James L. Watson

James L. Watson is Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University. Watson is an ethnographer who has spent over four decades working in south China, primarily in villages (Guangdong, Jiangxi, and the Hong Kong region). He learned to speak country Cantonese in the Hong Kong New Territories during the late 1960s and has subsequently worked in many parts of the People's Republic (using Mandarin). His research has focused on Chinese emigrants to...See more

James L. Watson is Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University. Watson is an ethnographer who has spent over four decades working in south China, primarily in villages (Guangdong, Jiangxi, and the Hong Kong region). He learned to speak country Cantonese in the Hong Kong New Territories during the late 1960s and has subsequently worked in many parts of the People's Republic (using Mandarin). His research has focused on Chinese emigrants to London, ancestor worship and popular religion, family life and village organization, food systems, and the emergence of a post-socialist culture in the PRC. Watson also worked with graduate students in Harvard's Department of Anthropology to investigate the impact of transnational food industries in East Asia, Europe, and Russia. Publications in the anthropology of food include "From the common pot: eating with equals in Chinese society," Anthropos, 82 (1987); Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia (edited volume, Stanford University Press, 1997/2006); The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader (co-edited with M.L. Caldwell, Blackwell Publishing, 2005); and "Feeding the revolution: public mess halls and coercive commensality in Maoist China," in E. Zhang et al. (eds), Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience (Routledge, 2011). See less