Friday:  October 16      4:00-5:45 PM     Taylor 102

Dr. Laurel Kendall (Vice president of the Association for Asian Studies, and chair of the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York)

“What Global Asia meant to Anthropology c. 1900“

Laurel Kendall (Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, 1979) is Vice-President of the Association for Asian Studies. Kendall is Chair of the Anthropology Division and Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History; she also teaches at Columbia University on popular religion and museum anthropology and is an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. A specialist on Korea who also does comparative work in Vietnam, Kendall is the author of Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits (985), The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (1988), Getting Married in Korea (1996), and Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (2009) which won the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Yim Suk-Jay prize as the best work of Korean anthropology by a foreign scholar. Her current research concerns the fate of sacred and magical objects in modern markets. With Vietnamese colleagues she has co-authored a series of papers on the manufacture and marketing of temple statues and Catholic images. God Images in Korean Contexts: the Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings, co-authored with Jongsung Yang and Yul Soo Yoon, is in press with University of Hawaii Press.

Saturday: October 17      12:50 -1:45 PM    Taylor 102

Mr. Liu Jianqiang (Deputy Editor of China Dialogue, previously journalist for Nanfangzhoumo)

  “Journalists’ Role in China’s Environmental Movement“

Mr. Liu holds a M.A. in Journalism from Tsinghua University and a B.A. in Political Science from East China University of Science and Technology, and currently lives in Beijing. He is Beijing Editor of www.chinadialogue.net, China’s earliest and most influential bilingual website for Chinese environmental issues. A visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, he published Tibetan Environmentalists in China–The King of Dzi in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The book was praised by media as one of the best nonfiction accounts of Tibet in China. The English translation version of the book will be published by Lexington Books in USA in 2015.