International Postdoctoral Fellows Program: Cultural Change in Western Hunan, China

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9505686 Brown The International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Melissa J. Brown to work with Professor Dong Luo of South-Central Nationalities College in the People's Republic of China. During this award, the PI will do ethnographic fieldwork on cultural change among the Tujia, a state-designated ethnic minority, in Fengyan Xian in western Hunan Province with the collaboration of scholars at the Zhongnan Minzu Xueyuan (South-Central Nationalities College), or Min Yuan, in Wuhan. Little is known about Central China since no western anthropologists have worked there and the Chinese scholars located there have had neither contacts or funds to disseminate the results of their research outside China. Therefore the historical experience of the Tujia will provide a means for examining cultural change in relation to local structure since they changed first toward and then away from a Han Chinese cultural model. ***