Ray Qu - University of Rochester
About
Press
Papers
We're Hiring!
Ray Qu
University of Rochester
Anthropology
Faculty Member
Followers
14
Following
43
Public Views
I am a cultural and medical anthropologist. I am a first-generation college student and scholar, born and raised in an impoverished peasant’s family in Shandong Province, North China. This experience of growing up in rural China, on the very bottom rung of Chinese society, pushed me to develop research orientations toward marginalized social groups (e.g., peasants, migrant workers, long-haul truck drivers), especially those living in rural China and county-level cities. My research and teaching interests include hope, healing, popular religion and Daoism, health disparities, mental health, chronic disease, rural health, aging, disability, hospital ethnography, ethics of care, migration and health, China Studies, and East and Southeast Asia.
My first book project (A Good Life Foretold: Incense Seeing, Hope, and Healing in North China) is an ethnography of lived hope bound up with religious practices in an authoritarian regime. It explores the practices of incense seeing to ask how people in North China pursue their hope for a good life and cope with uncertainty and precarity by consulting folk healers called incense seers.The study is based on 17 months of fieldwork among seers and their customers in Xia County (a pseudonym), Shandong Province: 13 months continually from 2021 to 2022 under China’s zero-COVID policy, and summers in 2018 and 2019. It details how incense seeing deals with both “empty sickness” (a state of being unwell attributed to the power of spiritual beings and Chinese geomancy) and “solid sickness” (a malfunctioning of body organs and systems), and helps people grapple with hope-related mental distress and conflict through “affective therapeutics”— healing people’s negative emotional states through religious practices. In exploring what happens to these hopes after customers depart from seers’ headquarters, the study unpacks how spiritual experiences influence people’s hopeful dispositions and inspire them to act, resist, and make changes in their lives in contexts of stringent social control such as China’s one-child and zero-COVID policies. An ambitious goal of this project is to extend the boundaries of the anthropology of hope and to mark some new paths that future research on hope, including but not limited to anthropological analysis, might fruitfully proceed.
My long-held hope of doing research that would benefit my hometown and Chinese peasants motivated me to make an early start on my second book project. Titled Sweet Apples, Bitter Lives: Aging Peasants, Chronic Illness, and Living a Good Later Life in North China, this project will provide an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and hopes of older peasants who are chronically ill and disabled.
An article from this new project has recently been published by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. A local narrative paints the hospital as a place where people are made ill. The article ethnographically explores the experience of an elderly couple and my countrymen as they navigate accessing healthcare in an urban hospital in North China. It argues that “sickening landscapes,” a concept built upon the local narrative, provides a fertile ground for enriching the studies of therapeutic landscapes, iatrogenesis, and hospital ethnography.
less
Related Authors
Douglas Fix
Reed College
Mark R Frost
University College London
Gregory Jany
Caroline Chia
Juhn Khai Klan Choo
National University of Singapore
Soon Keong Ong
Nanyang Technological University
Phạm Cảnh
Hélène Veber
Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle
Alan Chong
Boyi Chen (陈博翼)
Xiamen University
Interests
View All (9)
Uploads
all
Papers
Book Reviews
Papers by Ray Qu
'You get sick when you go to the hospital!' Sickening landscapes, digital exclusiveness, and iatrogenesis in rural North China
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
, 2024
A local narrative current in North China's Shandong Province paints the hospital as a place where...
more
A local narrative current in North China's Shandong Province paints the hospital as a place where people become ill. This article foregrounds older rural people's embodied experience of navigating the medical system. This involves humiliation and feelings of incompetence in their interactions not only with other people whom they see as more sophisticated than them but also with unfamiliar things such as elevators and digital payment platforms. 'Sickening landscapes', a concept built upon this narrative, expands the notion of therapeutic landscapes to bring into sharp relief the negative effects of places and things and the embedded health inequities. It offers a native account of iatrogenesis, as something arising from mundane interactions with physical spaces, technologies, and people, which expands the current focus of clinical iatrogenesis on medical error, malpractices, and nosocomial infections. Incorporating the notion of 'sickening landscapes' into the theory of care helps us better attend to the trivial, easily neglected things and places that directly bear on the health and well-being of marginalized social groups.
Identity politics in state-sponsored youth camps for Chinese overseas
China Information
, 2017
China's relations with communities of Chinese overseas and its attempts to improve these relation...
more
China's relations with communities of Chinese overseas and its attempts to improve these relations are challenged by the weakening ties between younger generations of Chinese overseas and China. This article examines Chinese government-sponsored camps which were developed to counteract the estrangement of Chinese overseas youth through exposure to Chinese culture, language, history and society. Drawing on a historical account of the programme and fieldwork performed among Chinese-Filipino youth in Xiamen, it argues that China's youth camps programme is more than a top-down, transnational initiative aimed at influencing the ethnic and cultural identities of these youths. Instead, these camps embody a convergence of national, institutional and personal agendas (e.g. the long-standing Beijing-Taipei rivalry, the self-defined agendas of Chinese overseas, and local officials' desires to garner political credit from upper-level authorities). This study also argues that the programme has made substantial contributions to Chinese language learning and to a relatively positive image of China among Chinese-Filipino participants and that its influence on the cultural and ethnic orientations of Chinese-Filipino youth has been stronger than its impact on their political identity.
Popular Religion Temples in Fujian, Southeast China: The Politics of State Intervention, 1990s-2010s
Modern China
, 2021
This article presents an ethnographic examination of state intervention in popular religion templ...
more
This article presents an ethnographic examination of state intervention in popular religion temples in Fujian, southeast China. Specifically, it surveys the state presence in four temples, explores how and why the local state adopted a varied approach to religious organizations in the same religious tradition, and examines the mutually legitimating relations of state and religion. State-religion relations are constantly changing, highly variable, and context-bound. The state-religion interactions in Fujian demonstrate that to a certain extent the uneven revitalization of temple-based popular religion shaped, and was shaped by, the degree of state presence. I argue that the performance-based legitimacy of the nation-state has been fortified through local-state projects devoted to religious tourism, intrareligious competition, and the Taiwan issue, and that the Chinese state has the potential to influence a reemerging traditional form of authority at the local level through varying degrees of state presence in religious organizations.
The quest for a good life: Incense seeing and the porous and dividual hoping person in North China
American Anthropologist
, 2022
The focus on human intention and action in anthropological studies of hope has made it difficult ...
more
The focus on human intention and action in anthropological studies of hope has made it difficult to attend to the aspects of a hopeful life that lie outside a hoping person’s purpose and control. This article brings the concepts of porous and dividual person- hood into conversation with the fast-growing literature on hope to explore how spiritual forces shape the hoping person and the practices of hope for a good life in North China’s Xia County. The lived experience of my Chinese interlocutors calls attention to the fact that hoping persons are often entangled in extended relationships with spiritual forces as well as other humans. An extended relational framework allows us to attend more carefully to the contingency and complexity of hope, and brings a more nuanced lens to personhood, one that rejects the Enlightenment idea that persons are autonomous, bounded agents, fully in charge of their own worlds.
format_quote
Nana represents a complex personhood, combining celestial and human elements, challenging the secular notion of the hoping person.
format_quote
Book Reviews by Ray Qu
Coming_home_to_a_foreign_country_Xiamen_and_returned_overseas_Chinese_1843_1938
Asian Studies Review
, 2023
Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China. Nicholas Bartlett. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2020.
Ethos
, 2021
Affective trajectories- religion and emotion in African cityscapes
Social Anthropology
, 2020
Opera and the city: The politics of culture in Beijing, 1770-1900 by Andrea S. Goldman
Journal of East Asian Studies
, 2014
or
or
reset password
Need an account?
Click here to sign up
About
Press
Papers
Topics
Academia.edu Journals
work
We're Hiring!
help
Find new research papers in:
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Health Sciences
Ecology
Earth Sciences
Cognitive Science
Mathematics
Computer Science
Content Policy
Academia ©2026