Upcoming Events
Strategies of Resistance and Refusal: The Politics of Citizenship, Indigeneity, and Historiography in Post-Mao China
March 18, 2023
5:45 PM - 7:15 PM
Amidst state-sponsored colonization and assimilation, China’s indigenous ethno-religious minorities have negotiated their identities, status and citizenship in complex and mediated ways. Taking the post-Mao period since the 1980s as their focus, the four studies in this panel examine the struggles that minorities groups across China’s northwest, southwest, and northeast regions have undergone, and the strategies they have adopted, in response to anti-Muslim racism, ethnic assimilation, and dispossession of indigenous groups’ ancestral land and resources. Piecing together their polyphonic responses to the cyber neologism “muhei” (“Muslim haters”) through participant observation, interviews, and life histories, Jing Wang examines the intimate, embodied, and mediated ways in which Sinophone Muslims interpret anti-Muslim racism. Focusing on a Central Asian politics of refusal in the face of dispossession by the Chinese state, Guldana Salimjan investigates the ways in which Turkic Muslim Kazakhstani citizens in Xinjiang have inserted themselves into negotiations between Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang government over the issues of citizenship and ancestral land entitlement. Applying the question of indigeneity to China’s southwest region of Guizhou Province, Yu Luo addresses Tai-speaking Buyi intellectuals’ intervention in the historiography of imperial expansion and assimilation through their use of oral histories, ritual and genealogical records, and contemporary heritage promotions to claim indigeneity and ethnic distinctiveness from the Han settler population. Martin Fromm examines historiographical controversies and debates in China’s northeast borderlands, comparatively evaluating the perspectives of Han and ethnic minority intellectuals in co-constructing and counterposing narratives of ethnic diversity, assimilation, and particularity during the post-Mao transition in the 1980s.
Organizer/Chair
Martin T Fromm
Discussant
Michael J Hathaway
Presentations
An Ordinary Anthropology of Muhei: Islamophobia with Chinese Characteristics in Post-Mao China
Jing Wang
Weaponized Citizenship: Negotiating Indigeneity between China and Kazakhstan
Guldana Salimjan, Indiana University
Claiming Indigeneity: The Paradox of Frontier Identities in Guizhou, Southwest China
Yu Luo, University of Puget Sound
Debating Destiny: Post-Mao Politics of Re-Situating Ethnic Minorities in China's Northeast Borderlands
Martin T Fromm, Worcester State University
Interviews and Podcasts
February 5th, 2023
In this interview by Dr. Marc Bekoff's "Animal Emotions" series for Psychology Today, Dr. Michael Hathaway discusses the liveliness and world-making capacities of fungi. Dr. Hathaway invites us to challenge human exceptionalism and engage with the worlds of fungi and other non-human worlds with deep curiosity and appreciation.
Summer 2022
antennae - summer 2022 - issue 58
What a Mushroom Lives For
In conversation: Michael J. Hathaway and Mendel Skulski
What a Mushroom Lives For, Michael J. Hathaway’s new book, pushes today’s mushroom renaissance
in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal- centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior.
August 8th, 2022
Breakthrough Journal
Matsutake’s Journeys
What one mushroom tells us about war, trade, diet, and ecology.
Lightly edited excerpt from What a Mushroom Lives For.
July 26th, 2022
June 15th, 2022
In this interview conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher, Dr. Hathway gives us a surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.
June 15th, 2022
May 21st, 2022
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April 7th, 2021
Future Ecologies Podcast
2022: In Conversation with Michael Hathaway
Available via the Future Ecologies Patreon and forthcoming in Antennae Journal (link will be posted when available)
2021: FE 3.6 - Making Sense of Each Other
Featuring Michael Hathaway, Merlin Sheldrake, and Anicka Yi
Hosted by Mendel Skulski and Adam Huggins
May 12th, 2020
"The Secret Life of Fungi" interview with Michael J. Hathaway by Isabela Vera
September 3rd, 2020
Cornell East Asia Program Conversations Podcast:
"Transforming More-than-human Economies in Southwest China: The role of the Matsutake Mushroom"
May 13th, 2016
Rice University's Culture's of Energy Podcast:
Dr. Michael Hathaway offers a different perspective on Chinese air pollution; we talk about wind as medium, metaphor and material force and about how the rise of environmental sensibility is changing politics and society in China today. What is China’s role as a global citizen?
December 28th, 2013
Event Recordings
June 15th, 2022
Michael J. Hathaway, Spencer Greening, and Mendel Skulski
THE LIVELINESS OF ALL BEINGS
At Massy Arts Gallery What a Mushroom Lives For book launch
Massy Arts and Massy Books Present Michael Hathaway in conversation with Spencer Greening (La'goot) on the ways that Western science often limits our understandings of the many living beings we share our lives with.
The researchers discuss different mushrooms, trees, and salmon, among many other species to show what the world might look like through ways of seeing that recognize the liveliness of all things. Hathaway will draw mainly from his work with Yi peoples of Himalayan China as well as a handful of unorthodox scientists in the Global North, and Spencer from Gitga’at and other Indigenous understandings.
Agency and Relating to The Species Around Us
Laws of The Natural World
Alternative Episemologies
May 10th, 2022
Michael J. Hathaway Presents: What a Mushroom Lives For
In conversation with Willoughby Arevalo and Mendel Skulski
THINKING ABOUT FUNGAL AGENCY
Vancouver Mycological Society Meeting
VMS member Michael J. Hathaway draws from his recently published book What a Mushroom Lives For, the second book in an academic trilogy that began with Anna L. Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Moving from fungi as an enigmatic kingdom that transformed the ancient Earth to the realm of the fascinating matsutake mushroom on the Tibetan Plateau, Hathaway reveals the ways these mushrooms are creating their own multispecies encounters, with and without humans. This book challenges a legacy of human exceptionalism and human supremacy that is dominant in Western thinking and offers ways to notice the creative liveliness of all organisms, from mammals to mushrooms.
Anthropomorphism and Fungal Senses
Anthropomorphism and Fungal Senses
Visual Presentation - Dr. Michael J. Hathaway for Vancouver Mycological Society
Introduction to Matsutake and "What a Mushroom Lives For"
May 10th, 2022
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and The Worlds They Make
Harvard University | Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies
This talk introduces the second book in an academic trilogy that began with Anna L. Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. In this talk, Michael J. Hathaway draws from his forthcoming book. He delves into the worlds of fungi, showing us how they literally enabled our green planet and carry out active forms of liveliness in the everyday, acting as “world-makers.” Moving from fungi as an enigmatic kingdom that transformed the ancient Earth to the realm of the fascinating matsutake mushroom on the Tibetan Plateau, Hathaway reveals the ways these mushrooms are creating their own multispecies encounters, with and without humans. This forthcoming book challenges a legacy of human exceptionalism and human supremacy that is dominant in Western thinking and offers ways to notice the creative liveliness of all organisms, from mammals to mushrooms.