Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China - Book Launch and Conversation

Refreshments will be provided from 5.30 pm, event starts at 6 pm. 

Join us for a book launch and conversation about Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation by Tamara Jacka. 

Nick Cheesman will be in conversation with Tamara Jacka about her new book, which draws on ethnographic and life-history research to provide an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history.

Ginkgo Village takes readers deep into a mountainous region of central-eastern China, in which villagers have 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 labour outmigration has lifted locals out of poverty and fuelled 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.

About the Speakers

Tamara Jacka is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. A feminist social anthropologist, her main research interests are in gender, rural–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. More recent publications include Women, Gender and Rural Development in China (co‑edited with Sally Sargeson, 2011) and Contemporary China: Society and Social Change (co-authored with Andrew B. Kipnis and Sally Sargeson, 2013).

Nick Cheesman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU, with an interest in creative ethnographic writing and interpretive methodologies. In his spare time he hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science series for the New Books Network.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact ciw@anu.edu.au.