Education:
- Ph.D., Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley
Bio:
Mayfair Yang is a 50% faculty member in Department of Religious Studies and 50% in Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intertwined processes of religiosity, secularization, and state operations in Chinese modernity. More recently, she has taken up research in religious environmentalism, religious ontology, environmental ethics, and multispecies studies in China, Taiwan, and Nepal. Areas of research and teaching: Chinese religions & secularization; critical theory; environmental humanities, China Studies, sovereignty and state power; gender and feminism; media studies; cultural approaches to political economy.
Yang specializes in the study of China, with an interest in Sinophone cultures of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West. Although her research is based on fieldwork in contemporary China and Taiwan, it is always informed by a vision of the longue durée of Chinese social history, and she seeks to integrate Western critical theory with Chinese philosophy and Chinese empirical findings.
She has been visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Beijing University, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, Fudan University in Shanghai, and Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. Yang was Director & Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia 2007–09.
Research:
With a five-year National Science Foundation research grant, Yang conducted fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, China from 1991 to 2019 on the revival of popular religion and their negotiations with state secularization. She is currently working on a book titled: Religious Environmentalism in the Anthropocene: Some Ritual Practices and Ontologies in Asia. It is based on fieldwork in China, Taiwan, and Nepal. She has published on media, gift economy, and women, gender, and nationalism in China.
杨美惠教授，美籍华裔人类学家。出生于台北市，在多国长大, 在加州上高中，大学。80 年代在北京大学作交换研究生。获美国伯克利加州大学人类学专业博士学位。现任美国加州大学圣塔芭芭拉宗教学系及东亚语言与文化研究系教授，也是本校孔子学院院长。曾任澳大利亚悉尼大学亚洲研究中心主任、中央民族大学”985工程”短聘教授。
杨美惠教授长期致力于中国研究的理论化，从1980年代开始多次到中国从事调查研究，其著述以对中国社会人情往来的”礼物”的”关系学”探讨而著称。其 代表性著作 Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China 现已在台北翻译出版，该书简体中文版《礼物，关系学与国家：中国人际关系与主体性建构》，2009年由江苏人民出版社出版。此外，她在国际重要学术杂志上发表论著，其中包括”横跨台湾海峡的女神妈祖：国家，进香，和卫星电视”、”关系的力量”和”传统，旅行的人类学，与中国的现代性话语” 等数篇中文论文，并曾主编学术文集 《中华妇女的跨国公共空间》 (Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, 1999）与 《中国人的宗教感：现代性的痛苦与国家构建》（Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation，2008）。其新作《中国环保道德：宗教，本体论，实践》(Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies, and Practices, 2021) 與 《现代性的重魅：温州的礼仪经济与社会》(Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy & Society in Wenzhou, China, 2020) 将更集中地呈现她对中国民间社会的一贯关注和近些年来的思考。开展的新课题为：中国宗教的环保主义。