Ginkgo Village: A Conversation with Tamara Jacka

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation (ANU Press, 2024), Tamara Jacka takes readers deep into a village in central-eastern China.In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ginkgo villagers experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socioeconomic and political change.At the heart of this book are eight tales that draw on ethnographic and life-history research to re-create Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between the villagers and the researchers who visit them.These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Chinese villagers' often traumatic life experiences, to present concrete details of transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner, and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.Nicholas Loubere: The writing style and format of this book represent a departure from the traditional academic research monograph.You provide a detailed historical and contextualised background to Ginkgo Village, but the bulk of the book is a collection of fictionalised stories.Can you discuss the choices you made when deciding to adopt this unusual approach?What different kinds of political or ethical considerations did you wrestle with compared with the more traditional academic writing you have done in the past?And how do you envision this book contributing to knowledge production differently than other academic monographs, including your own previous works?