EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 16 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 195 part, I examine the cultural and social construction of “the other woman” in both newspapers for women and other popular newspapers, periodicals, and novels. In the final section, I try to read between the lines of stories about yitaitai, focusing on prominent concubines, such as Lan Ni (Sun Ke’s concubine). I also intend to include female voices from legal cases pertaining to ordinary concubines. Zhu Jing (University of Edinburgh) Visualizing and Conceptualizing an Ethnographic Body in Republican China Key words: body, ethnic minorities, photography, anthropometry This paper investigates how the body of ethnic minorities in the southwest of China were visualized and conceptualized in the first half of the twentieth century. In China’s long history, the body was a crucial tool used by Han Chinese to frame knowledge of ethnic minorities. Since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, this new visual medium has been used to represent bodies of different races by anthropologists. Compared to the Miao albums of late imperial China, modern ethnographic photography presented new characteristics in visualizing the body of ethnic minorities: firstly, the upper part of the body was spotlighted, replacing the exclusive role of feet in late imperial Chinese ethnographic sources; secondly, both the front, side and back views of the body were represented in photograph; finally, the festival costumes were worn by figures in photography. This paper suggests that such styles of photography, especially the first two characteristics, are entwined with the development of anthropometry in late 19th and early 20th century Europe andAmerica. The methodology of anthropometry was promoted in China especially among those who studied abroad, such as Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 , Li Ji 李济 and Wu Dingliang 吴定良 . Projects to measure the bodies of ethnic minorities were conducted by researchers of Academia Sinica in the 1930s and 1940s.The purpose of body measurements was to show the variations of the bodies of different races through statistics and mathematical formulas. Drawing on both visual and textual sources, this paper ana- lyzes the characteristics of the body in modern ethnographic photography, and penetrates into the process of creation of knowledge about human variation concealed behind these images. It suggests that the body of ethnic minorities can only be understood by placing it in the contexts of both global knowledge produc- tion about the body and human variation, and the domestic construction of the nation in modern China.