ELANA CHIPMAN

Email: echipman@binghamton.edu

Elana Chipman received her PhD in anthropology from Cornell University in 2007. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist who has done fieldwork in Southeastern China and in Taiwan and studies identity, locality and the nation-state, ritual and popular religion, pilgrimage and tourism, and political-ecology. Her dissertation work examines the production of locality in Taiwan through ritual and other forms of culture work, such as grass-roots historiography. Her new project looks at the ways that changing global environmental discourses are transforming contemporary ritual practices in Chinese cultures, primarily the burning of offerings. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the East Asian Studies Center at Ohio State University.

Publications

2009 “The De-territorialization of Ritual Spheres in Contemporary Taiwan.” In Asian Anthropology 8: 1-33.

2008 “The Local Production of Culture in Beigang.” In Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 6(1): 1-30.

2008 Book review: Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing between Family and State. Edited by Robert P. Weller (2005). In Journal of Asian Studies 67(2): 675-676.

2007 Our Beigang: Culture Work, Ritual and Community in a Taiwanese Town. PhD Dissertation. Cornell University.

2006 “Whose Goddess? Competing visions of a pilgrimage site in Fujian, China” In: Monisha Chattopadhyay (ed), Religious Tourism: An Introduction. Pp. 176-184 (Hyderabad, India: ICFAI University Press).

 

Fall 2009 Courses: ANTH 380E Anth of Tourism & Travel, ANTH 510 Intro to Socioculture Theory

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