Anna Lora-Wainwright

• BA Anthropology MA Chinese Studies PhD Anthropology
• Professor at University of Oxford

Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. “Cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence,...

Alternately cherished as a valuable resource and reviled as toxic and/or worthless detritus, depending on one's cultural vantage, e-waste comprises the scratched, dented, tarnished flipside of the lucrative consumer electronics industry. This article focuses attention on flows of e-waste from Japan to East Asia, scrutinising channels of production,...

This article adopts a “pathways to sustainability” approach to study lead mining in rural China. Through an in-depth case study, it reveals how shifting mining practices are tied to institutional and political economic contexts, cost-benefit distribution, and changes in livelihood resources and strategies. It weaves together an analysis of liveliho...

It is often assumed that, when citizens do not oppose pollution, it is due to their ignorance of its effects or to structural barriers to change. This article argues that a sense that pollution is inevitable is also a major obstacle. We outline the gradual formation of environmental subjects who have learnt to value their environment in ways conson...

China has officially become a predominantly urban country, with over 50% of the population now registered as urban residents. Its urbanization process has been described as the most managed in human history. The Chinese government manages the building of new cities, regulates the housing of displaced people and controls squatters. As an historicall...

This article advocates for a closer study of the forms of citizenship nurtured among individual participants in citizen science (CS) projects by highlighting some salient features of CS in China. Through a detailed examination of the experiences of students participating in the CS activities of a Chinese environmental NGO, it proposes that attentio...

This position paper advocates for more scholarship on British Chinese and ESEA communities in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It briefly outlines our vision for future research in relation to visual arts and other forms of creativity but also presents some thoughts that could inspire new research directions for scholars with other disciplin...

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to...

This article examines the concept of ‘circular economy’ by looking at its effects on recycling activities in China, in particular through the lens of e-waste or DEEE (discarded electrical and electronic equipment). It focuses on a case study of the recent changes in the globally notorious DEEE recycling hub of Guiyu since plans for the construction...

A multidisciplinary examination of alternative framings of environmental problems, with using examples from forest, water, energy, and urban sectors. Does being an environmentalist mean caring about wild nature? Or is environmentalism synonymous with concern for future human well-being, or about a fair apportionment of access to the earth's resourc...

Environmental distribution conflicts (EDCs) related to the construction and operation of waste incinerators have become commonplace in China. This article presents a detailed case study of citizen opposition to an incinerator in the village of Panguanying, Hebei Province. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, we show how this case was notable, because it...

Chapter 1 situates the book vis-à-vis relevant literature on social movements, environmentalism, environmental health and these areas as they relate to China. In the first part, it suggests that environmentalism may take very diverse forms and it is powerfully shaped by its cultural, social, political and economic contexts. These contexts in turn a...

The conclusion draws comparisons across the three sites and it highlights common dynamics and processes, such as the normalisation of pollution, moulding of new parameters of health and new expectations for a “good life.” It closes by returning to the main themes of the book and to their implications for the social science study of environmentalism...

Chapter 2 examines the emergence of China’s “cancer villages”—village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence—and their significance. It overviews how media accounts discursively shaped their social, political and epistemological nature. It develops a typology of cancer villagers based on a close analysis of a selected number of cases examined in r...

Chapter 3 begins to flesh out the contours of resigned activism through the case of Baocun village, a major site for phosphorous mining and fertiliser production. It shows how industrialisation deeply diversified the local population, ranging from poor migrants to wealthy business owners and bore unequal effects on them: while some are better posit...

The last substantive chapter examines a third case study which differs in important ways from the first two. Unlike Baocun and Qiancun, Guiyu town is a well-known, indeed a notorious environmental health hotspot. Pollution is caused by a vast and complex cottage industry processing electronic waste. Chapter 5 explores how such “e-waste work” became...

Chapter 4 describes the diachronic evolution of lead and zinc mining in Qiancun village and its effects. Mining entrenched socio-economic stratification and caused shifting and uneven environmental health impacts. It affected livelihood pathways available to the local population, their perceptions of the benefits and effects of mining, and the ways...

In February 2013, the Chinese government publicly acknowledged the existence of ?cancer villages? (clusters of high cancer incidence typically correlated with pollution). Like much of environmental health, cancer villages are a contested field. Yet, growing concern and unrest over pollution and its health effects configure ?cancer villages? as not...

This paper evaluates two key patterns of irrigation institutions under integrated water resources management reform - private contracting and collective management using Ostrom's (1990) design principles for robust common pool resources (CPRs) institutions and sees how and to what extent they are applicable in an authoritarian society. Our result e...

Chinese Research Perspectives on the Environment (Volume 3): Public Action and Government Accountability. Edited by LIU JIANQIANG . Leiden: Brill, 2014 xv + 279 pp. €135.00 ISBN 978-90-04-26879-1 - Volume 221 - Anna Lora-Wainwright

Literature on land disputes typically portrays villagers as victims unable to protect their interests. While they sometimes protest against land expropriation, their efforts tend to be met with little success. Undoubtedly, villagers are in a position of relative powerlessness. However, their perspectives on urbanization, development, and displaceme...

Understanding perceptions of resource users and influencing factors that affect these perceptions has significant value in evaluating the success or failure of IWRM (integrated water resource management) reforms. This article explores villagers' experiences of China's recent powerful enforcement of IWRM and the locally perceived impacts through thr...

Based on fieldwork in a heavily industrialized Yunnan village, this article examines how villagers understand and respond to pollution-related health risks. Building on Robert Weller's (2006) concept of environmental consciousness, it shows that Baocun villagers have developed an acute environmental health consciousness. However, despite earlier in...

Numerous reports of "cancer villages" have appeared in the past decade in both Chinese and Western media, highlighting the downside of China's economic development. Less generally known is how people experience and understand cancer in areas where there is no agreement on its cause. Who or what do they blame? How do they cope with its onset? Fighti...

This chapter examines the relationship between cancer etiology and morality. It considers how Langzhong villagers tried to make sense of the reasons for the prevalence of cancer and why it affects particular individuals. While it focuses on the link between cancer and farm chemicals, the chapter also raises broader questions surrounding rising form...

This chapter explores the relationship between cancer and morality by focusing on women's particular experience of hardship, unfulfilled gendered expectations, and emotions as interrelated causes of cancer. It first considers women's perceptions of their hard work in the past and in the present, along with the effects of policy and political econom...

This chapter examines the interplay between the spirit world and perceptions of illness, healing, and mourning by comparing the cases of Gandie and Uncle Wang. More specifically, it considers how different religious allegiances produce different attitudes to healing and mourning, including disagreements. The chapter begins with an overview of spiri...

This chapter examines the relationship between cancer, consumption practices (including eating in general, smoking, drinking, and consuming preserved vegetables), and health more generally by focusing on the case of a sufferer named Gandie. More specifically, it considers how esophagus cancer was experienced by and affected Gandie's family and how...

This book examines how families strive to make sense of cancer and care for sufferers in Baoma, a village of 500 residents six kilometers from Langzhong city, China. It considers how villagers in Langzhong understand the development of cancer, how they cope with it, and how it affects and is affected by family relations. Drawing on her interactions...

This chapter discusses relevant areas in the anthropology of suffering and the ethnography of rural China, with particular emphasis on social suffering, subjectivity, family management of illness, cancer etiologies, and moral economy and morality. It begins with an overview of the link between critical medical anthropology and health inequalities b...

This book has explored how attitudes about the body are produced and inform experiences of cancer. Focusing on Langzhong villagers, it has examined how bodily experience is configured and how families make sense of cancer. It has also situated cancer within a nexus of social, cultural, political, economic, historical, and moral settings. Drawing on...

This chapter describes the ethnographic setting and provides a historical contextualization of village life in Baoma in order to elucidate what is at stake for villagers in the contemporary period as compared to their past experiences and to those of their neighbors. It begins with a brief social and economic history of the locality since the adven...

This chapter examines perceptions of cancer surgery from a social, cultural, and historical standpoint by focusing on Gandie's rejection of surgery. After reviewing some developments in health care provision since the founding of the People's Republic of China (1949) at the national, provincial, county, and village level, the chapter looks at some...

This chapter examines the costs (medical costs, banquets and mourning costs) incurred by the cancer sufferer's nuclear and extended families in dealing with the illness by comparing Gandie's case with that of Uncle Wang. It considers the link between family relations and family caregiving practices, what kinds of health care costs are entailed when...

Numerous reports of “cancer villages” have appeared in the past decade in both Chinese and Western media, highlighting the downside of China's economic development. Less generally known is how people experience and understand cancer in areas where there is no agreement on its cause. Who or what do they blame? How do they cope with its onset? This b...

This paper examines the plural forms of evidence of harm presented by the residents of two Chinese villages affected by severe pollution. Conversely, it scrutinises how and why the antonym to evidence – uncertainty – is emphasised and with what effects. It argues that their uncertainty surrounding environmental health harm is a result of the contex...

Our globe increasingly faces environmental risks from emerging markets such as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Over the last decade a consensus has developed that the particular social, economic and regulatory contexts of emerging markets require a form of regulation that at leastpartly involves citizens, who it is believed can bring extra capa...

This paper examines how villagers in rural Sichuan understand the development of cancer, how they attempt to make sense of why it seems widespread and of why it affects particular individuals. Lay aetiologies of cancer such as negative emotions, smoking, consuming alcohol and preserved vegetables are addressed in order to contextualise environmenta...

Where do Chinese villagers lay the blame when they develop cancer? The focus falls on the state when the supposed cause is water pollution; on the family context when it is hard work; and on the market when farm chemicals contaminate food. These different cancer aetiologies define the contours of a biological citizenship which does not only operate...

This article offers an account of two local options for healing available in contemporary rural Sichuan. Since the recent economic reforms, available healthcare options have multiplied due to social, economic and cultural changes. Yet, rising costs have entailed a narrowing of resources accessible to rural peasantry. In this context, research on th...