Cultural Heritage Politics in China

Tami Blumenfield is the James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Furman University. An anthropologist of China and documentary film producer who earned her doctorate at the University of Washington in 2010, she has spent more than four years conducting fieldwork in ethnically diverse regions of southwest China. Supported in part by a Fulbright fellowship and a grant from the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council, she has researched educational practices, cultural heritage politics, and social change. Much of her research has explored social change in Na villages located in and around tourist zones near Lugu Lake. Her book manuscript Screening Moso: Communities of Media in Southwest China, supported by a publication fellowship from the American Association for University Women, discusses a collaboration and participatory media project with the Moso Folk Museum. Blumenfield has also begun a project examining growing inequality in tourist areas of northwest Yunnan. She is a founding board member of the Cool Mountain Education Fund, an organization that supports students in Liangshan, China.