Chun-Yi Sum

Areas of Expertise

Identity, Ethnicity, Citizenship, Affects and Emotions, Kinship and Family, Civil Society, China, East Asia

About

Chun-Yi Sum is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the politics of identity and belonging in China. Her research examines university students’ experimental practices of space making and civic participation in late-socialist China. Dr. Sum’s book manuscript, based on ethnographic research among student volunteers and extracurricular activity participants in a Chinese university, analyzes how young people rejected or repurposed state platitudes about socialist citizenship and patriotic mobilization, creating new conditions for reimagining civic rights and responsibilities. It documents how students’ strategic participation in or retreat from public politics recast moral personhood and responsible citizenship not as proactive engagement in the present but an ongoing project of self-cultivation and capacity building for the future.

In addition, Dr. Sum has since 2016 worked with behavioral ecologists to compare emerging patterns of social inequality in matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo (Na) communities in southwestern China. This collaborative research investigates the impact of market integration on health outcomes, gender inequality, family structure, and social networks. Results are to date published in academic journals including Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies. Dr. Sum’s ongoing research in Mosuo and Nuosu communities continues to examine how poverty alleviation measures and education policies reshape ethnic inequality and state-society relationship in the region.

Dr. Sum holds faculty appointment at BU’s College of General Studies. She is also the Book Review Editor of HJAS (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies), published by Harvard-Yenching Institute.

View Dr. Sum’s Faculty Profile at the College of General Studies (CGS)

Selected Publications

• “Politics of Indifference: Mourning Wang Yue in Late Socialist China,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11.3 (2021).
• “Hierarchy, Resentment, and Pride: Politics of Identity and Belonging among Mosuo, Yi, and Han in Southwest China,” with Tami Blumenfield, Mary K. Shenk, and Siobhán Mattison, Modern China (2021).
• “Suffering and Tears: Authenticity and Student Volunteerism in Post-Reform China,” Ethos 45.3 (2017): 409–29.

Select Courses

• CAS AN 101 Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
• CAS AN 252 Ethnicity and Identity
• CAS AN 260 Sex and Gender in Anthropological Perspective
• CAS AN 379 China: Tradition and Transformation
• CGS SS 103 Politics, Economies, and Social Change: The Ancient World through the Enlightenment
• CGS SS 104 Politics, Economies, and Social Change: The Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution