author
Xin Liu
d. 23
An anthropologist of contemporary China, this writer is known for vivid, close-up studies of everyday life, identity, and social change. Her books bring large historical shifts into focus through the experiences of ordinary people.
1 Audiobook
西京雜記
by Xin Liu
About the author
Xin Liu is a scholar of anthropology whose work explores social life in contemporary China. Reliable sources available here identify her as the author of In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-reform Rural China and The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China.
Her writing is especially interested in how broad political and economic change is lived at the level of daily experience. In One's Own Shadow follows one rural community in post-reform China, while The Otherness of Self examines selfhood, business practice, and social transformation in contemporary Chinese life.
Sources found during this search also describe her as having served as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Across her work, she is noted for combining ethnographic detail with clear attention to the pressures of history, reform, and modernity.