SAGE’s journal Modern China published the article of the Oriental Institute’s research fellow Jan Karlach titled “Hearths, Mythologies, and Livelihood Choices: Exploring Cultural Change under Poverty Alleviation with the Nuosu-Yi of Liangshan.”

The paper deals with the position of the Nuosu-Yi, a Tibeto-Burman language-speaking ethnic group of Sichuan Province’s Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, between the Chinese and Western (media) discourses of the CCP’s poverty alleviation campaign. Through the voices of Jan’s research partners, the ethnography reveals a remarkable entanglement of different (political) mythologies surrounding not only the question of poverty alleviation but also problems of ethnicity, modernity and geopolitics as seen through everyday life in contemporary (southwest) China.

 

Oriental Institute also financed its open access.