Kylie Wong D:
Hey everyone. I'm your Familiar Stranger, Kylie Wong Dolan. This interview is between Zoe Hatten and her supervisor, professor Andrew Kipnis. It was recorded in San Jose at the AAA.

Kylie Wong D:
Just a quick note about the sound quality, it isn't perfect because it was recorded on borrowed equipment. Also, it's not by one of your usual Familiar Strangers. This was a new experiment by a friend of ours, Zoe. She offered to interview her supervisor and we thought it was a great idea.

Kylie Wong D:
If you'd like to produce an interview for this project, get in touch with us and pitch your idea. Also, if you would like to support this project, you can do that on Patreon. The website is patreon.com/thefamiliarstrange. Not the Strange Familiars, which is another fun podcast, just not ours. Let's go.

Kylie Wong D:
Hey everyone. First off, we at the Familiar Strange want to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we are producing this podcast, and pay our respect to the elders of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples past, present, and emerging. Let's go.

Kylie Wong D:
Hello and welcome to the Familiar Strange, brought to you with support from the Australian Anthropological Society, Australia National University's College of Asia Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, the Australian Center For the Public Awareness of Science, and produced in collaboration with the American Ethnological Association.

Zoe Hatten:
I'm Zoe Hatten, your Familiar Stranger, recording from the AAA meetings in San Jose. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Professor Andrew Kipnis, distinguished anthropologist of China who is currently based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Zoe Hatten:
And he is responsible for books including Producing Guangxi, Governing Educational Desire, and From Village to City: Social Transformations in a Chinese County Seat. Many scholars of China will be familiar with Andy's work, which has explored social interactions and relationships, education, governance, urbanization, and most recently, funerals.

Zoe Hatten:
I'm certainly familiar with Andy's work myself, as I've had the great honor of having him as a doctoral supervisor. It really is a joy to share this interview with you all. We'll talk about doing fieldwork in China, thoughts about the current climate of academic talk here at the AAA, and the evolution of ideas and methods throughout Andy's career. Let's go.

Zoe Hatten:
How are you finding the AAA so far? How are you finding San Jose?

Andrew Kipnis:
San Jose ... Being back in the US is very interesting. Lots of things are interesting. The fires. All the smoke in the air, and just seeing a lot of homeless people, much more than in Hong Kong where I'm based now. I am enjoying the meetings.

Andrew Kipnis:
Maybe another thing I've noticed is I feel a lot of young people, younger scholars are maybe not so interested in academia, or there seems to be a bit of a split between the older scholars and younger scholars. That's a bit worrying to me. I think it has something to do with the lack of jobs out there, and so really pushing people in a more applied direction.

Zoe Hatten:
That is indeed part of the theme of this year's AAA, is resilience and adaptation. Perhaps you could comment on some of the ways that younger scholars and academics at your stage in your career are addressing some of those problems.

Andrew Kipnis:
I don't know if we're addressing them. It's very difficult, I would say. What I see is the parts of anthropology that are growing are the most applied aspects. I hear about things like workshops in design anthropology. Of course medical anthropology, it's been big for a while, but it seems to be growing, and growing, and growing, and growing. Maybe things like educational anthropology are growing, work with industry, work with governments.

Andrew Kipnis:
What I really noticed is that often I see these panels with older anthropologists, and they speak a very academic language, and they're the only ones I see speaking that way. It worries me a little bit, not too much, but it makes me feel that maybe a certain way of thinking and speaking is dying out. I don't think you can ask people who were trained to think in a certain way, all of a sudden they're going to be the leaders of doing things in a different way. I think that change happens differently than that.

Zoe Hatten:
Okay, perhaps you mean the turn to more plain speak, or just the fact that some of these younger scholars aren't versed in the theoretical ...

Andrew Kipnis:
Yes, it's a matter of not being versed, but also of being very unsure about the extent to which they wish to become that way. A hesitancy, maybe not born out of a dislike of it, but rather born out of a thought that, "If I really focus on reading and writing, in the end, that's not going to help me. It might even make me less employable rather than more employable. I would be better off learning how to give a sales pitch to a Silicon Valley executive then ... " That's a different way of speaking than speaking at an academic conference as it traditionally was.

Andrew Kipnis:
Anyway, these are very surface-y thoughts, but ...

Zoe Hatten:
No, I think you're really hitting on something there. I definitely feel that pressure living here in the Bay Area to adapt in that respect. It's not necessarily a good thing.

Zoe Hatten:
Maybe we'll just backtrack for a moment. I've already given a brief introduction to you and your work, but perhaps you could explain for our listeners in your own words what it is that you do and maybe what your current research focuses on.

Andrew Kipnis:
I've done research in China for most of my career. I've occasionally done a little bit of research in the United States when I was based there, and also a little bit of research in Australia when I was based in Australia. I've pretty much kept up doing research in China. I think that's a combination of my career circumstances. Mostly my career circumstances.

Andrew Kipnis:
I have noticed there are an awful lot of scholars from the United States who perhaps wrote their dissertation about China, and wrote their first book about China, but then they get into careers somewhere in the United States. It's not easy for them to go back to China, and they end up shifting away from doing research on China. For me, at a certain point in my career, I really thought I might have to head down that direction.

Andrew Kipnis:
Then I got a job at ANU. When I came to Australia National University, it was not only that it gave me the opportunity, they were encouraging me to go to China to do field work and I had time to do so, but in fact they compelled me to do so. In my contract there it said, "You are hired as the person who's doing research on China in our department, and you are supposed to do research on China. You can't just switch to another part of the world." They had a very place-based way of hiring people at the time I was hired.

Andrew Kipnis:
I continued to do research in China. What stayed constant for me was doing research in China, but not the particular topics that I did research on. I was always going from one project to the next. I've done research about social relations and gift giving in a village. I've done research about education, I've done research about religion, I've done research about urbanization.

Andrew Kipnis:
My current research is linked to that. I'm looking at funerary ritual. To me it's very much linked to urbanization, because in urban areas you have a completely different type of ritual industry. Not just a different type of ritual industry, you have a ritual industry, whereas in rural areas, at the time I started doing my research, anyway, there was very little commercial aspect to familial rituals.

Zoe Hatten:
Perhaps you could describe some of your methods, what you actually do while you're collecting your data?

Andrew Kipnis:
Almost every project has been somewhat different. I'm always trying to think of, "How can I do something that's systematic? How can I move from what I'm finding out to making a coherent argument? What would the links be between my evidence, and my argument, and what I'm trying to say?"

Andrew Kipnis:
I haven't only done one sort of research. Different types of research I've done, I've done more traditional ethnographic research, which would be reliant a lot on participant observation. What things would I count as participant observations? When I was in the village looking at social relations, I would go to weddings, I would go to funerals, I would go to people's homes. I would look at how their homes were laid out. I would give people gifts when I was trying to establish relationships with them. I would invite them out to dinner. I would be invited to dinner, I would receive gifts. All these are a ways of participating and observing social relationships.

Andrew Kipnis:
Of course I would also ask questions, but a lot of it was based on what I saw and what I experienced. I would always be questioning myself of, "Who is my sample? Who am I talking to? Who am I observing? How would I sociologically categorize these people in terms of class, or occupation, or ethnicity, or gender?" Or whatever. All of these categories. By asking that question, I'm also asking, "Who am I missing? Who is absent from my sample?" Then when I write about this, how should I describe these examples in terms of what is being represented?

Andrew Kipnis:
I've also, of course, done interviews. When I did my education project, I did a lot of household interviews. I would go to a classroom. I would sit in the class for about a month, usually fifth or sixth graders. Classes in China are quite large. There would be 50 or 60 students in each class that I would go into.

Andrew Kipnis:
After the students got to know me and became comfortable with me, I would give them a letter and to ask their parents permission to go to their home and conduct a household interview. Most of them would say yes, almost all of them. Then I would go to people's homes and conduct interviews. To me that was both a form of interview research, but also a form of participant observation, because I got to see what their homes were like, and I got to see how people interacted in the household. It's two different types of research for me.

Andrew Kipnis:
It was also very good for me in terms of a strategy of representation, because these classes that I was analyzing in the place I was doing this research, they had a rule that all classes had to have an equal number of poor and excellent students. At least in terms of the academic performance of the student, each class offered me a representative sample of what was there at the school. That was quite useful for me as a sampling method.

Andrew Kipnis:
Now, in my current research, in some ways it's not very ethnographic in that I'm not spending a lot of time with a single group of people. I go to a lot of cemeteries, and I can observe what goes on in the cemeteries. I also can look at tombstones. Looking at tombstones is very interesting, because there's all sorts of familial information recorded on there. There's also sometimes little life histories and other types of information about the deceased. You can see who is buried together, which relatives are listed on the tombstones.

Andrew Kipnis:
Then you can do comparisons with things like how this has changed over time. You compare ... Different sections of a graveyard will usually have people that died in different periods. China's evolving very fast, and you can see how that is changed.

Andrew Kipnis:
Then because different cemeteries cost different amount of money, you can also do things about class. If you assume that people who are buried in a very inexpensive graveyard are on average of a lower class than people who are buried in a very expensive graveyard, and then you can compare the different practices of inscribing things on tombstones and make certain inferences about that. That's another kind of sampling method I use.

Andrew Kipnis:
I also interview a lot of people who are involved in the funerary business. They're often surprisingly easy to talk to because a lot of people don't want to talk to them. They're happy to have people who are willing to talk to them. Of course, I try to go to funerals whenever I can.

Zoe Hatten:
Of course. We all do.

Andrew Kipnis:
Not easy. These are some of my methods.

Zoe Hatten:
Okay. You've certainly produced some very rich and detailed work over the years that I think anyone who's interested in China would be doing themselves a favor to check out.

Zoe Hatten:
I also wanted to ask you about, perhaps, some of the challenges you've encountered doing fieldwork over the years. We all know that, when you go out, sometimes you can't get access to the situations and the people that you want to. I was wondering if you could talk about some general challenges that exist now for younger anthropologists going to China.

Andrew Kipnis:
There's definitely projects that I haven't done because it didn't work out. One example would be the one on religion. At one point, almost against my own desires, I decided I would do research about this Christian church in the county where I had been doing research. The reason I say "against my own desires" is I wasn't so interested in Christianity, and I'm not a terribly religious person myself. Especially when I was young, I felt it awkward to be doing research on religion when I didn't consider myself to be religious.

Andrew Kipnis:
But, the people I knew in the church kept on inviting me, and asking me, "Why don't you come to our church? Why don't you do some research on us?" Finally I did. But then after doing this for a few weeks, I found out that everybody I talked to was being debriefed by the government. The police were actually coming in and going to the houses of the people I interviewed. Once I found this out, I just felt that it was unethical for me to continue this research. I simply stopped that project altogether.

Andrew Kipnis:
What else is ... So you know, there's political limits. There are, of course, social limits. Some people don't want to talk to you. The funeral research is a good example of this. It's very difficult to go to funerals in urban areas.

Andrew Kipnis:
Very different to when I first did research in our village. It was considered ... What's the right word? People wanted me to go to their funerals, because the basic attitude towards funerals was the more people who went, the better. By going to the funeral, you were actually enhancing the status of the people who are running the funeral. Of course, you could bring a gift and show your respect in that way. It didn't matter if you didn't know the person who had passed away.

Andrew Kipnis:
Urban areas or not like that. You need an invitation. Urban people are not necessarily keen on having strangers attend their family rituals. I could only go to funerals that somehow I had a very close connection to. That has been a limitation.

Andrew Kipnis:
One way I've gotten to a few extra funerals is that I've often been associated with universities, and universities in China, as also in Hong Kong and in Australia, when a famous old professor has passed away, very often they send out an invitation to everybody in the university to go to the funeral that, in fact, some university people will be speaking at. I started going to those funerals as well. I had some friends and family in China, and sometimes I would go to people in those families' funerals as well. That enabled me to go to a few, but it was definitely a challenge.

Andrew Kipnis:
My understanding is that research in China is becoming harder, and harder, and harder for people to undertake in the past few years under Xi Jinping. It's hard to know how long that will last, but I'm very concerned about that both for myself and for younger scholars.

Andrew Kipnis:
I also think that, in general, in China, surveillance is becoming more and more sophisticated. I don't know if it's possible to do anonymous interviews anymore. I feel that the government can always reconstruct who you've been talking to, because if you carry around your mobile phone, they know where you've been. There's also all the video cameras. I really think in the future I'm going to be even more circumspect about doing interviews than I have been in the past. I do think that's something that everybody has to be thinking of these days.

Zoe Hatten:
That leads onto the next question I wanted to ask. A lot of people are curious about tertiary institutions in China, and universities, and the way the different disciplines are organized. Is there anthropology being taught in China?

Andrew Kipnis:
I'm not quite up to date on this, because I know I've recently talked to a colleague from China who's told me he has just written a very long paper in Chinese for a Chinese academic journal about the tensions between things that are variously translated as ethnology, and then anthropology, and then maybe you could call them ethnic studies. All of these disciplines have various lineages in China, and the history is very complex.

Andrew Kipnis:
The structure of universities in China is also very complex. There are some disciplines that are considered hierarchically above other disciplines, and it really channels how funding runs through the university and who can get funding to do what types of projects. It's quite a complex issue.

Andrew Kipnis:
Anthropology, there are a few departments of anthropology at Shandong University, I think also at Zhongshan University, maybe in Xiamen University. There are also many, many departments of Ming zi Xue, or, I guess that's "nationality studies" or "ethnic studies", or "ethnology". There's some tension between these two approaches to anthropology.

Andrew Kipnis:
Then there are various people, as in university systems all over the world, that have been trained in anthropology in various Australian, or American, or British universities, but they are located in all sorts of different departments within China. I would say there are many forms of anthropology within China, and mapping them precisely would be difficult for me to do. Nanjing University also has a very good department.

Zoe Hatten:
A question I get asked a lot from young students who want to start their research in China is choosing a topic. Choosing something to go in with. I'm wondering what general advice you can give in terms of starting out and making some relevant segue into anthropology in China.

Andrew Kipnis:
I think that it has to be a combination of things coming together, and you're looking for an intersection. First of all, it has to be your own interests, because I think you'd be crazy to go into something like anthropology. If you want to learn how to say whatever other people tell you to say, maybe you should become a lawyer, because then you can defend their interests, speaking up for them.

Andrew Kipnis:
One of the reasons to go into something like academia or anthropology is to have the opportunity to follow a bit your own interests. You should have the confidence to think that, "If this topic interests me, I'm also a socially constructed person. There's some social grouping out there that would be interested in this, because I'm a reflection of my own society and not just this strange individual with weird individualized interests."

Andrew Kipnis:
Then the third thing that has to come in there, of course, is political possibility. Political and social possibilities, "political" in the widest sense of the word. "What is it possible for me to research in China without getting people into trouble, without getting myself into trouble?" Then, of course, that people will welcome. I wouldn't say you should never do research on topics that people don't want to talk about, but, on the other hand, there's an ethical cost to being socially intrusive. You do have to take into consideration these issues and look for their intersection.

Zoe Hatten:
That's just got me thinking. I wonder if there'd be a way to incorporate surveillance culture in China into an ethnography somehow, and actually build that into your methodology.

Andrew Kipnis:
Certainly.

Zoe Hatten:
That would be interesting.

Andrew Kipnis:
Yes, certainly.

Zoe Hatten:
If anyone wants to do that, please, please do get in touch.

Andrew Kipnis:
Yeah, no, I think that would be a very good topic, though, of course, very sensitive. You have to think. You can't just go out and ... I'm sure you're not going to be allowed to do interviews of the people who stand behind the surveillance cameras in the Public Security Bureau. You'd have to come up with a way of addressing that topic that is a bit more innocent, or a bit more possible. That's the other thing, is you can think of more indirect ways of doing research.

Zoe Hatten:
It's a bit of a trend on the Familiar Strange podcast to ask each other what we've been thinking about lately. Just, doesn't have to be in relation to your research. It could be other ideas that other scholars are focusing on, or just some concepts that you have that you think you might develop further down the line. Do you have anything like that? Anything interesting you're reading?

Andrew Kipnis:
Sure. The side interest, now ... I think it's something on everybody's mind, is the rise of populism around the world, and right-wing nationalisms, and then somehow the links to social media, and also links to ideas about truth. These are things, if I see newspaper articles on it, I'm always reading it. If I see essays, whatever, in the New York Review of Books, I'm always very interested in reading about.

Andrew Kipnis:
I think I would be very interested in ideas of truth-making and vernacular forms of truth. How do whatever people from various walks of life make sense of what they see on social media and decide what is "true"? What are the criteria? What are their methods? What are their methods of sorting truthhood from falsehood? How do you act when you're unsure of what is true and what is false?

Andrew Kipnis:
That would be something very interesting to me. Something like vernacular strategies of dealing with issues of truth, and truth and falsehood.

Zoe Hatten:
Yeah, and fighting against the algorithms. They're not working in our favor in those regards.

Andrew Kipnis:
Yes. In some ways I'm very interested in social media, but as a older person and someone who wasn't brought up with it, I'm very timid about it. I don't want to get my news from Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account. I use WeChat when I'm in China because I have to, but I don't really want to that much. I definitely try to get my news the old fashioned way. I like to go to newspapers and see what they're printing.

Zoe Hatten:
I want to give you an opportunity to plug your latest book, if you want, while we're here, From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat, if I'm not mistaken. Unless you've written another book since then.

Andrew Kipnis:
No, that's my latest book. Yeah, while I think it's a ... What would I say? How could I sell it? I think both the strength and the problem with it, it's a very generalist book. It's looking at a county seat, but from many, many different points of view. By social transformation, I take that word very seriously, I take the idea of transformation as being trans, as being ... There are many, many aspects of social life that are somehow interlinked, and they're all changing together. There's an interrelation among different forms of change.

Andrew Kipnis:
To portray that in the book, I have to go around a lot of different topics like city planning, and economic production, and types of consumption, and the feel of the city. Types of class formation. Ideas of what it means to be a youth. In some ways, it's a generalist book, and because it's going around all these different topics, but I think that's a strength in other ways. It's very interesting to look at the interrelation among different types of changes, and it's a type of analysis that has fallen out of favor, and I think unfortunately so.

Zoe Hatten:
I think you've sold it really well. I think we're also running out of time for this interview. It's really a privilege to get the opportunity to sit you down and ask you some questions, and I hope that I've done my job and maybe covered some of the topics some of the listeners are interested in as well.

Andrew Kipnis:
Okay. Thank you very much, Zoe. I really enjoyed your questions.

Zoe Hatten:
Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the AAAs.

Andrew Kipnis:
I will.

Zoe Hatten:
That was it, me and Andy Kipnis. Today's episode was produced by me, Zoe Hatten, with help from Ian Pollock and the other Familiar Strangers. Our assistant producers are Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung.

Zoe Hatten:
Subscribe to the Familiar Strange podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, and all the other familiar places. You can find the show notes, including a list of all the books and papers mentioned today, plus our blog about anthropology's role in the world, at thefamiliarstrange.com.

Zoe Hatten:
If you want to contribute to the blog or have anything to say to me or the other hosts of this program, email us at submissions@thefamiliarstrange.com, tweet @TFSTweets, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram.

Zoe Hatten:
Music by Pete Dabro. Special thanks to [Nick Farley 00:00:29:20], [Will Grant 00:00:29:21], and [Maude Roe 00:29:22].

Zoe Hatten:
Thanks for listening. See you in two weeks. Until next time, keep talking strange.