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Anthropology
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Anthropology Faculty
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Office Hours: Tu/Th 2-4 |
Research Interests
I grew up in Malaysia and received my Ph.D. from Columbia University (1982). I joined UC Berkeley in 1984 and am currently Head of the Socio-cultural House in the Department of Anthropology.
My work has always dealt with the particular entanglements of politics, technology, and culture in rapidly changing situations on the Asia Pacific rim. My writings on Muslim factory women, diasporic Chinese, graduated sovereignty and Cambodian refugees have helped configured an anthropology of globalization. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (1987), Flexible Citizenship (1999), and Buddha is Hiding (2003) are now classic texts in the field.
In Global Assemblages (2005), Stephen Collier and I propose an anthropological approach that investigates how global and situated elements interact to shape conditions of contemporary living.
Currently, my work focuses on regimes of governing, technology, and culture that crystallize new meanings and practices of the human. These ideas are explored in Neoliberalism as Exception (2006), and Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (2007). My field research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and China in order to track emerging global centers and biotechnical experiments in East Asian modernity.
My writings have been translated into German, Italian, and Chinese. Some projects were supported by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. I have spoken at many universities and conferences in Asia and Europe, including the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Click here to read Aihwa Ong's recent interview in Il Manifesto
Recent Events
June 2006, Co-organizer, Workshop on “Asian Biotech,” Honolulu. Funded by the University of California, Pacific Rim Research Program.
June 2004, Co-organizer, Workshop on "Privatizing China," Shanghai. Funded by the University of California, Pacific Rim Research Program.
April, 2002, Co-organizer, Workshop on "Oikos/Anthropos: Rationality, Technology, Infrastructure," Prague. Funded by the Social Science Research Council, New York. See "Oikos/Anthropos: Rationality, Technology, Infrastructure; a Workshop Report" (with Stephen J. Collier). Current Anthropology 44(3):421-426 (June, 2003).
Representative Publications
“Scales of exception: Experiments with knowledge & sheer life in tropical Southeast Asia,”
/Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography/ 29 (July 2008)2:1-13.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
2008. (co-editor Li Zhang), _Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar_. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4810
2007. Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (co-editor). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2006. “Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology,” Transactions 31 (2006) 1-6
2006. “Please Stay: Pied-a-Terre Subjects in the Megacity,” Citizenship Studies Vol. 11, no. 1 (2007): 83-93.
2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.
American Literary History (March 1, 2006).
(co-editor Stephen J. Collier). Malden, Ma. and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
2004. "The Chinese Axis: Zoning Technologies and Variegated Sovereignty," Journal of East Asian Studies 4 (2004), 69-96.
2003. Buddha in Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America (University of California Press, Public Anthropology Series). (Italian translation, 2005.)
2003. "Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese" Interventions 5(1):82-100.
2003. "Higher Learning: Educational Availability and Flexible Citizenship in Global Space" in Diversity and Citizenship Education, ed. James A. Banks, New York: J. Wiley, pp. 49-70.
2001. Modernity, Anthropological Aspects. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 15. N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds. Pp. 9944-49. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon.
2000. Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia. Theory, Culture, and Society. 17(4):55-75.
1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Honorable Mention, Senior Prize, American Ethnological
Association (2000) and Cultural Studies Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies (2001). (German translation, 2004.)
1999. "Muslim Feminists in the Shelter of Corporate Islam," Citizenship Studies Vol. 3, no. 3:355-71.
1997. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (co-edited with Donald Nonini). New York: Routledge.
1995. Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Michael Peletz (co-editor). Berkeley: University of California Press.
1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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