GSSC Seminar Series
18 March 2025
Recent Findings on Ethnic and Religious Traditions in Historic Mining Villages in Southwest China
Nanny Kim, University of Cologne
12:00-13:00
Working on mining history in China is an uneasy topic for historians because traditional written records are scarce. At the same time, indirect evidence reflects great historic depth, reaching back several hundred years at many sites. In this talk I will present oral histories with a focus on recent findings from villages in mining areas in which intensive mining ended four to five centuries ago.
Nanny Kim is a China historian interested in mines and networks in the mountain zone of southwest China and Southeast Asia. She employs a fieldwork-based approach that combines traditional historical records with oral histories and remains and uses methodologies of history, geography and ethnology. Research that mainly focused on silver mining in Yunnan was made possible by two DFG projects in collaboration with Yang Yuda (Fudan University) and other colleagues in China and Vietnam (2015-2018 and 2019-2022) and a membership with the Institute for Advanced Study (2023-2024). Her project at GSSC aims at realizing a systematic integration of networks of mobility and case studies on transformations of mining communities during and after mineral exploitation.