Spec. in Chinese Studies, Kazan State University, 2008
B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature, Jinan University, 2008
M.Phil. in Sociology, Sun Yat-Sen University, 2010
Home town: Kazan, Russia
Email: ruslan.yusupov’at’cuhk.edu.hk

Originally from Russia, I am specializing on China and Islam. My principal research interests lie in the field of sociocultural anthropology, namely, religion and secularism, morality and civil society, state-subject relationship, governmentality and subjectivity. In my spare time, I also like to read about anthropological theory broadly and its engagement with philosophy.

Drawing on recent work in the anthropology of Islam, governmentality, state and citizenship studies, I am currently investigating reconfiguration of state-religion relationship in a Chinese town populated by the Hui minority and the form of citizenship that this reconfiguration produces. My project, entitled Pious Citizenship: Islam, Nationalism and Modernity is a Chinese Town, is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Shadian in the Yunnan Province of China and investigates a new form of subjectivity, which is displayed through public practices of piety. Muslims in Shadian are allowed to learn Islamic ethics in the public schools and to hold public meetings aimed at cultivating pious comportment and a devotional self, thereby challenging the secular idea of religion as private, informal, unproductive practice. Asking why Islamic ethics were valorized for the projects of national modernization in China, I am looking at the convergence of the secular and the religious in Shadian as well as at the political implications that such a convergence enables.