oh it's going backwards i'm sorry
89
no worries yeah i'm gonna have to go
90
back to the beginning yeah i'm
91
not okay so i'm going to have to start
92
like this okay okay
93
all right now i'm trying to make this
94
really tiny
95
okay so today's in today's talk i'm
96
going to talk about
97
the successive social and economic
98
99
that the chinese government has been
100
imposing on a small minority
101
in extremely rural tibetan areas nomadic
102
pastoralists
103
and on family life in particular
104
so this is where i talk about my field
105
work it's been difficult to
106
accomplish this and for four reasons i
107
cite here
108
one is we don't have any baseline
109
information prior to the recent past
110
so it's difficult to track changes when
111
we don't know where we're starting from
112
another factor as you'll see in the map
113
in a second
114
is that this is a huge region and there
115
also
116
are cultural variations for some of the
117
reasons i'll talk about
118
later across this region
119
the pace of change has been extremely
120
rapid
121
and each time i go back i'm sort of
122
whipsawed by the
123
the kinds of changes un unimagined
124
the previous time i've been there and
125
also for me particularly
126
difficulties of access as in america and
127
working in an
128
area which is had um
129
supporters and has been restive as as
130
they put it
131
okay so these are one this is the topics
132
i'll be talking about today
133
give a little bit of background on the
134
population where it's located and ways
135
of life
136
i'll talk very very broadly about the
137
policies that have been instituted
138
by the chinese government and some of
139
the ways in which these policies have
140
transformed the life of these people
141
i'll talk about my efforts to come to
142
some sort of conclusions
143
about what life was like in the past
144
prior to the 1950s and how they are
145
distorted by
146
theoretical frameworks which were
147
prevalent
148
at at the time that explorers and
149
missionaries went through the area
150
and then i'll try to make sense of some
151
of the changes that
152
families are making to their life ways
153
in response to socio socioeconomic
154
155
okay so this is a map and this can
156
perhaps show you how
157
huge the area is so i've outlined
158
pastoralist occupied areas in green
159
and so the figures one gets is that
160
the tibetan plateau that is the area
161
occupied by tibetan pastoralists
162
is an area of 1000 by 2500 kilometers
163
the average elevation is over 4 500
164
meters
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although pastoralists tend to occupy a
166
slightly
167
lower range of altitudes there are
168
approximately two million pastoralists
169
in this region
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and in what is the higher reaches of the
171
qinghai tibet plateau but they tend to
172
live in the lower reaches of the high
173
areas and in the past they maintained
174
distinctive territories
175
and they once moved seasonally with
176
their animals in search of forage and
177
that
178
pretty much defined their lives so this
179
is where i've done my research in this
180
broad area the broad areas of course
181
here
182
and i've been concentrated in northern
183
and northwestern sichuan
184
south uh southwestern kansu
185
and southern qinghai provinces and i've
186
been there for six periods of time of
187
varying lengths between 1994 and 2015.
188
my next slide shows some fairly typical
189
scenes
190
from the early 1990s when people
191
were trying to reconstruct their past
192
lives and were living
193
as i understand it in fairly close
194
parallel with the ways they lived in the
195
past
196
this is what a group of pastoralist
197
settlement might have looked like at in
198
the past
199
certainly as it did in 1994 and what it
200
looked like in winter
201
so these pastoralist populations vary a
202
great deal
203
and one of the major poles of variation
204
is the political circumstances under
205
which they lived
206
some were independent wholly independent
207
of outside authorities
208
others were subjects of secular
209
principalities and still
210
others fell under monastic institutions
211
to whom they owed
212
taxes and various work obligations
213
regardless of that foreign observers
214
have passed through the region
215
and also chinese-sponsored teams that
216
were meant to document to provide
217
gazetteers of the region
218
invariably describe these groups as clan
219
based tribes
220
i've cut and pasted the chinese word
221
as i'm not sure how to pronounce it i do
222
not speak chinese i speak
223
three dialects of tibetan and the use of
224
this term was meant to convey that they
225
were pre-modern
226
and that their social relations were
227
based on blood ties
228
rather than on territory and that those
229
ties
230
as i'll say again later were traced on
231
male lines
232
and everything i found out in the recent
233
234
throws a great deal of doubt on most of
235
those assumptions
236
this is one thing about the past on
237
which everybody agrees
238
that pastoralists and the lived in
239
encampments these were units of social
240
cooperation consisting of two to
241
ten tent households the families in
242
those households were closely related or
243
they were close friends
244
and each encampment was linked in others
245
in various ways
246
with similar groups and this is an old
247
photo from 1926.
248
so this is uh just a sort of snapshot of
249
reforms you all know about
250
this in 1950s collectives began to be
251
set up
252
in these eastern tibetan regions not in
253
the tar
254
in the early 1980s the household
255
responsibility system took effect
256
and collectives dissolved and animals
257
were distributed to member families
258
at that time people reserve return to
259
producing for their own
260
household consumption they returned to
261
living in encampments
262
and they moved seasonally across what
263
was for many
264
the grasslands that they held in
265
pre-modern times then in the late 1990s
266
there was a series of policies
267
supporting privatization and reducing
268
mobility among these groups
269
so the government subsidized house
270
construction animal shelters
271
and fence plots they also divided the
272
grasslands they used surveyors and they
273
allocated
274
parcels in the form of long-term
275
contracts to families
276
one problem is that these parcels are
277
indivisible and they can't be bought and
278
sold
279
common land holdings and grazing shared
280
by many families is the rare exception
281
it only occurs in areas where there's an
282
absence of water sources
283
or the territory has some sort of severe
284
ecological constraint but by and large
285
people are living separately
286
and so this is what life has been
287
looking like more recently
288
individual families living in built-in
289
structures in winter sometimes
290
year-round you can see
291
a kind of house that these families tend
292
to live out on the grasslands
293
some people also still live in the
294
traditional yak hair
295
tent they graze their area on fenced in
296
pastures
297
independent of other families and use
298
now motorized transport instead of
299
horses to get to and from town
300
and this is the government has been
301
subsidizing and providing
302
chain-link fencing to create privatized
303
use of privately contracted
304
or controlled grasslands
305
the program of greatest consequence that
306
is most problematic for people
307
is permanent settlement so holders of
308
pastures that were deemed ecologically
309
fragile or degraded
310
or that have been designated national
311
park land i hope i have time to talk
312
about this later
313
they have to leave their they got
314
contracted lands and then
315
three years later they had to leave them
316
and they've been provided for
317
housing provided with housing in county
318
towns
319
and also monthly government support
320
because they have no source of income
321
anymore
322
and so this is a picture of me in front
323
of the
324
source of three rivers national park one
325
326
marked source of the yellow river
327
although this is not the actual source
328
of the yellow river
329
and it's a huge tract of land according
330
to wikipedia
331
it is the land that falls into this park
332
is slightly smaller than england and if
333
we have time later i have a map
334
showing how great an area of the tibetan
335
plateau this park takes up it's just
336
simply huge
337
so other pastoralists who haven't been
338
forced off their
339
their lands have been offered subsidies
340
to get a house in town
341
and many of them decided to take
342
advantage of what they saw as a
343
once-in-a-lifetime
344
opportunity of a subsidized house or
345
they moved to a settlement to gain
346
access to new jobs new economic
347
opportunities
348
because their own pastoral enterprises
349
were failing
350
and also to take up mandated schooling
351
for their children
352
and so you can see this is a school
353
schools have been consolidated they used
354
to be dispersed across the grasslands
355
but now you just have
356
schools and towns and in order to follow
357
government policy you have to either
358
send your kids
359
to live on their own in town or
360
accompany them to town and this is what
361
this is an area which had not a single
362
building on it in the 1950s and now is
363
one of the many new towns
364
dotting the high plateau
365
and this is what one of the urban
366
resettlement villages look like
367
identical houses constructed by foreign
368
or outside constructed with outside
369
companies
370
often poorly constructed leading to
371
problems of repair and people are left
372
there with no source of income and
373
they're
374
completely separated from their former
375
way of life
376
so we know there have been a range of
377
adaptations to these changes some
378
families have fared better than others
379
and what i've been trying to get a sense
380
of is how these changing
381
circumstances have changed relationships
382
in families
383
and in order to track change you have to
384
say what
385
things were like in the past and it's
386
difficult to know what things are like
387
in the past
388
because we only have images snapshots
389
provided by travelers
390
travelers and missionaries and these
391
government study teams
392
and occasional um ethno-historical
393
recollections of people who were
394
395
or whose families were pastoralists in
396
the past who've written
397
in tibetan and english but this is the
398
image that
399
the the standard picture of pastoral's
400
life that
401
people traced dissent through men
402
and that local groups were organized
403
around clans
404
that sons stayed homes and daughters
405
married out
406
and that inheritance went from parents
407
to their sons
408
and none of this seems to be true as far
409
as i can tell
410
so interviews with people beginning in
411
1994
412
offer a very different picture clearly
413
there were clans in a couple of
414
areas clans were missing in most
415
livestock were inherited equally by sons
416
and daughters this is
417
absolutely true everywhere and daughters
418
were occasionally the selected heirs
419
by their parents and not sons and
420
nowadays what seems to be happening
421
is that siblings are helping one another
422
adjust to these changes brothers and
423
sisters are teaming together
424
to balance the opportunities of herd
425
keeping where it's possible
426
and urban opportunities where they are
427
feasible
428
and one also finds these very unusual
429
multi-family networks
430
single divorce and married individuals
431
often with their children
432
they form cooperative groups sharing the
433
contracted and
434
indivisible parcels of pasture land
435
that their parents received in the late
436
1990s
437
creating a new kind of encampment in the
438
present day and i have two pictures of
439
two families that i interviewed and this
440
is a family
441
network consisting of two sisters and
442
one brother the sisters are
443
the the brother's wife is here and one
444
of the sisters is in the picture and the
445
children of the the three one child each
446
from the three families is in this
447
picture
448
they live together in one house in town
449
and in separate tents
450
pitched adjacent to one another on their
451
452
they have no choice but to share the
453
indivisible
454
contracted land that they receive from
455
their parents
456
this is another picture it's a 21 person
457
mega family this is the head on the back
458
of the motorcycle
459
one of his sons in the front and two of
460
his grandchildren heading off to town
461
they live in one big and several small
462
tents on their summer grazing site
463
and share two adjacent houses and their
464
winter grasslands
465
and one house in town and so it's a mega
466
family
467
and it's occasioned by the
468
indivisibility of pastureland
469
on the one hand and by traditional
470
customs about family
471
sharing and networks of family
472
relationships
473
so these are my conclusions
474
understanding family practices requires
475
attention to history and
476
causes and processes of change this is
477
complicated when history is difficult to
478
reconstruct
479
and field trips for people like myself
480
are very brief
481
despite these challenges i've come to
482
the conclusion that eastern tibetan
483
pastoralists seem to be relying on
484
traditional values
485
previously unrecognized in the old
486
patriarchal oriented model of the
487
tibetan family
488
unrecognized values of cooperation
489
between male and female siblings
490
rather than any quote unquote tribal or
491
clan based unity
492
and collaboration seem to be
493
particularly common
494
among brothers and sisters not among
495
males
496
exclusively and so this is the picture
497
summarizing the end only it's not really
498
the end on the top
499
left is a picture of how i used to get
500
to town when i first began
501
studying these pastoralists and what the
502
town now looks like
503
same street this is the exact same
504
street uh
505
21 years later and this is all centered
506
around pastoral's life
507
are centered around yak which they know
508
by a word which in tibetan means wealth
509
okay so this is just to give you a sense
510
of
511
what's happening with this national park
512
land and how much of a huge area
513
that it occupies on the tibetan plateau
514
and the extraordinary numbers of people
515
who
516
have been taken off their traditional
517
rangelands
518
and sent to these barracks like towns
519
and i do have another picture as well if
520
we
521
have questions about it later so i'm
522
going to stop sharing
523
and keep waiting the next participant
524
thank you so much professor levine it
525
was a pleasure to hear you speak
526
and i've only i've only been at ucl
527
about five years but i don't think i've
528
ever had the pleasure of meeting
529
professor levine in person and so this
530
is exactly why we do these kind of
531
events to build
532
these uh connections and just so
533
fascinating to hear about what
534
people on and other units on campus are
535
working on
536
our next speaker is professor sean
537
metzger i do know sean
538
sean is based in the uh department of
539
theater film and television he is the
540
author of
541
two books uh chinese looks fashion
542
performance
543
race and most recently the chinese
544
atlantic
545
seascapes and theatricality of
546
globalization
547
which was just published last year his
548
areas of research span many different
549
fields from theater
550
to film fashion sexuality performance
551
and i believe today he's going to be
552
talking about the film irma vep
553
so i'll hand it over to sean thank you
554
so much for joining us and take it away
555
thanks michael and thank you to ccs for
556
inviting me
557
i was trying to think if i've ever been
558
invited by a chinese
559
study center before to give a talk and i
560
can't remember actually
561
because my research kind of sits
562
uneasily under that rubric although i
563
have a kind of foot in that field
564
and i am very grateful for all the
565
research done
566
properly within its domain
567
if nancy was sort of talking about
568
transformations within china
569
i'm often interested in what happens
570
when china
571
or chinese leaves the nation state and
572
travels around the world
573
so i suppose this is partly why my work
574
sits outside of area studies proper
575
often because i'm not
576
always interested in what happens in the
577
nation state except
578
insofar as that affects transnational
579
circulation
580
of things like chinese goods and
581
products later
582
and that's partly because of expertise
583
and partly as i'll explain
584
my own familial background i think so
585
i'm going to share my screen
586
okay so i wanted you to see what i've
587
been doing in par as
588
michael mentioned i've been working on
589
these two books and
590
i had just finished the second one so
591
i'm kind of in between projects right
592
now
593
and in so far as i'm thinking about
594
what i've done as an uber in terms of my
595
scholarship
596
i was thinking about how i got from
597
chinese looks to the chinese
598
atlantic and i'm going to talk about
599
that today so i wrote an essay
600
at this vampiric fashion what i'm
601
talking about today is an essay that
602
sort of explores
603
that dynamic of how i move from one
604
project to another because irma vepe has
605
sort of haunted me from the time of the
606
graduate student
607
to now it's just being red done as a
608
series by
609
the original filmmaker um olivier asean
610
he's doing a version for tv now
611
with a dutch actress this time in any
612
case i wanted you to see this picture in
613
chinese looks as well because that photo
614
is
615
my grandparents and the woman on the
616
left
617
is my grandmother who was illiterate
618
in both english and in chinese so i
619
guess one of the things i
620
take to chinese studies is
621
an emphasis on performance studies and
622
visual culture because in my family
623
cultural transmission didn't happen
624
through written archives
625
and i think from my perspective i'm i'm
626
really interested in how chinese
627
circulates and how it accrues meaning
628
but without recourse to thinking about
629
it through
630
a written archive through literature
631
through
632
letters because that wasn't part of my
633
family familial experience
634
this is not to say i only write about my
635
own family but i think
636
i was just thinking about today how i
637
got here and i think that's
638
has a lot to do with why i chose the
639
fields i did
640
when i started in graduate school
641
so i'm in the middle of a few different
642
projects right now but i chose this one
643
because i think it speaks to
644
some of the concerns that cross over a
645
lot of the very different iterations
646
i've done in the past several years
647
let me see i guess the other thing i
648
would just say is again my work tends to
649
look at
650
sino-american sort of intersection so
651
that is chinese-american and also
652
the ways in the u.s and china collide
653
but more recently i've
654
i've started to track china outside of
655
of the us and in part that's to
656
destabilize american hegemony so when i
657
started talking about globalization in
658
more or more explicitly
659
i did so with recourse to the atlantic
660
world thinking about the caribbean in
661
particular
662
and then adding in places like south
663
africa and england
664
which was new for me but i wanted to do
665
that because i was
666
feeling like the discourse of
667
u.s china was becoming too
668
there was too much of the same kind of
669
china becoming a global power and the
670
u.s is worried about it there was too
671
much of that i wanted to try to move
672
outside of that kind of paradigm so
673
that's what that book does i tell my
674
students
675
i like them to imagine differently and
676
so this was an attempt to do that
677
in my article that's called vampiric
678
fashion
679
chinese circulation cinema and clothing
680
on screen and off
681
i talk about olivier asaya's 1996 film
682
irma vap
683
again this film has haunted me for quite
684
a while
685
and part of it is because it showed me
686
early on how costing chinese characters
687
circulate transnationally and what
688
circulations might
689
what what those circulations might mean
690
in terms of
691
psychic and material terms
692
my first book was about specifically
693
fashion items that circulated through a
694
sino-american interface and then again
695
the second one was about
696
chinese aesthetics finances goods and
697
people
698
as they inform the idea of globalization
699
so this is really a provocation in terms
700
of my
701
own work to think about the boundaries
702
of life and death that is the vampiric
703
in relation to chinese circulations of
704
clothing and representation
705
so just so you have some idea the film
706
concern is a remake so the director who
707
you see on the left the male figure
708
is named rene vidal and he is trying to
709
remake
710
uh louis fuyat's series le vampire which
711
was a serial produced in 1915-1916
712
released in 1915 to 1916 in france
713
and he wants to redo shot by shot
714
this the series except for the fact that
715
he wants to substitute
716
the lead actress from the from the
717
cereal who was musadora
718
to uh hong kong star maggie chung
719
and keep in mind this was now 25 years
720
ago so
721
chung had a different kind of career at
722
that time
723
um so that that's really what the story
724
is about and then in the narrative
725
all these all the characters end up
726
falling in love or and lust with
727
maggie chung as she's moving through
728
different parts of the shoot and then
729
in the middle of the film the director
730
has a breakdown and replaces
731
the and the new director replaces maggie
732
chung with her stunt double
733
and then the film ends with uh shots of
734
the
735
existing footage that have been bleached
736
and and um etched out
737
and they're reporting that maggie chung
738
is going to then go to
739
new york and then to la so she'll come
740
back into france even though she's
741
kicked out of the french film the
742
products that she makes with those
743
american filmmakers will come back into
744
france
745
so my objectives for today for today
746
then are just to think about the
747
concerns that bring my
748
two books together and then use the film
749
to theorize vampiric fashion as a form
750
751
cultural interchange that might be
752
productive so i recognize that it has
753
certain kinds of connotations about
754
taking life but i'm also interested in
755
in seeing what it might mean to
756
resuscitate
757
the undead and i suppose it's worth
758
saying that
759
my work is often i'm more of a
760
conceptual thinker than i am an
761
empirical researcher although i rely
762
heavily on empirical research
763
but i'm really interested in again how
764
we imagine different tropes
765
to get us to think differently about
766
things that we think we know
767
so in this regard i think the vampiric
768
and clothing in particular is a useful
769
vehicle to track cultural anxieties
770
through both screen fantasy and material
771
production so i'm going to try to make
772
an
773
analog linkage there
774
so in order to execute that analysis my
775
goal is to go through four
776
categories quite briefly so one is the
777
vampiric and what i mean by that
778
the second is the notion of revamping
779
fuyyad
780
so to think through what does it mean to
781
redo a french cereal
782
at that time in the turn of the
783
millennium
784
and then what is the material
785
materiality of costume and what does it
786
have to do
787
with the film in the ways it's been
788
discussed or not discussed
789
and then i i kind of make a leap at the
790
end because i'm interested in thinking
791
of this
792
using the film as a device to think
793
through a kind of conceptual framework
794
for thinking about material fashion
795
circulation so i ended up in senegal
796
actually
797
looking at local shoemakers so that's
798
the scope of what i intend to do today
799
briefly okay so the vampiric
800
my notion of the vampiric draws heavily
801
on
802
two scholars one was my former colleague
803
sue ellen case
804
who wrote tracking the vampire which was
805
an essay
806
that really responded to feminist film
807
theory of the 1980s
808
and she was quite interested in thinking
809
about the possibilities
810
for not for visibility as
811
positive representation but thinking
812
about what other strategies might there
813
be for people who have been
814
invisibilized by dominant structures
815
so i grabbed a quote from that article
816
for you
817
and i'll just read it to you it says her
818
proximate vanishing appears as a
819
political strategy
820
that is again against the politics of
821
her bite that is disability vampire's
822
bite pierces subject object positions
823
because it makes whoever she's biting
824
into one
825
into a version of herself and her fang
826
kiss brings her the chosen one
827
trembling with ontological orgasmic
828
shifts into the state of the undead
829
so obviously well in cases of queer
830
theorists was interested in
831
in mining the vampire specific
832
specifically for lesbian theory and
833
if lesbian desire was unrepresented
834
representable in cinema of a certain
835
moment
836
how would you think differently about
837
using a vampire to
838
restate or make visible and then
839
invisible the vampire for political
840
purposes
841
the next text i had in mind for my
842
dialogue was nina arbok's
843
our vampires ourselves which was a
844
popular book in
845
the mid-90s because it sort of tracked
846
847
various vampire stories that were
848
popular in that moment
849
in both the uk and in the us so i took
850
two points from
851
our bach and they are as follows first
852
she has this idea that their appeal is
853
dramatically
854
generational that is in other words for
855
every vampire
856
for every age there's a different
857
vampire so we use the vampires to think
858
about
859
social construction at specific moments
860
in time
861
and related to that she says vampires go
862
where power is so that is if you follow
863
the vampire
864
through whatever medium you're looking
865
at you'll get a sense of how power
866
circulates within this particular
867
context so again i find both of those
868
uh cases and our box notions quite
869
useful
870
for me ultimately auerbach is really
871
interested in immutability so it's about
872
how the vampire mutates or
873
transforms in different historical
874
moments to reflect that moment
875
and for case she uses the vampire
876
to resist oppressive representation
877
representational apparatuses apparatus
878
so it that is she wants to think about
879
if there's a structure that has deemed a
880
certain population
881
not worthy of life like the queers for
882
example
883
she says we can turn to the to the
884
vampire to restore
885
some kind of animation to
886
those characters to think differently
887
about what's to think about
888
and critique the structural the
889
structure that's oppressing in the first
890
place
891
uh neither of these scholars at the time
892
was really thinking through
893
race in or culture difference in their
894
respective writings but i think those
895
areas of study have really come to the
896
fore in both vampire narratives
897
and their study because those narratives
898
continue to be about blood
899
and contamination and those inform that
900
genre
901
so that's the idea of the vampiric
902
and the vampire then leads me to uh
903
friad because friad series again is
904
called le vampir or the vampires
905
so the lead character or the lead
906
character
907
the most the villain that stays alive
908
the longest i'll
909
say in the freyad serials was irmavec
910
who was played by
911
a vaudeville actress turned screen star
912
named
913
musadora and she became
914
really well known in that role
915
specifically
916
in her silk bodysuit so you can see the
917
slip body suit in the image i have here
918
i just wanted to have a
919
full body suit and
920
supposedly only 15 minutes of that i
921
think 10 hours of footage
922
in the ten in the serial of ten episodes
923
features her clothing this way but
924
a lot of the advertisements and the
925
peritects around the film include
926
visualization of this silk costume
927
so the silk costume then bears the
928
weight of
929
whatever femininity means in the moment
930
that this was screening in the 1915 1916
931
and 19 teens
932
so there's been a lot of scholarship on
933
this particular
934
serial and most of it agrees in thinking
935
936
musa dora as irma vet
937
both the emergence and containment of
938
the new woman that emerged in france at
939
the phantasyic
940
um and that she transguessed social
941
boundaries through clothing so again
942
this particular outfit was how everyone
943
came to know her in the publicity
944
posters and things like that but there
945
are many many other moments in the
946
serial where she
947
cross-dresses as a male or she puts on a
948
costume to infiltrate a bank
949
etc etc so there's there's all of these
950
moments when she uses clothing
951
to work her way into a social system
952
that she wouldn't otherwise have access
953
to
954
so the criticism then follows and says
955
okay so this means that
956
she's signifying the lack of containment
957
or the
958
mobility of the woman in the early 20th
959
century
960
and then contains it at the end so at
961
the end of the tenth episode
962
irma vep is slain by the
963
news reporter who's reporting to who's
964
following her
965
his fiancee ends up shooting i think i
966
forget how he kills her but
967
she ends up killing her so basically
968
domestic woman
969
takes um control over the woman who's
970
who has too much authority in the social
971
sphere
972
so again is about the making of
973
levonpire with maggie chung just
974
substituted in resort mizador's role but
975
otherwise the
976
it should be a shot for shot remake
977
so that necessarily meant that scholars
978
who were looking at that remake thought
979
of okay
980
what's the point of having a hong kong
981
star or a chinese star
982
take over this role which was really
983
associated with a french national
984
movement in cinema and those scholarly
985
works tend to cover things like asian
986
femininity
987
globalization cinematic intertextuality
988
and again without focus on how china is
989
informing or
990
potentially challenging the notion of
991
french cinema at the moment of
992
the 1990s
993
okay so that brings me to
994
the material out of costume because i'm
995
not interested in rehashing what other
996
scholars have said although i find it
997
quite useful
998
but one of the things that i noticed
999
about the film is in addition
1000
to the actress being swapped out the
1001
costume is also
1002
swapped out so in the cereal irmavet
1003
wears a mayo de sua
1004
which is a silk costume and the picture
1005
here on the left
1006
is a soap factory that i'll explain in a
1007
second but it's a silk factory in lyon
1008
that's actually
1009
taking tours now for for people who want
1010
to see
1011
leone's history with soak so the french
1012
history was so is something i'm going to
1013
come back to
1014
on the right hand side is an image from
1015
alibaba
1016
because i thought you should have
1017
something to look at that would be more
1018
provocative
1019
so this is a latex item produced in
1020
china that you can order if you
1021
like i just found it online today
1022
actually and i'm interested in what is
1023
1024
significance of the shift in moving from
1025
a silk costume to
1026
a rubber one so that's gonna what i'm
1027
gonna talk about for just a moment
1028
so my question was really what are the
1029
associations or what might be the
1030
associations with silk
1031
in the uh period
1032
that irmavec was released and suffice it
1033
to say that
1034
lyon became the epicenter of france and
1035
europe's silk production
1036
as early as the 16th century and then in
1037
the mid-19th century
1038
or by the mid-19th century lyon really
1039
became the capital of that
1040
industry and one out of every two
1041
workers worked in what was then called
1042
the fabrique
1043
in the mid 1800s there were workers
1044
strikes and those
1045
helped signify the dawn of the
1046
industrial
1047
revolution in france and the attendant
1048
labor issues that were
1049
emerging at that time in the 1850s and
1050
1860s there was a silkworm
1051
disease that was spreading around so it
1052
basically stopped the industries in
1053
france and italy at the time
1054
which led to more importation from asia
1055
but also
1056
it led to the the rise of silk
1057
industries in other countries
1058
particularly in japan and the us so silk
1059
itself is
1060
the history of silk has something to do
1061
with um national industries and their
1062
contestation
1063
and similarly uh oh sorry so and the
1064
other thing
1065
i want to say about silk is that it
1066
1067
foreign competition did not get rid of
1068
the industry it was synthetics that
1069
eventually
1070
demolish the silk industry in france but
1071
as the vampiric reveals the dead can
1072
always return so we'll come back to that
1073
and the rubber industry to my knowledge
1074
at least as far as i've been able to
1075
tell
1076
really got going in the night it sort
1077
started in the 18th century
1078
when rebel was brought to it to england
1079
and then
1080
macintosh was released in the 1820s and
1081
by the 1830s you had
1082
a process of adding sulfur to the rubber
1083
which made it more durable
1084
and those that process sort of increased
1085
the demand for rubberized
1086
products so in the 19th century those
1087
products included like bicycle wheels
1088
which were
1089
increasingly popular as well as condoms
1090
which were actually reusable
1091
at this time these are the things i
1092
learned in my research
1093
so rubber had a history and of course it
1094
was associated plantations in france the
1095
plantations really took off
1096
in the early 20th century so the history
1097
of rubber is associated very much with
1098
southeast asia
1099
where chinese overseers or i guess
1100
chinese
1101
middlemen were were had boss jobs on the
1102
on the plantation in the
1103
plantation economy as far as i've been
1104
able to tell
1105
china itself didn't have a rubber
1106
industry until the 1950s
1107
so it and that was um sort of emergent
1108
but by 1986
1109
china was producing was the fourth
1110
largest natural producer or producer of
1111
natural rubber in the world
1112
so i'm interested in that shift and
1113
again it suggests that oh okay so
1114
china's coming in to challenge other
1115
industries around the world
1116
the other thing to know about latex
1117
versus silk is
1118
latex and this comes up a lot in the
1119
film because
1120
maggie chung's costume is always having
1121
issues is not an easy material to work
1122
with so unlike
1123
textiles or other textiles which are
1124
stitched together latex is glued
1125
together so you can either do that
1126
piecemeal
1127
and then attach things part by part
1128
or you can do a full body mold but
1129
either way
1130
there's a lot more labor involved in
1131
this and as the
1132
character in the film keeps commenting
1133
on this so too did
1134
the francois clavel is the costume
1135
designer for the film
1136
she also complained about this quite a
1137
lot that having to do this
1138
this this object in rubber was
1139
exceedingly difficult especially because
1140
of the budget of film
1141
because they didn't have enough money to
1142
do replacements they could only do
1143
repairs
1144
so like
1145
the silk rubber also is not engaged with
1146
in terms of the original series it's not
1147
common commented on on
1148
in irma that so that you never get a
1149
commentary on what it means and actually
1150
the filmmaker himself has never said why
1151
he wanted a latex suit uh nor does that
1152
occur in the diegetic narrative that is
1153
in the film's narrative itself
1154
so part of what i'm interested in here
1155
is that cinema as a mode of reproduction
1156
itself
1157
depends in part on the resurrection of
1158
stars that
1159
maggi chung for mesadora as well as the
1160
replication of costumes
1161
but it can never restore what's passed
1162
it can only elicit the desire for it
1163
okay so i want to just move quickly to
1164
implications of that
1165
and this is somewhat of a non-sequitur
1166
but i hope it
1167
kind of comes together in some way so i
1168
want to briefly
1169
jump to senegal because senegalese
1170
cobblers
1171
lost have lost sales because of chinese
1172
imports so basically
1173
chinese entrepreneurs have looked at
1174
what's on the shelves
1175
in cobbler's shops and reproduced them
1176
in china for much cheaper and are
1177
selling them
1178
at a much lower price
1179
so the sale of these cheaper goods in
1180
terms of uh pricing quality
1181
is decimating this local artisan
1182
industry in senegal and so
1183
another way to think about that is as a
1184
vampiric construction right so that
1185
china's coming in sucking up the
1186
lifeblood of this and then reanimating
1187
the garment industry
1188
in its own image so i'm interested again
1189
taking that metaphor and then applying
1190
it to
1191
something that's more concrete well the
1192
thing about the vampiric is is not just
1193
that someone is suffering from chinese
1194
intervention but
1195
it also facilitates a certain kind of
1196
accommodation and
1197
innovation and so i would just point to
1198
a study of youth culture in dakar that's
1199
looking at
1200
the ways in which people actually use
1201
these fashions and what's happened is
1202
1203
because of the quality of the goods
1204
they're showing so they look nice
1205
but they don't last long so women are
1206
going into parties for example young
1207
women are going into parties
1208
with chinese footwear on and then once
1209
they get to the party and have shown off
1210
their outfits they're replacing them
1211
with more practical shoes made in
1212
senegal by senegalese
1213
artisans so i think that's an
1214
interesting kind of moment where you see
1215
a whole discourse emerging again i got
1216
this from various
1217
al jazeera news reports and other kinds
1218
1219
stories on how senegal house and the
1220
police
1221
were responding to the chinese
1222
1223
so for me what's interesting about that
1224
is there's a potential agency enclosed
1225
as well as a kind of
1226
flexibility in the context that's
1227
producing garments and
1228
we know that those clothes even like the
1229
shoes that are disappearing right now
1230
will
1231
likely come back because fashion dies
1232
only to be reanimated
1233
that's my metaphor is coming back again
1234
and i'm going to stop
1235
on that note thanks very much
1236
thank you sean for a very stimulating
1237
talk that
1238
took us well from paris to senegal
1239
and somehow we looped in china in the
1240
middle
1241
and our third speaker is going to be
1242
wang yo who is a phd candidate in
1243
history at ucla
1244
at the intersection of environmental and
1245
economic history
1246
her dissertation examines the
1247
establishment and evolution of communal
1248
water government governance
1249
and early modern gennad from the period
1250
1600
1251
through 1850 and so uh i'm gonna turn it
1252
over
1253
to yo to share her screen and
1254
take it away thank you so much professor
1255
barry and it's definitely an honor to be
1256
1257
and let me share my screen
1258
so as you can see i was googling like
1259
the magic zone
1260
and so
1261
can you can you see the screen
1262
yes awesome
1263
so on as as professor barry
1264
says made anticipation exams the local
1265
water governance of early modern jannan
1266
and this talk is a part of it and it's
1267
still an ongoing project so i really
1268
look forward to your comments
1269
so after the two wonderful talks on
1270
contemporary china i would like to bring
1271
us back to the qing empire
1272
and explore a small but important region
1273
of it the china areas
1274
as you can see it's actually quite small
1275
region
1276
given the entire territory
1277
and geographically china often refers to
1278
eight prefectures and
1279
one department in the thousand zhang
1280
sioux province and western georgian
1281
province
1282
is china's economic and cultural center
1283
for
1284
millennia and today is often known as
1285
the greater shanghai area
1286
which first confirmed its economic and
1287
cultural importance
1288
known as on watery land or sri shang
1289
china and its agricultural productivity
1290
and economic prosperity
1291
heavily relies on intensive water
1292
management
1293
however we often heard criticisms of
1294
dysfunctional hydronic infrastructures
1295
in poems
1296
agricultural and hydrogen treatises and
1297
official and private histories
1298
in many cases there were blames against
1299
idol farmers
1300
who failed to match their water systems
1301
to be fair managing water is never easy
1302
for community indeed numerous social
1303
science studies have demonstrated that
1304
communal resource management especially
1305
those require large scale coordination
1306
with severe structural challenges
1307
therefore
1308
political scientists economists or
1309
social scientists in general
1310
often argue that communities
1311
unsurprisingly
1312
especially those non-western rural
1313
communities
1314
cannot manage their water resources or
1315
resources in general and so it is
1316
crucial to have the government or the
1317
market forces to step
1318
in likewise histories of earning more
1319
modern china asserts that
1320
farmers were incapable of coordinating
1321
on water governance
1322
and the state was the only resort today
1323
i will reject these assumptions through
1324
the research of water governance of john
1325
m
1326
especially that of one river system
1327
the taiping river here
1328
ran around about 10 miles in the
1329
dangyang county
1330
jinjong prefecture and received water
1331
from the yangtze river
1332
not only the youngs river has been the
1333
largest longest river in asia
1334
and even today it has an average flow of
1335
1.1 million cubic feet per second
1336
although comes also also comes with the
1337
young's water with the scent it carries
1338
as long as the riverbed was properly
1339
dredged the taiping river could irrigate
1340
1341
area of eight square miles with about 30
1342
30 000 more of land and benefited about
1343
1344
settlements alongside the river
1345
as we can see at least between 1653
1346
and 1820 the 10 mile river was regularly
1347
dredged
1348
13 times all river works were under
1349
little official intervention
1350
and was a collective achievement of over
1351
3 000
1352
households alongside the river
1353
considering the structural challenges
1354
the large-scale cooperation
1355
faced and these well-received
1356
assumptions
1357
we have to ask how did they make it or
1358
how did farmers in the typing basin
1359
responded to the challenges
1360
facing communal resource management and
1361
successfully manage a river
1362
that was as long as 10 miles
1363
to further answer this question today
1364
i will examine the residential part of
1365
chiang mai
1366
that facilitated the long-term
1367
intervention cooperation
1368
i will also explore the first hydronic
1369
reform in the basin
1370
which how especially how farmers set
1371
rules
1372
to allocate laborers and water benefits
1373
among vintages
1374
compared with large vintages in other
1375
densely populated regions such as the
1376
south china or
1377
north china plain german sediments were
1378
often small
1379
dispersed and often made of uh made up
1380
of people from the same petrol nino 9
1381
or the same ninj and so this
1382
is the south china or this is north
1383
china plain
1384
um like and also those
1385
large multi-synonym villages in
1386
also tend to further divide it into
1387
smaller uni
1388
settlements while their counterparts in
1389
north china and south china
1390
turned to stay as large integrated
1391
1392
let's notice by scholars uh is that even
1393
within a small single surname segment
1394
people of different branches might
1395
further divide it into smaller social
1396
units
1397
which i term multi-layered lineage
1398
identity
1399
so this residential parting and
1400
multi-layered lineage
1401
identity are well manifested by the
1402
jungle lineage of the typing basin
1403
all the charts here recognized as soon
1404
official
1405
as a shared male ancestor indicating a
1406
shared image identity
1407
except for a fury ritual performance
1408
this lineage did not wear much power
1409
over social and economic life
1410
in everyday life despite the geographic
1411
proximity
1412
the child at different advantages were
1413
perceived
1414
perceived as distinguished distinct
1415
groupings
1416
posed by other lineages and by
1417
themselves the first
1418
division of the drones did not end at
1419
the vintage level
1420
for example in 1949 all the proximity
1421
uh 70 households at the single surname
1422
should
1423
diving belonged to 12 branches
1424
and resided in three helmets at the
1425
north
1426
middle and southern parts of the vintage
1427
funerals and weddings were only attended
1428
by people from the same branch
1429
and the three jungle segments within the
1430
vintage had little social interactions
1431
with each other
1432
for many scholars the special this
1433
special residential partner
1434
doomed john and to dysfunctional
1435
hydronic coordination
1436
beyond the sediment or vantage level
1437
however i tend to argue that
1438
the kinship ties allow the sediment to
1439
serve as a unit of great cooperation
1440
more importantly the combination of
1441
small and dispersed settlements
1442
and proper kinship ties facilitated the
1443
communal cooperation
1444
including collective water governments
1445
of the taiping river
1446
for more details let's turn to the
1447
riverworks
1448
initiated in 1750 and 1653
1449
the taiping riverworks suing experienced
1450
a lack of neighbor
1451
in its second dredging attempt which is
1452
in 1775
1453
as many villagers along the reef
1454
alongside river refuse to contribute to
1455
the river
1456
or to provide the labor this is actually
1457
a
1458
challenge inherited in communal
1459
riverworks or communal coordination at
1460
large
1461
without the compulsory power the state
1462
or the market
1463
has the communities could not coerce
1464
their other villagers
1465
to to contribute to the shared
1466
water system to implement these local
1467
and collective
1468
project participating communities had
1469
the arduous persuade
1470
negotiate and coordinate with all
1471
benefited vintages
1472
and by 1683 after years long painful but
1473
fruitful negotiations
1474
the water control enterprise
1475
successfully implemented a serious rules
1476
to solve this labor scarcity
1477
at the center of this reform was
1478
on the rules to allocate laborers
1479
and also distribute water benefits
1480
like many communal hydraulic projects of
1481
the time
1482
farmers in the typing basin shared their
1483
hydronic responsibilities in proportion
1484
1485
what they called benefited land or
1486
shoney 2d
1487
this was regulated that it was regulated
1488
that every 20 move of land
1489
benefiting from the water governance
1490
should contribute a labor
1491
we should notice that the benefited land
1492
was actually a very ambiguous concept
1493
depending on how sufficient
1494
sophisticated existing water networks
1495
were
1496
and how efficiently carried the water to
1497
the irrigation
1498
site the area of benefited land could
1499
vary significantly
1500
which left great rooms of negotiation
1501
and
1502
bargaining here the small dispersed
1503
residential part partner facilitated the
1504
labor mobilization in at least two ways
1505
first the proximity between segments
1506
made land recognition
1507
and land trade difficult to conceal
1508
secondly the small segments were less
1509
likely to object
1510
collective decisions and participating
1511
1512
could readily generate enough social
1513
pressures
1514
and persuade each other to claim a fair
1515
amount of labor
1516
more importantly the reform of 1683
1517
guaranteed riverwork contribution with
1518
the elaborate rules on
1519
sharing water benefits generally i
1520
interpreted the set of rules
1521
in the frame of stick and carrot with
1522
additional arrangement to solve
1523
potential conflicts and guarantee a
1524
smooth cooperation between upstream and
1525
downstream
1526
let's come to the stick first and
1527
foremost participating communities
1528
announced the exclusive strategy to
1529
reserve the benefits
1530
of riverworks exclusively for their
1531
contributors
1532
which motivates segments to continue to
1533
contribute for public affairs
1534
the commitment ability to match what
1535
benefits was contribution
1536
and to implement the exclusive
1537
strategies was manifested in the efforts
1538
to prevent the knee lineage
1539
from accessing the taiping river so
1540
this is actually a lawsuit it starts
1541
with the miniature uh
1542
so the lean image resided right next to
1543
the southern end of the typing basin
1544
and never contribute to the riverworks
1545
after a severe doubt
1546
in 1775 the knees found the taiping
1547
river
1548
an increasingly appealing source of
1549
water
1550
as a reminder so the taiping river was
1551
timely dredged
1552
by the 1773 and act received the basin
1553
from the drought
1554
so to access the typing flows the knees
1555
tried to destroy
1556
a dam that blocked the taipei wall river
1557
in front of their vintages and farmers
1558
of the typing basin were outraged
1559
in order to protect their water benefits
1560
people launched an extremely costly
1561
lawsuit against the knees
1562
after spending over 1 000 tails of
1563
silver
1564
and at least three years of time the
1565
typing basin won the lawsuit and
1566
prevented his
1567
needs from receiving water benefits
1568
by taking pains to reserve the water
1569
benefits exclusively for the riverworks
1570
1571
the communities of the taiping basin
1572
motivated managers
1573
to claim their benefited land and
1574
largely resolve the issue of labor
1575
security
1576
and together with the stake was carrot
1577
the riverworks enterprise also required
1578
that for every two laborers advantage
1579
provided
1580
it could use one water wheel for
1581
irrigation during droughts
1582
by linking the water world quotas with
1583
the labor contribution
1584
this rewarding system lured capable
1585
1586
to contribute even more and compensated
1587
them with
1588
higher quarters or higher irrigation
1589
capacity
1590
and this is one of the many kinds of
1591
water whales
1592
use of the time which i found in the
1593
tiangong kaiwu
1594
and not only underlying the stick and
1595
carrot were actually a basic assumption
1596
which is what was available throughout
1597
1598
so that all the communities were treated
1599
fairly
however as some of us who are more
1601
familiar with uh
1602
river management we should know that
1603
actually in a river system
1604
there are often very strong potential
1605
confidence between the upstreams
1606
which can receive the water earlier and
1607
the downstream
1608
and there were actually many hydraulic
1609
operations collapsed
1610
because of this conflict in the typing
1611
basin
1612
the communities managed to secure a
1613
relatively even distribution of water
1614
alongside the river by regulating
1615
irrigation behaviors
1616
during droughts the vintages couldn't
1617
but
1618
could not irrigate during the day so
1619
that the tides could
1620
reach downstream during the evening and
1621
also during this
1622
severe drought upstream communities
1623
agreed
1624
that they will suspend irrigating for
1625
three days
1626
with spring tides and assure the
1627
downstream exclusive access of three
1628
spring tides
1629
plus a fair share of the rest the
1630
communities that guarantee decent water
1631
supply for all
1632
facilities by the residential partners
1633
and institutional principles regarding
1634
mobilizing labor and ensuring water
1635
benefits
1636
communities in the typing basin
1637
successfully sustained a water control
1638
enterprise
1639
for more than one century and a half
1640
there are indeed more communal efforts
1641
behind but i
1642
will not cover them today for the time's
1643
sake
1644
overall with the successful
1645
implementation of these rules by 1683
1646
there were nearly 90 settlements that
1647
contribute to the river
1648
repair of the year and afterward
1649
which is a huge achievement especially
1650
compared with the
1651
only 47 settlements three decades
1652
earlier
1653
when the riverwork was first launched
1654
these and other designs provide the
1655
institutional infrastructures for the
1656
long-term water governance
1657
of the typing base until at least 1821
1658
and with an average once one repair
1659
every 13 years
1660
and also coordination among nine and
1661
which all
1662
under the coordination among 19 segments
1663
and about 3 000 households each time
1664
and all of them were undertaken by
1665
farmers with little
1666
uh with little intervention by the
1667
officials
1668
and the focus on a single river in
1669
heaven we bring up
1670
with a question was the typing basin
1671
typical
1672
or to what extent could its success shed
1673
light on the jungle and water control at
1674
1675
it is a little bit hard to answer also
1676
regular
1677
water control was touched by many homes
1678
biographies
1679
and other local materials in ghana these
1680
records were often brief and superficial
1681
as shown in one record in 1910 and i
1682
will read
1683
it most minor rivers were dredged
1684
annually by peasant advantages according
1685
to customs
1686
therefore i as many others do not record
1687
these maintenances
1688
you can imagine how outraged i was when
1689
i was reading this document
1690
but while this record confirms the
1691
existence of water control regularly
1692
conducted by rural communities
1693
it actually delights any possibilities
1694
to delineate this communal effort
1695
and as the also justified these
1696
quotidian practices were too trivial to
1697
be worse detailing
1698
and it's a time to go back to the
1699
assumptions that were
1700
well accepted not only in the history of
1701
early modern china but also even in a
1702
contemporary setting
1703
however perhaps we should think that if
1704
a project of the sheer
1705
size and complexity of the typing
1706
riverworks could be accomplished by the
1707
farmers themselves
1708
it perhaps the time to rethink the
1709
1710
uh which we should assume that self
1711
organizing hydraulic objects felt in
1712
general
1713
and that the state or the market was the
1714
only resort
1715
to conclude through the once uh 169
1716
years
1717
of typing river works farmers or
1718
local communities demonstrate that they
1719
can self-organize
1720
and craft long-lasting institutions for
1721
water governance and
1722
alike and that the state and the market
1723
will not and should not be the only
1724
options
1725
thank you so much for listening and i
1726
look forward to your questions
1727
thank you so much yo for your
1728
presentation and to all of our speakers
1729
and we're going to now enter the second
1730
portion
1731
of the event which is our dialogue
1732
conversation
1733
um i'll start off with a question and
1734
then we'll take whatever questions we
1735
have from the audience and also i want
1736
to encourage our panelists
1737
if you have questions for one another i
1738
really want to encourage dialogue
1739
amongst
1740
all of us professor levine i wanted to
1741
ask a quick follow-up you had
1742
some really amazing images of the
1743
physical transformation
1744
of the sites that you visit including
1745
going from
1746
livestock to get to the place to
1747
automobiles and the
1748
build-up of cities i'm wondering if you
1749
could offer
1750
share some of your insights about the
1751
human transformation about how this
1752
technology and modernization has
1753
affected the people
1754
uh that you've met with and interacted
1755
there over the years
1756
i mean i remember visiting tibet 1998
1757
and was shocked when
1758
a monk reached into his rope and pulled
1759
out a cell phone i didn't even have a
1760
cell phone in
1761
1998 but the
1762
the rapid pace of modernization how do
1763
you see especially your topics that you
1764
study
1765
in terms of marriage and household
1766
systems how have you seen those
1767
uh structures transformed due to
1768
technology
1769
and modernization i think tibetans are
1770
sort of on the
1771
the lower end of any kind of
1772
technological
1773
access so that my i know this must have
1774
been a classy monk with a with a cell
1775
phone
1776
so tibetans have like fifth hand cell
1777
phones that that they use to stand
1778
in touch with close relatives and that
1779
beat up old cars
1780
but in these areas there are a lot of
1781
1782
business people coming in and also a lot
1783
of chinese tourists as you may know it's
1784
uh an attractive site for
1785
chinese of a certain kind of uh cultural
1786
sensibility to
1787
to travel to tibetan regions and
1788
it's expensive it's rare it's it's
1789
unique and so
1790
a lot of them are doing it and so
1791
chinese businessmen have come
1792
in to to earn money from providing food
1793
1794
and hotels to the their compatriots
1795
hot chinese um the way to
1796
there's only one way the tibetans have
1797
gotten rich in recent past and i don't
1798
know if any of you know about this but
1799
it's caterpillar fungus
1800
which is a us an herb that grows at very
1801
high altitudes and it supposedly has
1802
medical and aphrodisiac properties and
1803
so
1804
those people who are in areas which are
1805
rich in this in this substance
1806
have managed to get wealthy but they
1807
don't
1808
really know how to invest the money so
1809
that the wealth is often quickly lost
1810
there are a lot of people who are moving
1811
to chengdu and
1812
and um those with
1813
with resources but by and large i think
1814
there
1815
it's a population that finds it very
1816
acts very difficult to access
1817
um the benefits of development in modern
1818
china because they lack language
1819
facility most of them they lack
1820
access to good educations and they're
1821
mostly been on the losing end and now
1822
i've been trying to find current good
1823
statistics and i just haven't been able
1824
to do so to illustrate
1825
things like life expectancy years of
1826
education
1827
the kinds of jobs that people are are
1828
having of course a small minority are
1829
succeeding but the vast majority
1830
are really being left behind and the
1831
and depressed by losing their
1832
livelihoods and not being able to
1833
find a new way of living to substitute
1834
thank you we have a question from
1835
yoonpoul young for sean
1836
thank you for this fascinating talk as
1837
we all know irmavepe was released in
1838
1996 and hong kong got taken over by
1839
china
1840
in 1997. i'm wondering how you use this
1841
film to conceptualize that convoluted
1842
political cultural
1843
effective relationship between this
1844
french film
1845
the united kingdom and china
1846
oh thank you for the question i think
1847
you know for me i don't think
1848
china signifies in a stable fashion
1849
normatively so but we act as if it does
1850
so i think when i read in the press new
1851
york times or whatever
1852
when they say china that's supposed to
1853
mean something
1854
and i suppose it's supposed to mean like
1855
han chinese
1856
more urban oriented chinese folks i
1857
think
1858
but it tends not to describe
1859
either linguistic or ethnic minorities
1860
among other things so for me i i like um
1861
uh jungle new because she signifies
1862
in a hybrid way anyway i mean she's from
1863
england right so she came to hong kong
1864
to be a model
1865
and a movie star and she i think
1866
she her she speaks english better than
1867
she speaks chinese i mean she doesn't
1868
she doesn't
1869
hold national signification that way and
1870
i think that's partly why she interests
1871
me because she's being used then by this
1872
european director in a kind of
1873
orientalist way to start
1874
to sort of map china onto france
1875
and he seems unaware that that's not
1876
going to work well so i think that's
1877
part of the part of her
1878
um part of the complicated politics is
1879
also thinking through like oh well
1880
how do individuals signify those things
1881
i really haven't thought about it in
1882
relation to
1883
hong kong in the last couple years
1884
because there's been such radical
1885
transformation and i
1886
am a bit slow so i'm not sure how that's
1887
i can't i don't
1888
have a read on how those earlier
1889
cultural iterations are earlier because
1890
of cultural icons that signified hong
1891
kong student of a certain moment now
1892
signify
1893
because so much has transformed in such
1894
a short time
1895
and i feel like i'm catching up to that
1896
so i certainly will be curious
1897
i think um france on the other hand is a
1898
little bit easier because
1899
you know it it imagines itself as much
1900
more stable and so
1901
when it's faced with things like
1902
immigration issues it just it
1903
it kind of the national discourse
1904
reverts to a kind of very
1905
patriarchal nationalist kind of rhetoric
1906
that you can
1907
that's easy to recognize and critique um
1908
so i guess i'll stop there but i
1909
i mean it's a good question i guess i
1910
have to think through it more in terms
1911
of the contemporary resonances of
1912
of hong kong in france today
1913
thank you there's another question from
1914
donald mu
1915
it might be off topic somewhat ucla has
1916
a good program and i'm curious about its
1917
program
1918
seeing the map in sixteen hundred to
1919
eighteen hundred showed in wang yo's
1920
presentation
1921
the land of china had shrank quite a lot
1922
china lost three hundred and fifty
1923
thousand square miles of land
1924
including sakhalin island to russia is
1925
there any studying of that history and
1926
its implications to modern china
1927
and russia's relationship yo do you want
1928
1929
take that on i'm sure and to be
1930
honest i'm not the expertise of the
1931
frontier history so
1932
i'm definitely not the best person to
1933
answer this question
1934
but actually a resident graduate of the
1935
our history program
1936
this year who is now a associate
1937
assistant professor at the chinese
1938
academy of social sciences
1939
her study actually talked about exams
1940
1941
frontier curation of the manchuria
1942
and also integrating the relationship
1943
between the china between china russia
1944
and japan with and also dealing with the
1945
russian and
1946
korean immigrants um in the late 19th
1947
century and
1948
early 20th century so there are
1949
definitely lots of studies about the
1950
signal russia relationship of the time
1951
but unfortunately i'm not really able to
1952
give perhaps a book suggestions
1953
but i would highly encourage you to read
1954
the seance
1955
on seance's dissertation or her articles
1956
on the signature and russian relations
1957
and i hope this answers the questions
1958
thank you i'm wondering if our panelists
1959
have any questions for
1960
each other
1961
i have a question for professor levine
1962
if i could i'm just curious about
1963
i mean there's a lot of sort of tibet
1964
signifies outside of china as well so
1965
you know i just ca and there's a lot of
1966
activist groups that are
1967
coming in to work with uh local
1968
populations
1969
and i just wonder if you have thoughts
1970
about how sort of the international or
1971
transnational networks have shaped
1972
the contemporary lives of tibetans
1973
the way they shaped the activists in
1974
india are
1975
very much feared by tibetans inside
1976
1977
so the political activists are feared
1978
and if their contacts with them
1979
um i don't know about them and they're
1980
they're very carefully managed
1981
the way in which there's interaction is
1982
on religion
1983
and so they're religious teachers mostly
1984
based in
1985
sichuan and qinghai also in kansu
1986
1987
that are teaching widely around the
1988
world who get who do get visas
1989
who communicate traditional fairly
1990
orthodox traditional tibetan religion to
1991
a wider audience of foreigners
1992
and also speak to their own population
1993
so they're the people who have been
allowed
1995
and who have been very active in in
1996
communicating
1997
what tibetans consider the jewel of
1998
their culture to a wider world but
1999
but not political activists i think
2000
that's very carefully managed and i
2001
think that's almost impossible
2002
to do because of excellence of chinese
2003
surveillance systems
2004
any final questions for each other
2005
if not i'll just end by again expressing
2006
my
2007
profound thanks to our three speakers
2008
today
2009
i know it's week 10 it's a busy time in
2010
the quarter and
2011
i really appreciate everybody taking
2012
time out of your busy schedules to
2013
share your research and hopefully well
2014
this will be the beginning of more
2015
dialogues we can continue in the future
2016
so thank you all thank you
2017
yes thank you