Susan Greenhalgh

Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Columbia, 1982)
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 3308
(949) 824-5683
email: smgreenh at uci dot edu

Susan Greenhalgh's curriculum vitae

Selected publications are listed (and some are available as PDF files) at the bottom of this webpage.

Professor Greenhalgh’s work is centrally concerned with the emergence of power over life in the modern era, especially at the macrolevel of the regulations of the population. By now, anthropology has well illuminated the microdisciplines of the individual body, but the other pole of modern power – the regulations of the social-body-as-a-whole – remains relatively unstudied. Her work focuses on China, home to the world’s largest populace and its largest and strongest communist party. Given that party-state’s intense interest in shaping the population for statist ends, and its determination to borrow Western science and technology in doing so, an inquiry into the regulations of population in China is inevitably an inquiry into state-making and science-making, and the pursuit of the historic agenda of transforming China into a wealthy and powerful socialist state. In the years since Mao’s death, population has been fundamental to that larger project of building China into a modern power – a force to contend with on the world stage. Two books bring these long-term interests to fruition.

The first is Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with E.A. Winckler). This book maps out the governmentalization of population in China over the last fifty years – a remarkable build-up of capacity for governance by the regime, the professions, and individuals – and a gradual, still ongoing shift from “hard” Leninist methods of birth planning toward softer, more “neoliberal” approaches involving indirect regulation by the state and self-regulation by citizens themselves. The book documents how the state’s concern to reduce the “quantity” of Chinese people (via the one-child policy) intersected with concerns to enhance their bodily and mental “quality” (by quasi-eugenic means) to stimulate the development of a gigantic apparatus of population surveillance, management, and control unparalleled in the world. Greenhalgh’s chapters on the policy’s broad social and political consequences show how the governmentalization of population not only restratified Chinese society, inducing social suffering on a staggering scale; it also strengthened the Chinese party-state, gave rise to a qualitatively new, embodied form of power, and reestablished China’s global position in complex and contradictory ways. The book charts the rapid development of a distinctively Chinese form of biopower – power over the production and cultivation of life itself -- in which the macro and micro poles of modern power are especially densely connected. Based on over twenty years of research and written with a political scientist, this book develops a new kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that expands the domain of the political in fresh ways.

The second, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, is a science studies project on the role of Chinese defense science and Marxian social science in the making of the one-child policy and, in turn, of Chinese modernity. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just re-entering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, it documents the extraordinary process by which a handful of leading missile cyberneticists hijacked the population policymaking process to create a policy that treated people like missiles. The book places these science- and policy-making practices in the broader contexts of the scientization and statisticalization of sociopolitical life, showing how certain quantification practices, calculative techniques, and visual inscriptions created a story of the Chinese nation facing a crisis of modernization so serious that only a policy of one child for all could avert it. This new scientific mode of policymaking produced not only a notorious social policy, it yielded a new form of scientific reason within the regime and gave birth to a technoscientific state. Beyond the origins and broad effects of the one-child policy, the book poses larger questions of interest beyond China: What culture is science? What counts as politics now, after the political ascent of science and technology? What constitutes the political abuse of science and why does it matter? What gives population its vital significance as a field of politics today?

Drawing on governmentality and science studies, this book develops a new epistemic, or knowledge-centered, approach to policymaking that suggests the kinds of theoretical, methodological, and ethical contributions anthropologists can make to the study of public policy. Its three central concepts – policy problematization, policy assemblage, and the micropolitics of science- and policy-making -- should be of use to students of modern policy, governance, and power more generally.

Another book, Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain, examines power over life and the body at the microlevel of the doctor-patient encounter in American biomedicine. The Medical Gaze is an auto-ethnography of a life-threatening medical experience in which a pain specialist, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, convinced himself and his patient (the author) that she had a painful, untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. The book traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis and related treatments on the patient’s inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Drawing together the insights of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and feminist work on the self and emotion, the book illuminates medicine’s power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. It argues that the biomedicalization of pain too often silences the ill and diminishes the person in the painful body, and that individual and communal storytelling – especially by the ill themselves -- is a promising strategy for changing the culture and politics of pain.

Professor Greenhalgh is keenly interested in developing an anthropology of public policy. In 2005-06 she served as Faculty-in-Residence at the University of California’s Washington DC Program (UCDC). She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the anthropology of public policy, serves on the Steering Committee of the Interest Group on the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP) within the American Anthropological Association, and is now contributing editor for the IGAPP column in the Association’s Anthropology Newsletter.

Professor Greenhalgh’s work has been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, an Individual Project Fellowship from the Open Society Institute, and a Distinguished Visitorship at the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. In 2002 Greenhalgh received the Population Association of America’s Clifford C. Clogg award for outstanding career achievement during the first twenty years post-Ph.D. Her article, “Missile science, population science,” was a runner-up for the Gordon White Prize for most original article in contemporary Chinese studies in 2005.

Selected Publications

Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, late 2007.

Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, with Edwin A. Winckler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy. China Quarterly 182, June 2005, pp. 253-276.

Globalization and Population Governance in China. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 354-372.

Science, Modernity, and the Making of China’s One-Child Policy. Population and Development Review 29(2), June 2003, pp. 163-196.

Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: "Population" in the Making of Chinese Modernity. American Ethnologist 30(2),May 2003, pp. 196-215.

Fresh Winds in Beijing: Chinese Feminists Speak Out on the One-Child Policy and Women's Lives. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(3), Spring 2001, pp. 847-886.

The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of 20th Century Demography. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38(1), January 1996, pp. 26-66.

Engendering Reproductive Policy and Practice in Peasant China: For a Feminist Demography of Reproduction (with Jiali Li). Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 20(3), Spring 1995, pp. 601-641.

De-Orientalizing the Chinese Family Firm. American Ethnologist, 21(4), November 1994, pp. 742-771.

Controlling Births and Bodies in Village China. American Ethnologist, 21(1), February 1994, pp. 1-30.