Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty Member

Lili Lai

Lili Lai received her PhD in Anthropology from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2009. After her 2-year postdoc at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology at Peking University, she joined the School of Health Humanities of PKU in 2011. Now Associate Professor of anthropology, Lai’s research interests focus on body, everyday life, and medical practices. Lai has done extensive ethnographic and interdisciplinary research in North and Southwest China, both rural and urban areas, on health-related issues. By sensitively reading everyday social life and analyzing periodic eruptions of frictions in “Shang Village” (Henan), her 2016 book, Hygiene, Sociality and Culture in Contemporary Rural China manages to show that the conventional generalizations about rural people are not only wrong, but dangerous. As a medical anthropologist with additional expertise in the anthropology of knowledge and the anthropology of the body, her 2021 book, Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (co-authored with Judith Farquhar), discusses the development of ethnic medical systems in nationality areas, as a kind of historical anthropology and an ethnography of national cultural production. She has also conducted an ethnographic study of the practice of assisted reproductive technologies, where she paid particular attention to the subtle ways in which technical expert knowledge is blended in practice with rather superstitious procedures that play with the uncertainty of achieving a pregnancy by any means, scientific or otherwise.