Podcasts about city social transformation

Andrew KIPNIS, interviewed by Jun ZHANG and Gonçalo SANTOS on October 28, 2021ABOUT THIS PODCASTThis podcast discusses urbanization in China through the lens of changing funerary practices. It examines how spatial reorganization during Chinese urbanization problematized death, and how newly emerged forms of familial organization, stranger sociality, and economic restructuring were reflected in changing funerary rituals and the rise of the funerary industry. It also discusses some of the unique features of Chinese patterns of governing death and how existing frameworks of governance influence and are influenced by everyday practices of urban memorialization. Finally, it considers moral debates on the commercialization of death and the place of secularization and ghost stories in contemporary urban China.FEATURED AUTHORAndrew B. Kipnis is a professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His latest book is The Funeral of Mr. Wang: Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2021, available for free here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520381971/the-funeral-of-mr-wang). He is also the author of From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press 2016), Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China (University of Chicago Press 2011), China and Post Socialist Anthropology (Eastbridge 2008), and Producing Guanxi (Duke University Press 1997). From 2006-2015 he was co-editor of The China Journal and he is currently co-editor of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.AUTHOR'S WEBSITEhttps://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~ant/memberprofile/andrew-kipnis/

"I think you'd be crazy to go into something like anthropology if you want to learn how to say whatever other people tell you to say - you know, maybe you should become a lawyer!" This week we bring you a special treat – an interview between our good friend Zoe Hatten and her PhD supervisor Professor Andrew Kipnis. Andrew Kipnis, Professor at the Australian National University and author of multiple books, most recently From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese Country Sect, spoke with Zoe at the AAA Conference in San Jose last year. They spoke about the way academics speak at conferences and the divide between younger and older generation anthropologists, about funeral ceremonies in China and how to navigate the intricacies of social relationships when doing fieldwork, and discussed the evolution of methods and ideas in action, reflecting on Andrew's career. QUOTES and LINKS can be found at our website thefamiliarstrange.com And if you haven't already checked it out, head over to our Facebook group The Familiar Strange Chats. We'd like to keep our discussions going from this podcast episode, so let us know your thoughts: what was most interesting? What was most surprising? Did the episode remind you of something else you've read, seen, or heard lately – if so, what is it? Let's keep talking strange, together. Our Patreon can be found at https://www.patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU's College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com Shownotes by Deanna Catto Podcast edited by Ian Pollock and Matthew Phung

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over that period the place grew from a quiet county town of 30,000 people to a bustling urban centre of 300,000. All of this came amidst a burst of economic growth and urbanisation in China which have been defining global events for our time. Yet whilst one hears a lot about how the PRC’s headlong rush to urban modernity has affected headline-grabbing metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, or the increasingly empty Chinese countryside, the experience of China’s many thousands of in-between locations is not so often discussed (p. 18). Andrew Kipnis’ book is a vital addition to our understanding of what has been going on in these arguably much more representative places. Presented to us by an anthropologist with three decades of longitudinal perspective from a single location, the county-level town of Zouping in Shandong province, the book at once serves as a rich ethnography of life there since the late-1980s and as a compelling theoretical argument for how we might understand the idea of ‘modernisation’ in general. Richly supplementing his text from his own photographic archive, Kipnis refuses to over-simplify this compound and multifaceted process. Yet despite dealing with a great many entangled aspects of social transformation, From Village to City is also a really absorbing read from start to finish. Amidst key academic insights, the human stories told here are at turns astonishing, entertaining and, as one would expect from someone with as longstanding a connection to a single place as Kipnis has, deeply personal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over that period the place grew from a quiet county town of 30,000 people to a bustling urban centre of 300,000. All of this came amidst a burst of economic growth and urbanisation in China which have been defining global events for our time. Yet whilst one hears a lot about how the PRC’s headlong rush to urban modernity has affected headline-grabbing metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, or the increasingly empty Chinese countryside, the experience of China’s many thousands of in-between locations is not so often discussed (p. 18). Andrew Kipnis’ book is a vital addition to our understanding of what has been going on in these arguably much more representative places. Presented to us by an anthropologist with three decades of longitudinal perspective from a single location, the county-level town of Zouping in Shandong province, the book at once serves as a rich ethnography of life there since the late-1980s and as a compelling theoretical argument for how we might understand the idea of ‘modernisation’ in general. Richly supplementing his text from his own photographic archive, Kipnis refuses to over-simplify this compound and multifaceted process. Yet despite dealing with a great many entangled aspects of social transformation, From Village to City is also a really absorbing read from start to finish. Amidst key academic insights, the human stories told here are at turns astonishing, entertaining and, as one would expect from someone with as longstanding a connection to a single place as Kipnis has, deeply personal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over that period the place grew from a quiet county town of 30,000 people to a bustling urban centre of 300,000. All of this came amidst a burst of economic growth and urbanisation in China which have been defining global events for our time. Yet whilst one hears a lot about how the PRC’s headlong rush to urban modernity has affected headline-grabbing metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, or the increasingly empty Chinese countryside, the experience of China’s many thousands of in-between locations is not so often discussed (p. 18). Andrew Kipnis’ book is a vital addition to our understanding of what has been going on in these arguably much more representative places. Presented to us by an anthropologist with three decades of longitudinal perspective from a single location, the county-level town of Zouping in Shandong province, the book at once serves as a rich ethnography of life there since the late-1980s and as a compelling theoretical argument for how we might understand the idea of ‘modernisation’ in general. Richly supplementing his text from his own photographic archive, Kipnis refuses to over-simplify this compound and multifaceted process. Yet despite dealing with a great many entangled aspects of social transformation, From Village to City is also a really absorbing read from start to finish. Amidst key academic insights, the human stories told here are at turns astonishing, entertaining and, as one would expect from someone with as longstanding a connection to a single place as Kipnis has, deeply personal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over that period the place grew from a quiet county town of 30,000 people to a bustling urban centre of 300,000. All of this came amidst a burst of economic growth and urbanisation in China which have been defining global events for our time. Yet whilst one hears a lot about how the PRC’s headlong rush to urban modernity has affected headline-grabbing metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, or the increasingly empty Chinese countryside, the experience of China’s many thousands of in-between locations is not so often discussed (p. 18). Andrew Kipnis’ book is a vital addition to our understanding of what has been going on in these arguably much more representative places. Presented to us by an anthropologist with three decades of longitudinal perspective from a single location, the county-level town of Zouping in Shandong province, the book at once serves as a rich ethnography of life there since the late-1980s and as a compelling theoretical argument for how we might understand the idea of ‘modernisation’ in general. Richly supplementing his text from his own photographic archive, Kipnis refuses to over-simplify this compound and multifaceted process. Yet despite dealing with a great many entangled aspects of social transformation, From Village to City is also a really absorbing read from start to finish. Amidst key academic insights, the human stories told here are at turns astonishing, entertaining and, as one would expect from someone with as longstanding a connection to a single place as Kipnis has, deeply personal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices