Profile
Hongni Yang is conducting postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she is affiliated with the Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’ as an Associate. Her research stay at MPI is supported through Sino-German (CSC-DAAD) Postdoc Scholarship Program. Her current work concerns the fragility of living heritage and asks how agricultural landscapes can remain “living” when the everyday conditions that sustain them are increasingly under pressure.
Based on long-term ethnographic research in China’s Hani Rice Terraces, she examines how heritage governance, tourism development, labour migration, and generational change reshape farming practices, landscape maintenance, and rural futures. She is also developing a collaborative project on gender, tourism participation, and rural resilience.