Tim Gurung speaking to the Society in October 2021 on the history of `the Gukhas', men from the hills of Nepal who have fought for Britain over the last 200 years and whose children and granchildren form the bulk of Hong Kong's Nepali community
Details of upcoming talks, to which all are welcome, and other activities are posted here. After each talk, those attending are invited to a self-paying dinner at the Chiu Chow City restaurant across the square from the Hong Kong History Museum, where discussion can be continued informally. For fuller information on the society's activities (including archived abstracts of all talks since 1996) visit the HKAS website.Versions of Candy Yu's presentation on the Manila hostage crisis and Wu Liang's on seafarers can be read on-line in the Hong Kong Anthropologist. The PowerPoint presentation of John Whelpton's January 2012 talk on Christianity in Nepalcan be downloaded from the Nepal page on his site.
Living with Fukushima An anthropological lecture by Mankei TAM Friday, 12April at 7:00 p.m. Hong Kong Museum of History Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
After Fukushima, what does it mean to live with nuclear fallout? Japan's 3.11 triple disaster has created an uncertain world of imperceptible radioactivity. This talk is about Iitate, a village that was exposed following the Fukushima meltdown, where radiation lingers still. My interlocutors are villagers who explore damaged ecologies and seek pathways to let their homes co-exist with flora and fauna that have become uncanny. Based on my fieldwork from 2015-23, this talk will present an anthropological study of the livable future(s) created by those who refused to surrender their homes and tried to eschew the dichotomized realities enacted by the state and anti-nuclear activism.
Mankei TAM (譚萬基) is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the HealthXCross project at the Ca' FoscariUniversity of Venice (https://pric.unive.it/projects/healthxcross/home.). This project focuses on the relationships between global health/biopolitics and microbiome technoscience evolving in Hong Kong and other key hubs that situate China globally. His previous project concerned citizens’ self-empowering practices in critical assessments of radiation risks and their collaborations with scientists to explore new forms of agriculture after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. His research interests include Political Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, multispecies ethnography, and studies in social movements.