CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Mollie Gossage is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology whose work focuses on touristic place-making in western China. She conducted the majority of her fieldwork in 2019 as a volunteer tour guide at a major scenic site/national park in Ganzi (Garze), Sichuan Province. When the COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020, Mollie remained in China for another year and a half, experiencing the pandemic’s effects on Chinese society firsthand. Mollie’s forthcoming dissertation considers how visual practices, border processes, and commercial tourism development produce certain perceptions and values of nature, ethnicity and place at multiple scales—from a melting glacier and an old frontier town to the nation and beyond. Additionally, Mollie likes to grapple with the implications of Buddhist philosophy for anthropological methods and to explore the use of comics as an educational tool.