There are reliable reports circulating via email that the major International Congress on Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to be held in July in Kunming has been postponed. At present the website for the conference does not have any mention of this. As one colleage commented, perhaps the conference - in which ethnic minority issues would, no doubt, feature prominently - was too close to both the Olympics and Tibet. Many anthropologists working on mainland southeast Asia were planning to attend the conference.
Does anyone have clear information on what is going on, and why?
The thing that just about every blogger on Thai issues ( both Thai & non-Thai)...
4 responses so far ↓
1 Preetam Rai // May 7, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Might be that people are having trouble getting the visas. Seems China is being very selective in issuing visas.
2 Olivier // May 9, 2008 at 11:08 am
Obviously the participants received a letter yesterday which confirmed that the conference was postponed. Don’t know the details yet.
3 Andrew Walker // May 11, 2008 at 2:08 pm
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Unexplained ‘Difficulties’ Force Postponement of Scholarly Conference in China
By DAVID GLENN
One day after warning its members that a postponement was likely, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences made the bad news official on Thursday: Its July conference in Kunming, China, will not take place.
More than 6,000 scholars had registered to attend the meeting, and the abrupt and unexplained cancellation has left many anthropologists speculating about possible interference by the Chinese government.
The association’s international executive board received two messages this week from its Chinese affiliate that referred to “complex difficulties” in carrying out the conference, but the messages did not specify what those difficulties are.
On blogs and e-mail lists on Thursday, anthropologists interpreted those vague phrases to mean that Chinese authorities have forced a postponement because they were nervous about a conference that would touch on sensitive topics of ethnic diversity only months after an uprising in Tibet and weeks before the Summer Olympics, in Beijing.
“We’ve been working on this meeting for five full years,” said Faye V. Harrison, a professor of anthropology and African American studies at the University of Florida, in an interview on Thursday. “This has been a shock—demoralizing, disheartening.”
Ms. Harrison, who is a member of the association’s international executive board, said that the conference might be postponed for a full year. She said it was possible that the conference would be moved outside of China, but she hopes to avoid that outcome.
The Chronicle attempted to contact four Chinese scholars who have been involved in the conference’s planning, but none immediately replied on Thursday.
Search for a Reason
Emily E. Wilcox, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley who is conducting research in Beijing and who had been scheduled to speak at the conference, wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that she had spoken with Du Fachun, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is a member of the conference’s organizing committee. When she asked about the reason for the postponement, Mr. Du replied that, if she thought about it, she could surely guess why. He then assured her it had nothing to do with the quality of the organizing committee’s work thus far, she said.
Ms. Wilcox said she took that to mean that “the Chinese government is taking every precaution to avoid problems leading up to the Olympics, and this is just one among a long list of compromises that have been made to this end.”
The conference’s program included papers on such potentially sensitive topics as “Marxist Theory About Ethno-National Issues and Practice” and “Bilateral Exchanges Between Tibetan and Chinese Culture.”
Ms. Wilcox added, however, that the Chinese government generally tolerates scholarly discussions of ethnic diversity and social justice. She recently attended a small conference in Beijing that dealt with ethnic tensions in China and Canada, and her perception was that opinions were freely expressed. Only the large scale and prominence of the planned Kunming conference, she speculated, led to the official pressures that forced its postponement.
Gregory Guldin, a professor of anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University who has written a history of anthropology in China, said in an interview that social scientists there have far more liberty than they did two decades ago. He said that the conference’s postponement is unfortunate, but he hoped that Chinese anthropologists themselves would not “come under opprobrium from people who are willing to be supercritical of China or unfairly critical of China.”
Ms. Harrison was more bluntly critical of the Chinese government’s apparent action, but she, too, emphasized that scholars there were not at fault.
“It’s important not to conflate them with the government,” she said. “They have in earnest worked very hard. We want to promote cooperation, and we want them to be part of the international community of anthropologists.”
The international association was formed at a meeting in Brussels in 1948, and holds its major conferences every five years. Ms. Harrison described it as the single most important international association in anthropology.
“It’s been a very important part of my life and professional identity for the last 15 years,” she said. “I’ve established relationships with colleagues in Kenya, India, and South Africa. … The IUAES has been a space where I can break down some of the usual hierarchies and establish collaboration with colleagues in an egalitarian and inclusive way.”
4 Andrew Walker // May 12, 2008 at 8:45 am
Further detail is available here: http://www.leidenuniv.nl/fsw/iuaes/10-04-kunmingcongress.htm
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