Josh Guo joins the class!

Hey everyone! My name is Josh, and I’m originally from Beijing, China. I’m a freshman in Grace Hopper College and I’m looking to major in anthropology, along with maybe music. I’m taking this course partly due to a project of cultural preservation that I’ve been working on for the past few years in a village in Yunnan Province, China (right on the border with Myanmar/Burma and SE Asia!) with the people of the Mangjing Bulang Minority. They are famous for being the thousand-year originators of the world renowned Pu’er Tea, but their culture contains so many other incredible layers in music, festivals, spirituality, clothing, rituals, and scripture. Through film, e-books, music transcriptions, podcasts, research/interviews, a foundation, and many other fields of work, I’ve grown very close to the Mangjing Bulang people as I’ve worked with them to preserve and pass down their traditional culture, which is fading due to processes of globalization and modernization, especially after the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Throughout the process, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the value of culture as a vessel for identity and a defining aspect of daily life. I’ve also been driven to reflect on my own identity as a second generation Chinese immigrant, which has also been defined by tensions between assimilation and preservation of my heritage. I’m super excited to learn about the changing dynamics in other modern cultures in the region of Southeast Asia beyond the Bulang through this course.