University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 23, 2006

By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor

Everett Zhang's research takes him back to his native China at least once a year.

"Anthropologists—we travel a lot," says Zhang, who in August joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, as an assistant professor.

The rapid societal changes taking place in China take UB anthropologist Everett Zhang back to his homeland at least once a year.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Zhang, who moved to the United States to study for a Ph.D., is developing his dissertation into a book examining the transformation from Maoist socialism to post-Mao Chinese society as viewed through changes in sexuality, the body and medicine.

He's also working on several different projects that examine the much-heralded changes Chinese society has undergone recently, and the effect those dramatic changes are having on the population.

In one project, Zhang is looking into the way life and the individual are valued differently in post-Mao China.

"My thesis is that there is a fundamental change in logic between the logic of the two periods," he says. "It's the logic of how to treat life."

Zhang explains further. "In the Maoist period, people were encouraged to sacrifice their lives for the collective cause. One extreme example would be that if you died protecting property owned by the state, you would be praised as heroic."

Now, he says, while heroism still is promoted, the life of the individual has more value than before. For example, under the old mentality, if a plane was hijacked, passengers would feel they had to fight the hijackers, regardless of what seemed like the best thing to do at the time. Now, he says, they would be expected to act in whatever way they thought would save lives.

Zhang calls this change one of the most significant in the transformation of modern China.

"We cannot take this for granted. We have to ask questions about it and examine it," he says.

Zhang also is interested in the revival of the cultivation of life in Chinese society, including what he sees as an increase in the practice of Daoism.

The new consumer society in China, he notes, means more stress on the body and a desire for more material things. Daoism, he says, combats those trends by promoting long life and harmony between the body and nature, and he feels it may help the Chinese people combat some of the downfalls of a desire-centered society.

His third area of ongoing research looks at the increasing rate of mental illness and numbers of psychiatric patients in China.

He suspects that this change, too, could be related to the rapid change to a more consumer-oriented society, as people who were once satisfied with a simple lifestyle now navigate the world of competition and materialism.

Anthropologists spend a lot of time in the cultures they're studying. But the rapid changes taking place in China make it that much more important that Zhang return frequently and stay in touch with what's happening in the country. It's not uncommon, he says, for people to literally lose their way home because the landscape has changed so much—roads rerouted, vegetation removed, buildings torn down and others constructed, all within a few years.

"The landscape is thoroughly altered in some places," he says. "Chinese anthropologists are challenged to study the changing society, the uncertainty."

Zhang earned a bachelor's degree from Sichuan University and a master's degree from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, them worked as a researcher at the academy for three years. He also served as the executive editor of the academic journal Reference Materials of American Studies before enrolling in Texas State University for his second master's degree. He attended Boston University and the University of California-Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate in social and cultural anthropology in 2003. He did postdoctoral studies in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School for two years.

At UB, he teaches "Medical Anthropology" and "The Anthropology of the Body," both graduate-level courses, as well as an undergraduate course called "Understanding China: Culture, Society and its Transformation."

"I enjoy teaching very much," he says. "I think the interest of students in learning has a lot to do with how the teacher teaches. The passion of the teacher can affect the students and increase their interest, not only in the topic, but in the field."

Zhang lives in North Buffalo. In his spare time, he enjoys classical music and the board game Weiqi, commonly known in the United States as Go. Zhang explains that Go incorporates several concepts that are important in Chinese thought—the 361 black-and-white game pieces are close to the number of days in a year, and their round shape and the board's square shape are also significant.

"In ancient Chinese understanding, the sky is round and the earth is square," he says. "Black symbolizes the night and white symbolizes the day. So you have sky versus Earth and day versus night."