Matthew Kohrman
Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Bio
Matthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.
Academic Appointments
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Associate Professor, Anthropology
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Senior Fellow (By courtesy), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Associate Professor (By courtesy), Medicine
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Member, Stanford Cancer Institute
Administrative Appointments
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Faculty Fellow, Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford University School of Medicine (2015 - Present)
Program Affiliations
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Center for East Asian Studies
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Modern Thought and Literature
2024-25 Courses
- A Hands-On Anthropological Introduction: Health, Politics, and Culture of Contemporary China
OSPBEIJ 55 (Spr) - Medical Anthropology
ANTHRO 282, ANTHRO 82, HUMBIO 176A (Aut) - Reading Theory Through Ethnography
ANTHRO 300 (Win) -
Independent Studies (16)
- Directed Individual Reading in Anthropology
ANTHRO 454 (Aut) - Directed Individual Study
ANTHRO 451 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Directed Individual Study
ANTHRO 96 (Aut, Win) - Graduate Directed Reading
EASTASN 300 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Internship
ANTHRO 452 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Teaching
ANTHRO 440 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Independent Study for Honors or Senior Paper Writing
ANTHRO 95B (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Internship in Anthropology
ANTHRO 97 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Master's Project
ANTHRO 441 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Qualifying Exam Preparation in Anthropology
ANTHRO 455 (Aut) - Qualifying Examination: Area
ANTHRO 401B (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Qualifying Examination: Topic
ANTHRO 401A (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Qualifying Paper
MTL 390 (Win, Spr) - Reading for Orals
MTL 399 (Win, Spr) - Research Apprenticeship
ANTHRO 450 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Research in Anthropology
ANTHRO 95 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum)
- Directed Individual Reading in Anthropology
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- From Biopolitics to Necropolitics and Beyond
ANTHRO 322 (Win) - Health, Politics, and Culture of Modern China
ANTHRO 148, ANTHRO 248, CHINA 155A, CHINA 255A (Spr) - Reading Theory Through Ethnography
ANTHRO 300 (Spr)
2021-22 Courses
- Medical Anthropology
ANTHRO 282, ANTHRO 82, HUMBIO 176A (Win) - Prefield Research Seminar
ANTHRO 93 (Spr) - Proposal Writing Seminar in Cultural and Social Anthropology
ANTHRO 308 (Spr)
- From Biopolitics to Necropolitics and Beyond
All Publications
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Filtered Life: Air Purification, Gender, and Cigarettes in the People's Republic of China
PUBLIC CULTURE
2021; 33 (2): 161-191
View details for DOI 10.1215/08992363-8917164
View details for Web of Science ID 000664784000005
- Tobacco Reconsidered: Ongoing Omissions, Original Outlooks in the Slipstreams of Experience, Global Health and Critical Industry Studies ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY 2020; 49
- Unmasking a Gendered Materialism: Air Filtration, Cigarettes, and Domestic Discord in Urban China Can Science and Technology Save China? Utopian Dreams, Dystopian Realities edited by Greenhalgh, S., Zhang, L. Cornell University Press. 2020
- Scholars’ Plea: U.S. and China, Work Together on the Pandemic New York Times. New York, New York. 2020
- The Chinese Cigarette Industry during the Great Leap Forward Poisonous Pandas Stanford University Press. 2018
- “Filtered” Cigarettes and the Low-Tar Lie in China Poisonous Pandas Stanford University Press. 2018
- Wrangling the Cash Cow: Reforming Tobacco Taxation since Mao Poisonous Pandas Stanford University Press. 2018
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Curating Employee Ethics: Self-Glory Amidst Slow Violence at The China Tobacco Museum
MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2017; 36 (1): 47-60
Abstract
Seen through the prism of public health, the cigarette industry is an apparatus of death. To those who run it, however, it is something more prosaic: a workplace comprised of people whose morale is to be shepherded. Provisioning employees of the cigarette industry with psychic scaffolding to carry out effective daily work is a prime purpose of the China Tobacco Museum. This multistoried exhibition space in Shanghai is a technology of self, offering a carefully curated history of cigarette production thematized around tropes such as employee exaltation. Designed to anchor and vitalize the ethical outlook of those working for the world's most prolific cigarette conglomerate, the museum is a striking illustration that industrial strongholds of 'slow violence' produce their own forms of self-care.
View details for DOI 10.1080/01459740.2016.1174227
View details for Web of Science ID 000390586900005
View details for PubMedID 27050550
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC5258112
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Cloaks and Veils: Countervisualizing Cigarette Factories In and Outside of China
ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
2015; 88 (4): 907-939
View details for Web of Science ID 000366229700003
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Smoking intensity among male factory workers in Kunming, China.
Asia-Pacific journal of public health
2015; 27 (2): NP606-15
Abstract
This study investigated the intensity of cigarette consumption and its correlates in China among urban male factory workers, a cohort especially vulnerable to tobacco exposure, one that appears to have benefitted little from recent public health efforts to reduce smoking rates.Data were collected from men working in factories of Kunming city, Yunnan, China, who are current daily smokers (N = 490). A multinomial logistic regression was conducted to examine the factors in association with smoking intensity in light, moderate, and heavy levels.Light smoking correlated with social smoking, smoking the first cigarette later in the day, self-reported health condition, and quit intention. Heavy smoking was associated with purchase of lower priced cigarettes, difficulty refraining from smoking, and prehypertensive blood pressure.Even in regions where smoking is highly prevalent, even among cohorts who smoke heavily, variation exists in how cigarettes are consumed. Analyses of this consumption, with special consideration given to smoking intensity and its correlates, can help guide tobacco-control strategists in developing more effective interventions.
View details for DOI 10.1177/1010539513483826
View details for PubMedID 23572373
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4167973
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Tobacco
ANNUAL REVIEW OF ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL 40
2011; 40: 329-344
View details for DOI 10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164527
View details for Web of Science ID 000299376200022
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Anthropology in China's health promotion and tobacco
LANCET
2008; 372 (9650): 1617-1618
View details for DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61361-6
View details for Web of Science ID 000260899900009
View details for PubMedID 18930530
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Smoking among doctors: Governmentality, embodiment, and the diversion of blame in contemporary China
MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2008; 27 (1): 9-42
Abstract
How and to what effect have physicians in China become frequent cigarette smokers and blamed as engines of nationwide tobacco-induced suffering? Building on governmentality heuristics, I argue that multilevel interactions of biopolitics and male embodiment have been especially significant in shaping these phenomena. Of the effects gleaned in my fieldwork ongoing since 2003, the most important is a deflection of responsibility for tobacco-induced death away from incoherent leadership decisions--some aimed at protecting Chinese citizens from tobacco, others at facilitating trillions of cigarettes being sold annually in the PRC--made over recent years in and outside the country.
View details for DOI 10.1080/01459740701831401
View details for Web of Science ID 000253096800003
View details for PubMedID 18266170
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Depoliticizing tobacco's exceptionality: Male sociality, death and memory-making among Chinese cigarette smokers
CHINA JOURNAL
2007; 58: 85-109
View details for DOI 10.1086/tcj.58.20066308
View details for Web of Science ID 000248937800004
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Why am I not disabled? Making state subjects, making statistics in post-mao China
MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY
2003; 17 (1): 5-24
Abstract
In this article I examine how and why disability was defined and statistically quantified by China's party-state in the late 1980s. I describe the unfolding of a particular epidemiological undertaking--China's 1987 National Sample Survey of Disabled Persons--as well as the ways the survey was an extension of what Ian Hacking has called modernity's "avalanche of numbers." I argue that, to a large degree, what fueled and shaped the 1987 survey's codification and quantification of disability was how Chinese officials were incited to shape their own identities as they negotiated an array of social, political, and ethical forces, which were at once national and transnational in orientation.
View details for Web of Science ID 000181417400002
View details for PubMedID 12703387
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Authorizing a disability agency in post-Mao China: Deng Pufang's story as biomythography
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2003; 18 (1): 99-131
View details for Web of Science ID 000181232300004
- Grooming Que Zi: Marriage Exclusion and Identity Formation among Disabled Men in Contemporary China AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST 2000; 26: 890-909
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Motorcycles for the disabled: Mobility, modernity and the transformation of experience in urban China
CULTURE MEDICINE AND PSYCHIATRY
1999; 23 (1): 133-155
Abstract
This paper describes changes in people's attitudes toward and experiences of disability in contemporary China. In particular, it examines how, as a result of shifting gender structures and modernist modes of production, urban men who struggle to walk have adopted cycle technologies, and how this has caused Chinese society increasingly to associate these men with disability. The paper further details ways the young state-run advocacy organization, the China Disabled Persons' Federation, has contributed to these attitudinal and experiential shifts by providing more assistance to urban men who struggle to walk than to any other PRC citizens who might be considered disabled. In general, the transformations outlined in this paper exemplify how ongoing macro changes in contemporary China often provide benefits to a relatively small number of people and how, for those who receive them, the benefits are often double-edged.
View details for DOI 10.1023/A:1005455815637
View details for Web of Science ID 000080678500007
View details for PubMedID 10388946