September 23, 2009 – News & Views

Professor Mary Howard with her Tibetan friends.

Photo courtesy of Mary Howard

A Visit to China’s Yunnan Province
OWU Professor Mary Howard’s Trip #5 to China

It was an international conference of anthropologists and ethnologists that took OWU Professor of Anthropology Mary Howard to China’s Yunnan Province this summer, but her visit was filled with so much more. She connected with OWU senior Will Ruzek who was interning in the province’s Tibetan region; she traveled the countryside, visiting farmers markets and meeting many interesting people, and toured China’s breathtaking Stone Forest.

Yunnan, China’s most southwestern province, is mountainous and beautiful, Howard says. Bordered by Tibet to the north and Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand to the south, the province’s population is diverse with 26 different kinds of people with radically different lifestyles – more ethnic minorities than any of China’s provinces, she says.

“It was a great setting for this international organization to hold its conference,” Howard says of the 16th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, which met from July 27 to July 31, in Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, at the University of Kunming. The conference attracted more than 2,500 attendees from around the world who are interested in topics of anthropology and ethnicity.

“This is one of the biggest issues the nation states are faced with,” Howard said of the Congress’s theme: Humanity, Development and Cultural Diversity. “So many of them have a variety of peoples … pluralistic societies. That’s a potential source of conflict should resources become scarce.” China has had its share of unrest for these reasons, Howard says, and in fact she was there in the wake of unrest taking place in the northern part of the country. “That added a little element of drama to the stay there,” Howard says. “By the time I arrived it was still being worked on. China is experiencing an economic downturn, though less severe than in the United States. People have lost jobs. When you throw that into the ethnic mix and longstanding resentment toward the majority Han, it’s an ingredient for civil unrest.”

Howard was invited to the conference by Dr. Chen Gang, a professor at the University of Kunming and previously of The Ohio State University. He asked Howard to give the keynote address at a session he organized on globalization and poverty. Howard discussed her book, “Hunger and Shame” about the food crisis and poverty issues in Africa, and shared her knowledge about homelessness in America, screening part of her film, “Swept Out,” at the session.

This was Howard’s fifth visit to China and she was struck by how much had changed since her last trip there seven years ago. She was surprised by the amount of open criticism by the Chinese people of their government. The Beijing Airport, which was revamped for the 2008 Summer Olympics, was “one of the most extraordinary airports I have ever been in,” she says. And she also found the farmers’ markets in the mountains to be filled with an abundance of garden produce and foodstuff. “This is one of China’s poorest provinces and I traveled around the city extensively and I didn’t see a single homeless person. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, however.”

Other highlights of her trip included a visit with Will Ruzek (featured in Connect2 OWU’s September 10 issue), a senior who was studying GPS mapping in the Tibetan region of Yunnan this summer. She spent a better part of a week with Ruzek at the China Exploration and Research Society, which was lovely, she says. She later toured China’s stunning Stone Forest with a student of Chen Gang. Howard described the site as an “extraordinary natural phenomenon,” and likened it to the North America’s Grand Canyon.

Howard returned to Ohio a week before classes began in August. She says she intends to incorporate what she learned during her nearly month-long stay in Yunnan into her anthropology classes.

– Andrea Strle ’99