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Mystery Object #3: Snow Globes

August 10, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I have a small collection of souvenirs collected on a shelf in my office. I they are not personal souvenirs, but a teaching collection that I use in a class I teach on the anthropology of travel: Pilgrims, Travelers, and Tourists. For this reason, I have tended to collect the most kitschy souvenirs I can find—souvenirs that scream, “I am a souvenir!” In other words, I have been collecting meta-souvenirs which reference their souvenir-ness more than the site where they were […]

Categories: Made in China, Mystery Objects, Tourism • Tags: Casablanca, China, Morocco, Paris, Rome, snow globe, souvenir, Susan Stewart, travel, vacation

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Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (金陵刻经处)

June 21, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I was invited by some of the folks that have been helping me with my research to go on a trip to visit the Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (jinling kejing chu) in downtown Nanjing. I can’t really say that I am that interested in ancient Buddhist texts, but I was looking forward to seeing how they carve the wooden blocks, print and bind books in the classical way. It takes nearly a month to carve one panel and […]

Categories: Museums, Video clips • Tags: Buddhism, buddhist texts, China

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Making Zongzi

June 20, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

While walking in some of the back streets of Nanjing just days before the Duanwu Festival I came upon a woman preparing zongzi for sale. I have eaten the bamboo leaf-wrapped rice many times over the past two decades, but until then had never seen how they were made. I was fascinated by how the simple ingredients of rice and red beans were deftly filled and wrapped by her experienced hands. It took her about half a minute to make […]

Categories: Food, How To, Video clips • Tags: China, cooking, food, zongzi

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Walmart in China

December 29, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to receive my complementary copies of Walmart in China. Many of the papers in the collected volume were presented at a workshop on Walmart organized by Anita Chan held at Beijing University.  The conference brought together a wide variety of scholars and activists from Australia, greater China, and North America.  For me it was a great opportunity to see the wide variety of work done on Walmart both in Chinese and English. […]

Categories: Fieldwork • Tags: China, corporate culture, Walmart

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A Single Hand-Pulled Noodle: Playing with My Food

March 17, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

For years I have adored hand-pulled Chinese noodles–how water and flour and a little magic in the hands of a master can become a tasty food.  Many years ago a student of mine and I even went so far as to “intern” for a few months at a noodle shop in Beijing. Last weekend in Shanghai a friend took me to a nice hotpot restaurant in Shanghai.  At the end of the meal a young guy in a white shirt with […]

Categories: Video clips • Tags: China, food

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Visualizing a Changing China Through Word Frequencies

December 17, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

This evening I spent a number of hours playing around with Google Labs Ngram Viewer, a fantastic tool that graphs word frequencies found in the huge collection of scanned books amassed by Google Books. It is as easy as choosing some keywords, selecting a language collection, choosing a timeframe and hitting return on your computer keyboard. In a flash the viewer graphs the frequency that the words occur in Google Books over time. Choosing multiple words separated by commas adds […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: China, Google

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China’s Facebook disconnect–The great dark space

December 14, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

A friend of mine just posted a link on Facebook to a very interesting image that is also beautiful to look at. It is a visualization of Facebook friend data–ten million Facebook friend pairs, to be exact.  Mapped geographically against a black background the pairs create a striking image. The image’s creator, Paul Butler, a Facebook employee explains on a Facebook note that he created the image in an effort to map the “locality of friendship.” On one level it is […]

Categories: Random Reflections • Tags: China, Facebook, internet

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Demolishing Shanghai’s Old City, Spring 2006

December 12, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Before it can be nostalgically remembered as “Shanghai’s Old City” and before newly constructed “traditional buildings” can be experienced by both foreign and domestic tourists as authentic “Chinese culture”, historical structures must be cleared. This afternoon I came across a set of photos I shot in Shanghai in April 2006, which show just such a clearing. The photos were taken in part of the old Chinese city section of Shanghai in the period between the local residents’ departure and the […]

Categories: End of Times, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: China, old chinese city, Photography, Shanghai, 拆

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The Adventures of Li Xianji

October 1, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

One of my students came to visit me in my office this afternoon to share a Chinese animation that he found very interesting. The Adventures of Li Xianji (李献计历险记) was, in his opinion, amazing because it was a sophisticated animation done by a Chinese artist–most of the best coming of Japan. He also identified with the mix of popular culture references–and references to foreign films and video games. We had a very interesting chat about the way that some of […]

Categories: Video clips • Tags: China, media

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Finding Red Flag Canal

July 14, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

One summer of my early graduate school career I made friends with the very large man who managed the audiovisual collection at the University of Washington. I don’t remember his name. He was friendly in a grumpy sort of way and loved quirky films and videos almost as much as he loved rollercoasters. I had come to him with a request for some films for a class I was TAing, when we got to talking about China. He told me […]

Categories: China, Memory, Museums, Mythologies, Nostalgia, Photo Essays • Tags: China, Cultural Revolution, 紅旗渠, nostalgia, Red Flag Canal, red tourism

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