Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
About
Languages (other than English)
Mandarin Chinese
Naxi
Dongba writing
Classical Chinese
Tibetan
Why did you choose Asian studies?
My interest in Asian Studies began on a deeply accidental basis. I just ended up being in China, back when I was 17 and could barely find China on a map (I regret to say). But at some point between hearing ghost stories in the Guangzhou mountains and seeing an old guy write calligraphy (on the sidewalk, with a big brush and a cup of water), my ship was sunk...I was fascinated. More than anything else, I wanted to talk to people and read things, and so it was through language study that I found the larger field of Asian Studies.
This was also one of the main reasons I came to Michigan: it’s a good place to study languages, especially Chinese and Tibetan. And it’s a good place to contextualize one’s area studies across departments. Or put another way, interdisciplinarity is a big thing around here, and it makes everything more interesting.
My research focuses on writing systems and the various questions they raise, of relationships among speech, text, and image; of the ideologies and practices that mediate these relationships; and of the particular forms of meaning that emerge from this. I do most of my research in southwest China, where I focus on ssee jjiq, a form of script often described as pictographic, and associated with the Naxi ethnic minority. For my dissertation, I’ll be looking at how this form of writing has changed since the 1930s, and how those changes have become wrapped up in local social change more broadly conceived, including changes in modes of affect.
In this I am driven largely by my own strange obsession with scripts and writing, but I do think there’s something in it for the world. Practices of writing and reading are rooted so deeply in so many people’s lives, and yet we so rarely think about them. Putting a little more thought into the matter is one way to learn about people, about our lives and experiences of the world.
My most rewarding moments in the grad program here have been conversations, in class and out of it, with a variety of people about many different things. A very memorable one involved a swath of black ice and a lost sandwich. But in any case, getting to know people who have their own burning questions, and having a chance to find out about the questions.
Favorite Book
Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar
