Department Talk Series: Dr. Ruslan Yusupov
On Thursday, February 2nd, 2023, the Anthropology Department hosted a talk withDr. Ruslan Yuspov on 232 Bay State Rd. in PLS 505. Dr. Yusupov is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
His talk, A Measure of Sovereignty: Memory, Violence, and Ethnoreligious Policies in Southwest China, “explores how a community of Chinese Muslims remembers the painful decade of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The small town where this community lives is infamous for an event of ethnoreligious violence during which the local resistance to the iconoclastic campaign led to military intervention. The event claimed the lives of some fourteen hundred residents and destroyed large parts of the town. Unlike other places that witnessed collective killings of a similar scale, however, the town was subsequently rehabilitated and the grievances were officially redressed. The attempt to remember both the incident and the hard-won redress today resulted in a future-oriented disposition that is locally described as “not forgetting history but not being entangled in it.”
From Dr. Yusupov: “Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I center on and seek to understand this disposition by exploring the competing demands of remembering but reconciling and forgiving but not forgetting that speak to such themes as legacies of violence, ethnoreligious violence, and the Chinese state’s sovereignty in the face of cultural difference.”
