Tamara Jacka, "Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China" (Anu Press, 2023)

Oct 21, 2024

Tamara Jacka, Emeritus Professor at The Australian National University, shares her insights on the intricate tapestry of rural Chinese life through her recent work. She delves into Ginkgo Village's traumatic past, marked by civil war and famine, and its dramatic social transformations due to labor migration. Emphasizing empathy, Jacka explores the evolving gender dynamics and the collaborative nature of her ethnographic research. Her storytelling invites listeners to understand the resilience and challenges faced by villagers while illuminating broader socio-cultural shifts in contemporary China.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation

02:29 • 14min

Exploring Trauma and Transformation in Rural China

16:39 • 1min

Collaborative Ethnography in Ginkgo Village

17:55 • 18min

Exploring Ghosts and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Studies

35:29 • 3min

Evolving Gender Dynamics in Rural China

38:20 • 16min

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labor outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fueled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations.

At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Tamara Jacka is an Emeritus Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. A feminist social anthropologist, her main research interests are in gender, rural-to-urban migration and social change in contemporary China. She is the author of Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (2006), which won the Francis L.K. Hsu prize for best book in East Asian Anthropology.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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