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Everett Zhang

Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog

About Everett

Everett Yuehong Zhang is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at Princeton University. His current research compares the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 and the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, to explore how different ways of mourning the loss of life make a huge difference in producing life’s worthiness or unworthiness in China and how public grieving has become a crucial site of struggle for justice and well-being.

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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog

View all of Everett's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.

Forsythe Prize 2016: Everett Zhang on Chinese medicine, globalization, and embodiment

I am very delighted to receive an honorable mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize from The General Anthropology Division of American Anthropological Association. I am very grateful.   I grew up in Maoist China and experienced the early period of post-Mao reform—its excitement as well as its big setbacks before I came to the US. Becoming an anthropologist and contributing to the understanding of this tremendous transformation are two undertakings closely related to each other. Neither is easy, but it was this combination that brought about the book now called The Impotence Epidemic. Starting from the phenomenon—the increasing visibility of a seemingly infamous “epidemic,” I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the relationship between body and society. When I was doing my fieldwork, many of my friends, former schoolmates, former colleagues and acquaintances in China were very surprised at this project, puzzled about my seriousness, and doubtful about its (read more...)