Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King's College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant (2020-2026) 'Cosmological Visionaries' and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for upwards of two decades. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Berghahn, 2018) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012).

• List of IllustrationsForeword: Conceptualising Chinese MemoriesJialin Liu and Raphael WoolfIntroduction: Materiality, Imagination and the MemorableKatherine SwancuttPart I: Curating Memories through Art and FilmChapter 1. The Memory Palace of a Chinese PainterBenoît VermanderChapter 2. Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History, Rethinking HistoriographyChris BerryPart II: Framing Memories through Literature and the BodyChapter 3. ‘Swimming against the Current’: The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding LingYejun ZouChapter 4. Chinese Body-Expression and Cultural Memory in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide HipsWei LuanChapter 5. Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish ShanghaiAnna ReadingPart III: Propagating Memories through StorytellingChapter 6. From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust: Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs ServiceChihyun ChangChapter 7. Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling, and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest ChinaKatherine Swancutt and JiarimujiConclusion: Layers, Traces, Fields, and Storehouses of MemoryKatherine SwancuttIndex

“An ambitious, original interdisciplinary project of memory studies that brings together contributions from several academic disciplines – art, film, literature, history, and anthropology. Its highly interesting case studies investigate how memories about/in modern and contemporary China are made through various forms of storytelling and embedded in their materiality.” • Rui Kunze, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg