Yang, Mayfair 楊美惠
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
Professor of Religious Studies &
East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies
Director of East Asia Center at UCSB
yangm@religion.ucsb.edu

HSSB 3084
Department of Religious Studies
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
(PH) email only| (FX) 805-893-2059

Curriculum Vitae | Courses Taught

Statement:

I am a cultural anthropologist interested in the intertwined processes of religiosity, secularization, and state operations in modernity, and in the tensions and traumas accompanying the break with traditional orders under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Areas of research and teaching: religion, ritual, and secularization, critical theory; China Studies, sovereignty and state power; gender and feminism; media studies; cultural approaches to political economy.

I specialize in the study of China and Chinese diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. Although my research is based on fieldwork in contemporary China and Taiwan, it is always informed by a vision of the longue durée of Chinese history, and I seek to reconcile Western critical theory with Chinese empirical findings.

I have assumed teaching, research, and visiting scholar positions at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Beijing University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard University. I was Director of Asian Studies at University of Sydney in Australia 2007-09.

I am a 50% faculty member in Department of Religious Studies and 50% in Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies.

Research:

With a five-year National Science Foundation research grant, I have conducted fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, China since 1991 on the revival of popular religion and their negotiations with state secularization.

Book in-progress: Re-Enchanting Modernity: Sovereignty, Ritual Economy, and Indigenous Civil Order in Coastal China

杨美惠教授，华裔美籍人类学家。出生于台北市，在多国长大。80 年代在北京大学作交换研究生。1986年获美国加州大学伯克利分校人类学专业博士学位。现任美国加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校宗教学系及东亚语言与文化系教授。曾任澳大利亚悉尼大学亚洲研究中心主任、中央民族大学"985工程"短聘教授。

杨美惠教授长期致力于中国研究的理论化，从1980年代开始多次到中国从事调查研究，其著述以对中国社会人情往来的"礼物"的"关系学"探讨而著称。其 代表性著作Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China 现已在台北翻译出版，该书简体中文版《礼物，关系学与国家：中国人际关系与主体性建构》，2009年由江苏人民出版社出版。此外，她在国际重要学术杂志上发表论著，其中包括"横跨台湾海峡的女神妈祖：国家，进香，和卫星电视"、"关系的力量"和"传统，旅行的人类学，与中国的现代性话语"等数篇中文论文，并曾主编学术文集Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China（1999）。其新作《中国人的宗教感：现代性的痛苦与国家构建》（Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation，2008），将更集中地呈现她对中国民间社会的一贯关注和近些年来的思考。

• “The Future of China’s Past: An Interview with Mayfair Yang”with Nathan Schneider, in The Immanent Frame (an academic internet blog), Oct. 2010. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/09/23/the-future-of-chinas-past/
• "Postcoloniality & Religiosity in Modern China: the Disenchantments of Sovereignty" in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 3-45.
  Electronic Version Here
  
• "'温州模式'的礼仪经济"(" 'The Wenzhou Model's' Ritual Economy" ) in 《学海》 (Sea of Scholarship), Sept. 2009.
  Electronic Version Here
  
• Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Edited by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
  link to the e-book version, free online: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jn4j8cf
  《礼物，关系学，与  国家：中国人际关系与主体性建构》 杨美惠著。     江苏人民出版社，2009 年。
• “Thoughts on Postcoloniality & Modern Chinese Religiosities” in 《社会学人类学刊》(Journal of Sociology & Anthropology)，Nov. 2009.
• Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China. Cornell University Press, (1994). (American Ethnological Society First Book Prize, 1997)
• Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Mayfair Yang, editor. University of Minnesota Press, (1999).
• "Ritual Economy and Rural Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics" in Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation. David Held and Henrietta Moore, editors. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.
  Electronic Version Here
  
• "A Sweep of Red: State Subjects and the Cult of Mao" in Religion und Politik in der Volksrepublik China (Religion and Politics in Contemporary China). Wiebke Koenig, Matthias Koenig, and Karl-Fritz Daiber, eds. Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2006.
• “Spatial Struggles: State Disenchantment and Popular Re-appropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China” in Journal of Asian Studies, (August, 2004).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• “Goddess across the Taiwan Straits: Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-State, and Satellite Television Footprints” in Public Culture (May, 2004)
  available at: http://repositories.cdlib.org/gis/31/
• “The Resilience of Guanxi and its New Deployments: A Critique of Some New Guanxi Scholarship” in China Quarterly (June 2002).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• “Using the Past to Negate the Present: Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China” in Religion: A Reader in the Anthropological Tradition. Michael Lambek, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
• "Une histoire du present: Gouvernement rituel et gouvernement d'Etat dans la Chine ancienne", in Annales, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. (1991).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• "Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis" in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Oxford: Blackwell (2002).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• “Putting Global Capitalism in its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure” in Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 4, (2000).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• "The Gift Economy and State Power in China", Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 31, no. 1, January (1989).
  Electronic Version Here
  
• "The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order", Cultural Anthropology, v. 3, no. 4, November (1988).