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Ralph A. Litzinger
Office Hours: On leave
133 Social Sciences
681-6250
E-mail to: litz@socsci.duke.edu
Ralph Litzinger, PH.D. University of Washington, 1994, does research on minority politics in the People's Republic of China. He has written on Marxist theory in nationality policy in socialist states, ethnic and indigenous revitalization in the post-Cold War global order, and on ethnographic film, photography, and popular culture. He is the author of Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging and numerous essays in anthropology, cultural studies, and East Asia studies journals. He is currently doing research on nature research, non-governmental organizations, and transnational activism in northeastern Yunnan and Eastern Tibet, work that connects to new thinking on the politics of nature and global governmentality. He is also beginning research on the history of mountaineering in socialist and postsocialist contexts.

Specializations

Cultural and political theory; critiques of modernity; anthropology of socialist and postsocialist ethnology; environmentalism, NGOs, and transnational activism; the People's Republic of China and East Asia.

Graduate Courses

Post-structuralist ethnography; Ideology and the Image; Global Environmentalism and the Discourse of Nature; East Asian Cultural Studies; Postcolonial Anthropology; Culture, Power, and History

Selected Publications

Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging, Duke University Press, 2000.

"Questions of Gender: Ethnic Minority Representation in Contemporary China." Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, (spring) 2001.

"Government from Below: The State, the Popular, and the Problem of Autonomy." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 9:1 (spring) 2001.

"Theorizing Post-socialism: Reflections on the Politics of Marginality in Contemporary China." South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue on "The Vicissitudes of Theory," (fall-winter), 2001-2002.

"Race, Taxonomy, and Auto-Ethnographic Critique in Ethnographic Film Criticism." American Anthropologist, 102:3 (September), 2000.

"Screening the Political: Pedagogy and Dissent in The Gate of Heavenly Peace." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7:3 (1999): 827-850.

"Re-imagining the State in Post-Mao China." In Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, edited by Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, 293-318. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

"Memory Work: Reconstituting the Ethnic in Post-Mao China." Cultural Anthropology 13: 2 (1998): 224-255.

"Making Histories: Contending Conceptions of the Yao Past." In China's Civilizing Projects, edited by Stevan Harrell, 117-139. University of Washington Press, 1995.