Donald Sutton
Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies
Bio
Donald Sutton is a China historian working at the juncture of history and anthropology. Besides early studies of the origins of 20th century warlordism, he has mostly focused on ritual or folk religion, with support from the Fulbright Program, the Taiwan National Endowment for Culture and the Arts, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the ACLS and SSRC and St John’s College in Cambridge, U.K. Dr. Sutton has published on religious and social change in 20th century Taiwan, and on late imperial social relations explored through religion, and will gather some of the articles for a book on ritual in Chinese societies.
Another line of his research explores ethnicity and religion in two remote areas: West Hunan and the Tibetan borderlands. The second project, conducted jointly with the historian Xiaofei Kang (George Washington University), centers on a World Heritage site with the support of collaborative summer grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their book in draft, “Contesting the Yellow Dragon,” is a case study of ethnicity, religious practice, tourism and environmentalism. As an offshoot of this work, Dr. Sutton is examining state formation in Aba Autonomous Tibetan and Qiang Prefecture in the early People’s Republic.
He is also a contributing editor for the Journal of Ritual Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ethnology (民族学刊), Chengdu, China.
Education
Ph.D., Cambridge UniversitySelected Publications
“Policy and Identity on an Ethnic Periphery: The Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture: 1950-2010,” in Carolyn Cartier and Tim Oakes, eds., Vast Land of Borders: Regionality and the Development of the Chinese State (in press)
“Transfers of a Ritual at a Northern Sichuan Site: Tibetan and Han Chinese Pilgrims, and Han Chinese Tourists,” in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, Gen. ed. Alex Michaels. Vol. V, I: Transfer and Spaces: Ritual Transfer. Eds. Gita Dharampal-Frick and Robert Langer. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden (Nov. 2010), pp. 235-57.
Faiths on Display: Religious Revival and Tourism in China. Rowman and Littlefield. Co-edited and introduced with Tim Oakes (2010)
“Making Tourists and Remaking Locals: Religion, Ethnicity and Patriotism in Northern Sichuan,” (co-authored with Xiaofei Kang), for Tim Oakes and Donald Sutton, ed. (see above), pp. 103-26.
“明清時期的文化一體性、差異性與國家：對標準化與正統實踐的討論之延伸” (Cultural Unification, Variation and the State in Ming and Qing Times: A Contribution to the Debate on Standardization and Orthopraxy) (with the assistance of Melissa Brown, Paul Katz, Ken Pomeranz, and Michael Szonyi, in Lishi renleixuekan [Journal of History and Anthropology] (in Chinese), Hong Kong and Guangzhou 7, 2 (October 2009): 139-163