Barbara L. Voss

“The Cosmopolitan Village” is the first archaeological study to investigate the Chinese diaspora from a homeland perspective. This project is based on three years of field and laboratory research at Cangdong Village, a qiaoxiang (migrants’ home village) in Guangdong Province. The study examines multiple domains of material practices to reconstruct an intimate picture of village daily life during and after migration. These findings are compared with results of research at Chinese diaspora sites throughout the North American West. Conceptually, “Cosmopolitan Village” mobilizes theories of vernacular cosmopolitanism and the Chinese philosophical concept of tianxia (all under heaven) to trace the co-production of the local and the global through material practices.