Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

Overview

I am a medical and environmental anthropologist. My research examines how people pursue a good life through religious practices, navigate aging and disability, and live with environmental degradation in rural China. My work spans medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, environmental studies, science and technology studies, and China studies.

Born and raised in an impoverished peasant family in Shandong Province, North China, I am a first-generation college graduate and scholar. My experiences of hardship and humiliation, and of sharing ordinary peasants’ and migrant workers’ struggles to “live the daily life” (guo rizi), continue to shape my research and commitment to public, engaged scholarship .

Research and Public Scholarship

My first book project, tentatively titled A Ladder of Hope: Doing Hope through Popular Religion in Authoritarian China, explores how people pursue hopes for a good life and cope with uncertainty and precarity by consulting religious specialists called incense seers. Based on 17 months of fieldwork in North China, including 13 consecutive months under China’s zero-COVID policy, the book examines incense seeing as a practice of healing and indigenous psychotherapy. Following clients beyond their consultations, it traces how spiritual experiences shape hopeful dispositions and inspire action under political constraint. I argue that incense seeing offers a cultural toolkit—a “ladder of hope”—that even marginalized social groups can draw on to pursue hopes seemingly beyond their reach.

My second book project, Sweet Apples, Bitter Lives: Aging Peasants, Disability, and Living a Good Later Life in North China, centers on the apple-growing village where I was born and raised. It asks how older peasants grapple with chronic conditions and disabilities while striving to live a good later life amid inadequate welfare support and the migration of younger generations to cities. An article from this project, published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, explores how hospital spaces, technologies, and social interactions can themselves become sources of illness. It received the 2025 Leah M. Ashe Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.

An emerging project, Cultivating Illness for a Good Life: Apple Farming and Environmental Health in North China, places life in a contaminated environment at its center. Also based in my home village, it investigates how farming livelihoods and aspirations intersect with chemical exposure, toxic waste, and contaminated water and soil, bringing medical anthropology into conversation with critical environmental studies.

I am also developing ethnographic films on aging, disability, and rural life, alongside a YouTube channel centered on storytelling. Through stories from my own fieldwork and those of other ethnographers, I hope to make anthropology accessible to wider audiences and contribute to a better life for the people and communities I deeply care about.

Research Interests

• Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Anthropology of Hope and the Good Life
• Science, Technology, and Medicine
• Environmental Anthropology
• Aging, Chronic Conditions, and Disability
• Care and Abandonment
• Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Environmental Degradation and Rural Health
• Rural-to-Urban Migration
• China Studies
• East and Southeast Asia