Ping-hsiu Alice Lin (林炳秀) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. She was formerly an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International & Area Studies and a Doctoral Fellow (2020-21) at the Center for Global Asia, New York University Shanghai. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2021).
Ping-hsiu researches gemstone economies in South Asia and their intersection with labor, expertise, and imperial commerce. She uses multi-sited ethnographic and archival methods to examine how valuation practices are embedded within imperial and colonial circuits of extraction and contemporary expertise around provenance. Her work spans mining regions in northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan to trading hubs in Peshawar, Karachi and Bangkok, tracing how the materiality of gems extends across diverse sites of production and trade in South and Southeast Asia.
Her book manuscript “Precious Economies: Trading Gems Across Asian Borderlands” is a multi-sited ethnography of Pakistan’s gemstone industry that reveals the social processes through which precious commodities acquire meaning and value. The book examines how imperial and colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary markets, chronicling how local miners, traders, and artisans navigate and contest global hierarchies of value. Ping-hsiu’s work brings an anthropological lens to debates concerning extraction, expertise, and the global circulation of valuable materials, connecting approaches in economic anthropology, postcolonial studies, science and technology studies and human geography.
Ping-hsiu’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her dissertation “Precious Economies” was awarded the IACS Dissertation Prize 2023. Her published work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Quarterly in Asian Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, among others.
A native of Hualien, Taiwan, Ping-hsiu spent her formative years moving between the diverse cultural landscapes of Namibia, Singapore, New Zealand, and France—a geographic mobility that would later inform her anthropological perspective.
Ping-hsiu Alice Lin 