Mayfair Yang

PhD Berkeley
Chair of Asian Studies and Program Director
Room 535, Brennan MacCallum Buidling (A18)

+61 2 9036 5480

Prof. Yang received her PhD. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, and taught at U.C. Santa Barbara between 1987 and June 2007. She came to the University of Sydney in July 2007 as the Chair of Asian Studies. Prof. Yang has also assumed teaching, research, and visiting scholar positions at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Beijing University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard University.

Prof. Yang is interested in issues of religion, secularization, and the state in modernity, especially in the tensions and traumas accompanying the break with traditional orders under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Her areas of research and teaching are: critical theory; gender and feminism; media studies; sovereignty and state power; and cultural approaches to political economy.

Prof. Yang's cultural and geographical region of specialization is China and China's offshoot cultures and diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. Although her research is based on fieldwork in contemporary China and Taiwan, her approach is always informed by a vision of the longue duree in Chinese history, and she has published on ancient China.

• Religions of China
• Critical Theory
• Gender & Feminism
• Media Studies
• Sovereignty & State Power
• Cultural Approaches to Political Economy

• With a five-year U.S. National Science Foundation research grant, Prof. Yang has conducted fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, China since 1991 on the revival of popular religion and lineages and their negotiations with state secularization. The title of her book in-progress is: Re-Enchanting Modernity: Sovereignty, Ritual Economy, and Indigenous Civil Order in Coastal China.

• Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Edited by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (forthcoming, University of California Press, 2008).
• Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Mayfair Yang, editor. University of Minnesota Press, (1999).
• Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China. Cornell University Press, (1994). (American Ethnological Society First Book Prize, 1997)
• "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.
• <<禮物﹐關係學 與 國家﹕ 中國人際關係與主體性建構>>。(Chinese translation of Gifts, Favors, and Banquets, w/ a new Afterword). Zhang Yuehong, Zhao Xudong, Sun Min, et. al. trans. Nantian Shuju (Taiwan) (2005).
• "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).
  available at: http://repositories.cdlib.org/gis/30/
• “The Resilience of Guanxi and its New Deployments: A Critique of Some New Guanxi Scholarship” in China Quarterly (June 2002).
• “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/
• “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).
• "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).
• “Putting Global Capitalism in its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure” in Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 4, (2000).
• "The Gift Economy and State Power in China", Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 31, no. 1, January (1989).
• "The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order", Cultural Anthropology, v. 3, no. 4, November (1988).

• “Through Chinese Women’s Eyes” (1997)
  50-minute documentary comparing Chinese urban women’s lives during the era of state feminism and gender erasure during the Maoist era, with the current era of commercialization, featuring gender difference, commodification of sexuality, and globalization. Film includes clips of Cultural Revolution and “revolutionary model operas”, as well as interviews with urban workers, intellectuals, and social workers in Shanghai and Beijing. (distributed by Women Make Movies: info@wmm.com and screened at the Creteil Women's International Film Festival in Paris, France).
• “Public and Private Realms in Rural Wenzhou, China” (1994)
  50-minute documentary about changes in a local community in rural southeast China: scenes of market economy, plowing of rice paddy, household factory, festival at deity temple, lineage ancestor hall, Old People’s Association, Christian church, and private school. (formerly distributed by U.C. Media Extension, now distributed by Mayfair Yang herself – please contact: )

Currently Prof. Yang continues to supervise 7 Anthropology Ph.D. students and 5 Religious Studies Ph.D. students at her former university, University of California, Santa Barbara. At Sydney University, she is associate supervisor of two Ph.D. students and supervisor of one M.A. student. She will be teaching such undergraduate courses as Modern Asian History and Cultures and Gender in Modern Asia, and the post-graduate courses Religion and the State in Modern Asia, and Theory and Method in Asian Studies.

In 2006-2007, Prof. Yang presented papers or served as discussant at the following conferences and workshops:

• History and Theory of Religion Conference @ U.C. Irvine;
• Harvard-Yenching Institute Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences in Asia @ Harvard University;
• Conference on Daoism and its Reinventions in the 20th Century, sponsored by Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient and Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies @ Harvard University;
• Center for Pacific Asian Studies @ Australian National University, Canberra;
• Taiwan Studies Conference @ University of South Carolina, Columbia;
• American Anthropological Association annual meetings in San Jose, California;
• Society for Anthropology of Religion conference in Phoenix, Arizona;
• Conference on "Shifting Paradigms in China Studies" @ University of California, San Diego.

In November 2007, she will present a paper at the American Academy of Religion Conference whose theme this year is on China, and she will give a keynote address for the Conference on Religious Innovation in East Asia at the Australian National University, Canberra.