Social Anthropology Seminar: Book talk: Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
Venue
ZoomMedia
Image
Description
This talk examines how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of urban governing in post-socialist times.
The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with relentless market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This talk is an overview and open discussion of Zhang’s newly published book--an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide-range of personal, social, and political domains.
Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of two award-winning books: Strangers in the City and In Search of Paradise, and the co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar and Can Science and Technology Save China?
Seminar Convenors
Jiazhi Fengjiang
Resto Cruz
Key speakers
- Zhang Li, University of California, Davis