2018-2019 Colloquium Series


The Tourism Studies Working Group is pleased to announce
 
THE NEW AND THE OLD:
The Wine Tasting Landscape of China in the Global Encounter

Nelson Graburn
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Xiangchun Zheng
Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Yunnan Minzu University

Friday, February 15, 5:00pm
Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:
In the past two decades, the consumption of wine in China has encountered the 'globalization of drinking practice'. This 'globalization' means diverse and distant groups drink similar items in increasingly similar ways. In China, the consumers are getting involved in the sensual learning process to link their wine taste with the global representation of characteristics including balance, complexity, harmony and length of the aromatic and flavor through wine education, a boom in the number of wine tasting events and social media, especially the app of WeChat. However, each culture has its own palate, taste pattern and preference, which serve as a cohesive and stable force to accustom a specific tasting landscape to balance between the new taste and traditional inner taste. Today, in China, the newly trained tastes are blending with the old taste accumulated in Chinese traditional food philosophy and people's daily life to form a particular embodied culture of Chinese tasting landscape. So this study, based on participant observation focusing on the tasting experience of Chinese wine consumers, attempts to explore the process of encounter, interaction and negotiation between the newly learned taste regime and the traditional inner taste experience. Moreover, it tries to understand the following: how does the association between newly learned taste and inner taste encounter and interact? What do Chinese people actually sense and experience when they taste wine? How does this dynamic negotiation finally produce the particular cultural embodiment experience and knowledge in contemporary China's wine consuming behavior?

Speaker Bios:
Nelson Graburn was educated at Kings, Canterbury, Cambridge (1958), McGill (1960) and Chicago (PhD 1963) with a Postdoc at Northwestern (1963-4). He has taught Anthropology at U C Berkeley since 1964, and served as Curator of the Hearst Museum, Chair of Canadian Studies and Co-chair of Tourism Studies Working Group. He also taught in Canada, France, UK, Japan, and Brazil and at 35+ universities in China. He has carried out research with Canadian Inuit (1959-2014) and Naskapi-Cree (1963-4), and in Japan (since 1974) and China (since 1991). His works include: Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976); To Pray, Pay and Play: The Cultural Structure of Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983); The Anthropology of Tourism (1983); Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008); 旅游人类学论文集 [Anthropology in the Age of Tourism] (2009); Tourism and Glocalization in East Asia (2010); Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads (2016), Tourism in (Post)Socialist Eastern Europe (2017), Cultural Tourism Movements (2018) and Simulacra, Architecture, Tourism and the Uncanny (2019). In addition to wine consumption in China, his recent work has focused on the Future of Ethnic and Village Tourism in China, the Education and Empowerment of Chinese Minority Scholars, the Indigenization of Key Social and Cultural Concepts in Chinese (bentuhua) Anthropology, Tourism and Museums in Contemporary China, and the Internationalization of Japan's 'Contents Tourism.'

Xiangchun Zheng is associate professor of department of Anthropology and Ethnology at Yunnan Minzu University in China, and visiting scholar at UC, Berkeley. She received her PhD from Xiamen University. Xiangchun Zheng's research interests include wine production and consumption of China, culture heritage and anthropology of tourism. She has published one monograph and over 30 essays. Her book titled 葡萄的实践：一个滇南坝子的葡萄酒文化缘起与结构再生产（The Grapes' Practice: Cultural and Social Reproduction of Wine at a Bazi in Southwestern Yunnan. Beijing University Press, 2012) focuses on the practice of grapes from the perspective of anthropology, to explore the process of local social and cultural change and reproduction due to the wine production associating with wine cultures encounter between the western and China. Since 2016 she has carried out research wines and wine consumption in Portugal and Bordeaux as well as in China. She focusses on the socio-symbolic meaning of wine consumption and its evolution in globalizing China.