[Linganth] Sonya Pritzker on her book, Learning to Love

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues

This Wednesday, Jiarui Sun asks Sonya Pritzker questions about her
book, *Learning
to Love: Intimacy and the Discourse of Development in China *on the CaMP
blog.


campanthropology.org


Best,

Ilana


Press blurb: *Learning to Love* offers a range of perspectives on the
embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical project of “learning to
love” at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, a popular
“mind-body-spirit” bookstore and practice space in northeast China, in the
early part of the 21st century. This intimate form of self-care exists
alongside the fast-moving, growing capitalist society of contemporary China
and has emerged as an understandable response to the pressures of Chinese
industrialized life in the early 21st century. Opening with an
investigation of the complex ways newcomers to the center suffered a sense
of being “off,” both in and with the world at multiple scales, *Learning to
Love* then examines how new horizons of possibility are opened as people
interact with one another as well as with a range of aesthetic objects at
New Life.

Author Sonya Pritzker draws upon the core concepts of scalar intimacy—a
participatory, discursive process in which people position themselves in
relation to others as well as dominant ideologies, concepts, and ideals—and
scalar inquiry—the process through which speakers interrogate these forms,
their relationship with them, and their participation in reproducing them.
In demonstrating the collaborative interrogation of culture, history, and
memory, she examines how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual
self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of
injustice, how historical systems of power—including both patriarchal and
governance structures—continue in the present, and how they might be
transformed in the future. By examining the interactions and relational
experiences from New Life, *Learning to Love* offers a range of novel
theoretical interventions into political subjectivity, temporality, and
intergenerational trauma/healing.
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