Mingyuan Zhang | Writing Against ‘Mask Culture’

Dr. Mingyuan Zhang is a sociocultural anthropologist by training. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Community Medicine and Global Health the University of Oslo. She received her PhD degree from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario in November 2018. Her doctoral research focuses on how the meaning of “being Chinese” is culturally constructed in northern Madagascar, and the social implications of Chinese-led development projects in the same region. Prior to moving to Norway, she was a writing fellow at the Centre for Ethnography at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Scarborough. She has also taught at the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She speaks and writes Mandarin Chinese and English fluently, and has a working knowledge of French and the dialect of Malagasy spoken in northern Madagascar. More info: https://uio.academia.edu/MingyuanZhang

Further Reading:

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 137–162. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lynteris, Christos. 2018. “Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment.” Medical Anthropology (37)6: 442–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2017.1423072.

Lynteris, Christos. 2020. “Why Do People Really Wear Face Masks During an Epidemic?” The New York Times, 13 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/coronavirus-face-mask-effective.html (accessed 10 July 2020).

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Zhang, Mingyuan. 2021. Writing Against “Mask Culture”: Orientalism and Covid19 Responses in the West. Anthropologica 63 (1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica6312021327