For years, Helen Siu tracked history and trekked the fields of South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, her studies finally uncover China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward.
Tracing China: A Forty-Year Ethnographic Journey (Hong Kong University Press, 2016) — a collection of Siu’s work published over the last twenty years—is not a grandiose showpiece splotched with a lot of paint and colors. Instead, she uses a 2B pencil to leave fine marks on wafer-thin parchment and smudges them ever so slightly, gradually letting the image emerge through the back of the page.
Siu’s intention with the title Tracing China is less to track the history of China, and more to scrupulously examine every footstep she comes across, no matter how indistinct—to “look for plum blossoms in the snow,” as the Chinese saying goes. This saying might have inspired the Chinese version of the title of the collection, one that preserves a sense of graceful subtlety.
Among all of the conceptual tools Siu has applied, cellularization is found to be the most dynamic for appreciating the historical structuring that she has attempted to demonstrate with her field research over the past forty years.
The Speaker
Professor Helen F. Siu, is one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese rural and urban society.
She is founding director of the Institute Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and professor of anthropology, and former Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University.
Her teaching interests are political and historical anthropology, urban and global culture change. Since the 1970s, she has conducted fieldwork in South China, exploring the nature of the socialist state, the refashioning of identities through rituals, festivals, and commerce. Lately, she explores the rural-urban divide in China, cross-border dynamics in Hong Kong, historical and contemporary Asian connections. She is the director of “Hubs, Mobilities and the Asian Urban” and “China-Africa Diasporas” research clusters at the Institute.
Professor Siu served on the University Grants Committee (1992 – 2001) and the Research Grant’s Council (1996 – 2001) in Hong Kong, for which she received the Bronze Bauhinia Star. In the U.S. she has served on the Committee for Advanced Study in China and the National Screening Committee for Fulbright awards in the U.S. Her monograph and co-edited volumes include Mao’s Harvest: Voices of China’s New Generation (Oxford 1983, co-editor Zelda Stern); Furrows: Peasants, Intellectuals and the State (Stanford 1990); Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford 1995, co-editor David Faure); Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (Yale 1989); Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (California 2006, co-editors Pamela K. Crossley and Donald Sutton); SARS: Reception and Interpretation in Three Chinese Cities (Routledge 2007, co-editor Deborah Davis); Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population (Hong Kong University Press 2008, co-editor Agnes Ku); Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce and regional Culture in South China (Hong Kong University Press 2010).
Programme
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