Cold War heritage scholarship has long privileged material remains—bunkers, silos, ruined infrastructures—while overlooking the living bodies through which such landscapes were produced and remembered. This lecture examines Beijing's Mao-era civil defence shelters, built through mass urban mobilisation, drawing on oral histories with surviving participants.

It traces how state-orchestrated affects—enthusiasm, devotion, and fear—propelled bodies to physiological extremity, and how the sensory conditions of subterranean labour sedimented those affects into enduring corporeal form. This recursive interplay between feeling and flesh, I argue, constitutes a corporeal archive: a fragile repository of historical knowledge preserved not in ruins or records, but in the lived afterlives of mobilised bodies.

Through the cultivation–devotion–trauma nexus, the lecture reconceptualises infrastructure heritage as a process in which affect and embodiment co-produce one another, and reframes temporality as an urgent epistemological condition—for as these ageing bodies pass, their affective and sensory histories will be lost together.

Dr Geng Li is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University. Her research spans the anthropology of architecture, cultural heritage, Chinese popular belief, and the sociology of technology. She received his PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University (2015). Prior to joining MPU, she was Associate Professor at China Agricultural University and Assistant Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

ZOOM details:
https://anu.zoom.us/j/88232672199?pwd=jhI3bVuQoJnn46sZ26cdRhKhI2QAMu.1

Meeting ID: 882 3267 2199 - Password: 734224