Vietnam's 'modernisation' increasingly relies on heritage-tourism, often prioritising economic development over Indigenous sacred meanings at religious sites. This research investigates this dynamic through the lens of Bourdieu's symbolic violence, analysing how tourist-oriented Hau & Dstrok;ong (spirit mediumship) performances at Po In & acirc; N & acirc;gar temple normalise the transformation of sacred grounds into performance platforms. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2022 to 2025, the study utilises participant observation, 25 in-depth interviews, and a netnographic analysis of 2,543 online comments. These findings reveal how the local Cham community navigates this dynamic, utilising digital technologies to interpret and respond to the online circulation of these events. By advocating for temple sanctity and ritual stewardship, they reassert cultural authority. Ultimately, this work contributes to the digital anthropology of religion and heritage preservation scholarship, highlighting how Indigenous communities maintain agency across physical and digital landscapes.
Within a global discipline still marked by uneven epistemic hierarchies, collaborations in Chinese anthropology provide a revealing lens for examining how knowledge can be produced relationally. This article analyses partnerships between Western and Chinese anthropologists from the 1990s to the 2020s to show how knowledge co-creation operates in practice. Using Nelson Graburn's long-term engagements in China as an ethnographic point of entry, it traces how collaborative relationships developed through shared fieldwork, mentorship, institutional exchanges, and co-authorship. These practices enabled Chinese scholars, including those working in minority regions, to pursue research agendas grounded in local histories, philosophical traditions, and socio-political conditions. Across domains such as heritage, museum studies, ethnic tourism, foodways, and art, co-created scholarship generated analytical questions that extend beyond the Chinese context. While structural asymmetries persist, the article argues that relational forms of knowledge production emerging from these collaborations broaden anthropology's conceptual repertoire and offer insights for rethinking collaborative practice in global anthropology.
Vaccine hesitancy is considered a growing problem worldwide. In Papua New Guinea, the vaccine for the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was met with extraordinary fear and antipathy, resulting in one of the world's lowest rates of COVID-19 vaccination. Not only were there concerns about the vaccine's safety, it was also perceived as a grave threat to sovereignty and religious faith. We draw on 131 qualitative interviews with health service clients, healthcare workers, community leaders, and stakeholders to explore how the colonial legacies of medicine and Christianity converged with global conspiracies to shape locally resonant beliefs and opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine. Eschewing a deficit approach, we argue for the importance of seeking to understand the contexts into which biomedical interventions are introduced and made sense of, particularly in neocolonial settings; it is critical to the ability to respond to future pandemics in attuned and effective ways.
This article argues that Ravar Paiwan musical practices constitute a sophisticated Indigenous knowledge system that sustains fundamental relationships between community and water environments through concepts of interconnectedness (vecik) and duality (cikem/zemingeraw). Focusing on the Paridrayan community's connection to the Ailiao river, this ethnographic study (2017-2024) examines how three water-related periods-mythological origins, community establishment, and post-Typhoon Morakot displacement-have shaped their sound worlds. The analysis centres on multipart singing and twin-pipe bamboo flutes (lalingedan and palingedr), demonstrating how these practices embody Indigenous concepts of duality and infinity. It reveals how locally sourced bamboo, nourished by Paridrayan waters, creates distinctive sonic characteristics in Ravar Paiwan flutes. Using vecik, cikem, and zemingeraw as primary analytical frameworks, I show how musical practices preserve environmental knowledge and cultural memory. This article contributes to discussions of Indigenous ecological knowledge and cultural preservation, highlighting the role of music in maintaining community identity during environmental displacement.
