Emily Chao
Professor of Anthropology
On Sabbatical Spring 2024
With Pitzer Since: 1996
Field Group: Anthropology
Campus Address: Fletcher 206
Phone: 909.607.2728
Email: [email protected]
Office Hours: See Faculty Directory
Educational Background
President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MA, New School for Social Research
BA, University of California, Berkeley
Recent Courses
Introduction to Nepal (ANTH16)
The History of Anthropological Theory (ANTH 153)
Food, Culture, Power (ANTH9)
Sex, Body, Reproduction (ANTH50)
China: Gender, Cosmology, and the State (ANTH88)
China in the 21st Century: Gender, Culture, Nation (ANTH99)
Selected Publications
Lijiang Stories: Shamans, Taxi drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-Era China. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2012.
“The Resurgence of Bride Abduction as a Marker of Difference: Gender, Power, Ethnicity, and Social Change in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Southwest China,” panel organizer, 110th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal, Quebec, November 16-20, 2011.
“Layered Alterities: Discourses of the Other in Lijiang, China,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol.34, no.2 (September 2008).
Selected Conference Presentations and Invited Talks
“Ethnicizations of Marital Marginality: Bride Abduction and Elopement In Lijiang,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal, Canada, November 16, 2011.
“Ethnicizations of Marginality: Bride Abduction in Lijiang,” paper presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal, Quebec, November 16-20, 2011.
Panel chair, “China’s Ethnic Peripheries,” paper presented at the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast/Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, June 18, 2011.
“Capitalizing on Ethnicity: Agency and the Recirculation of Authenticity in China’s Southwest,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA, November 2010.
Panel chair, “Circulating Identities in East and West China,” Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA, November 2010.
