Portrait: Mayfair Yang

My BA was a double major in anthropology and what was then called ‘Oriental languages’, and my MA and PhD were in anthropology, all at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley instilled in me a strong sense of politics and power dynamics and a penchant for social critique in my work. My PhD advisers were Jack Potter, a cultural Marxist who had done fieldwork on peasants in rural Hong Kong and Guangdong Province in China; Paul Rabinow, a philosophical anthropologist and early science and technology studies scholar who hosted Michel Foucault at Berkeley and introduced me to the world of French theory; and Robert Bellah, a sociologist of Japanese religion and American civil religion. As an immigrant originally born in Taiwan but who had grown up in multiple countries, I was very drawn to knowledge about Mainland China, the land from where both my parents fled the Communists. In the late 1970s, there was still very little knowledge about China in the outside world, but I was lucky to go there on a new graduate student exchange program between Berkeley and Beijing universities in 1981.