Anthropologist's Book Receives Ethnographic Writing Honorable Mention

Li Zhang's 'Anxious China' explores mental distress and psychotherapy in Chinese society

Book cover with title "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" and author's name Li Zhang over image of hair braids standing up like wheat stalks

A book by UC Davis anthropology professor Li Zhang on the rise of Western-style psychological counseling in China received honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s 2021 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing competition.

Anxious China: Inner Revolution and the Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how this unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times.

'Anxious China' is a superb achievement, and marks an outstanding example of the some of the best ethnographic writing today.” — Petra Rethmann, an anthropologist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and other members of the Victor Turner Prize committee.

Portrait photo of UC Davis anthropologist and award-winning author
Li Zhang

The committee received more than 110 submissions for this year's Victor Turner Prize. Books were judged on their quality of writing, depth of engagement with ethnographic material, and intellectual contributions to the field of anthropology and ethnographic genres.

Zhang researches cultural, spatial and psychological repercussions of market reforms and postsocialist transformations in China. She also received awards for her books In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population (Stanford University Press, 2002).

— Kathleen Holder, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science

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