The West in the East Chinese Anthropologies in the Making

Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18-2, 2017

The 4th JASCA International Symposium

Keynote Lecture 1

The West in the East Chinese Anthropologies in the Making

Mingming Wang Peking University

Abstract: Focusing upon the disciplinary formations of Chinese anthropology in the pre-war years (1929-1945), the author examines the “contests” between the varied sub-traditions, chiefly including the Yanda school of sociological ethnography and Academia Sinica school of historical ethnology. These scholarly traditions were invented by different groups of newly returned “students studying abroad” (liuxuesheng) who, having learnt sociology, anthropology, and ethnology in different Western nations, brought home different conceptions of the disciplines. As the author argues, the formations were derived from “Westernization”; but neither were they the same, nor were they opposed to “indigenization.” As varied approaches to disciplinary modernity, they were different combinations of Western and Eastern discourses, each of which was in turn internally varied. Despite their origins in “international exchanges,” they did not develop any concept of internationality or, from Marcel Mauss’s perspective, “civilization.” The problem has continued to trouble Chinese anthropologists in the past decades. Key words: Westernization, Disciplinary Formations, Anthropology, Sub-Traditions, Internationality

Acknowledgements The piece was presented as a special lecture at the 4th workshop on “The Nationalization

and Globalization of East Asian Anthropology” held on 28 December 2017 in Tokyo. I thank the president of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, Professor Motoji Matsuda, and Professor Hironao Kawai for inviting me. I also thank Professor Yoshio Watanabe for encouragement and Professors Byung-Ho Chung, Zhou Xing, Katsumi Nakao, Liu Zheng’ai, and Takami Kuwayama for the inspiring remarks they made during and after the workshop. Some of the materials I use here first appeared in a presentation given at the workshop on

Wang Mingming

“Rethinking Ethnology” held in University College London in June, 2009. I thank Professor Michael Rowlands for that invitation and for giving me inspiration.

First of all, let me thank the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology for inviting me,

and for defining the theme of how in recent decades Chinese anthropology has interacted with Euro-American – or in other words, Western – colleagues. Originally, I thought that I could follow the advice given and speak about the present-day situation. But then I had second thoughts, and considered it to be more prudent to downplay the part about the contemporary situation, on which an insider’s perspective would be biased, if not controversial, and instead spend most of my time discussing the events of a comparatively distant period, that of the two decades between 1929 and 1949, especially the pre-war years.

These decades formed a transitional period in which Chinese anthropology was re-made into a number of disciplinary formations, differentiated from its earlier being as the discourse of History with a capital “H.” During this period, our anthropological ancestors, in inventing their varied disciplinary traditions, ever more actively involved their Western mentors and their writings. In explicit or implicit manners, they turned their intellectual borrowings into certain contesting national sub-traditions, and within the boundaries of these sub-traditions, they and their followers further “absorbed” some Western ideas and research techniques, with which they carried on activating their “ethnographic machineries.” In their academic activities, to varied extents, many of the pioneers – mostly students who had returned from studying abroad (liuxuesheng), cultural intermediators embodying Westernization -- also made what they “recycled” available to the world. They could be said to have been involved in certain intellectual activities typical of what we mean by the word “exchange.”

We can define the interactions in terms of reciprocity, a concept the French sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1925 [1990]) advanced just a few years before the Chinese disciplinary formations were launched. But we should not simply construe these as relations between equals (that is what Mauss meant by “reciprocity,” anyway). Rather, the interactions were practiced and perceived as those between hierarchically defined “generations,” in particular, between Western teachers and Chinese students; and indeed they took place in the age of Western hegemony (Asad ed. 1973; Said 1978; Wolf 1982). In such an age, China, a part of the “circle” of the archaic “empires” of Eurasian landmass defined by Japanese ethnologist Tadao Umesao in terms of “zone two,” was extruded by “zone one” (the West and Japan) (Umesao 2003) as a to-be-modernized nation. In such an “empire-turned nation,” to establish the foundations for anthropology, Chinese intellectuals were anxiously following Western trends and they were more or less “internationalists.” However, they were also motors driving the engine of “indigenization” (Yamashita, Bosco & Eades 2004): as Mauss pointed out in his essay “The nation,” “[s]ocieties live by borrowing

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“Rethinking Ethnology” held in University College London in June, 2009. I thank Professor Michael Rowlands for that invitation and for giving me inspiration.

First of all, let me thank the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology for inviting me,

and for defining the theme of how in recent decades Chinese anthropology has interacted with Euro-American – or in other words, Western – colleagues. Originally, I thought that I could follow the advice given and speak about the present-day situation. But then I had second thoughts, and considered it to be more prudent to downplay the part about the contemporary situation, on which an insider’s perspective would be biased, if not controversial, and instead spend most of my time discussing the events of a comparatively distant period, that of the two decades between 1929 and 1949, especially the pre-war years.

These decades formed a transitional period in which Chinese anthropology was re-made into a number of disciplinary formations, differentiated from its earlier being as the discourse of History with a capital “H.” During this period, our anthropological ancestors, in inventing their varied disciplinary traditions, ever more actively involved their Western mentors and their writings. In explicit or implicit manners, they turned their intellectual borrowings into certain contesting national sub-traditions, and within the boundaries of these sub-traditions, they and their followers further “absorbed” some Western ideas and research techniques, with which they carried on activating their “ethnographic machineries.” In their academic activities, to varied extents, many of the pioneers – mostly students who had returned from studying abroad (liuxuesheng), cultural intermediators embodying Westernization -- also made what they “recycled” available to the world. They could be said to have been involved in certain intellectual activities typical of what we mean by the word “exchange.”

We can define the interactions in terms of reciprocity, a concept the French sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1925 [1990]) advanced just a few years before the Chinese disciplinary formations were launched. But we should not simply construe these as relations between equals (that is what Mauss meant by “reciprocity,” anyway). Rather, the interactions were practiced and perceived as those between hierarchically defined “generations,” in particular, between Western teachers and Chinese students; and indeed they took place in the age of Western hegemony (Asad ed. 1973; Said 1978; Wolf 1982). In such an age, China, a part of the “circle” of the archaic “empires” of Eurasian landmass defined by Japanese ethnologist Tadao Umesao in terms of “zone two,” was extruded by “zone one” (the West and Japan) (Umesao 2003) as a to-be-modernized nation. In such an “empire-turned nation,” to establish the foundations for anthropology, Chinese intellectuals were anxiously following Western trends and they were more or less “internationalists.” However, they were also motors driving the engine of “indigenization” (Yamashita, Bosco & Eades 2004): as Mauss pointed out in his essay “The nation,” “[s]ocieties live by borrowing


from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance” (Mauss 2006, 44). China at the time fitted Mauss’ observation well.

I believe that the activities of exchange have, by themselves, written a history, which, once re-inscribed, can shed important light on the complex conditions and ontologies of anthropology in the East. As I shall show, if there was a Chinese anthropology, then, it should be seen as externally related and internally varied, having been made through certain different syntheses of incoming disseminated forms and contents; and as such, it was not singular. Rather, it consisted of several, strands, all situated “between universalism and indigenism” (Dirlik ed.2012), be they “national anthropologies” (Gerholm & Hannerz 1982), “regional traditions” of ethnography (Fardon 1990), or potential “world anthropologies” (Escobar & Lins Ribeiro 2006).

In the following overview, I shall reflect on the contesting sub-traditions, especially their differing ethnographic styles. Then, I shall show how such sub-traditions continued to expand and to engage more participants during and after World War II, so much so that they created further internal divisions. I shall conclude by putting forward some more reflections and forward-looking speculations in which the past and present become associated.

Brief background

Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), for the sake of restoring the order of

the Mandate of Heaven, imperial officials and scholars visiting Europe and America – as either delegates or exiles – not only carefully studied “in the field” Western technologies and institutions but also earnestly followed the tracks of the development of new social scientific and humanistic ideas (Zhang 1933 [2000]; Wu 1938 [2010], 269-332; Zhong 2000). Notwithstanding the anthropological sensibility evident in ancient books like The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Cai 1926 [1962]) and the magic of wandering in Liezi as well as Fa-Hsien’s Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms (Wang 2014a, 117-152), the origin of Chinese anthropology has been traced back to such late imperial movements of “Westernization” (Zhang 1933 [2000]), driven by evolutionary cosmologies.

For the decade beginning at the end of the 19th century, ethnological diffusionism was also borrowed by some classicists who wrote to argue for the common origin of Eastern and Western civilizations, paradoxically conceived as benefitting China’s self-identity as a modern culture (Wang 2014a, 49-86).

Slightly later, in the first decade of the 20th century, the discipline of anthropology – more oriented toward physical anthropology – was included in the curriculum of the Imperial University of Peking. In the early Republican period, while other Western works in anthropology and related disciplines were translated, anthropology, ethnology, and sociology departments were established in many of the national and missionary universities,

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including Peking, Amoy [Xiamen], Nankai, Tsinghua College, Hujiang (in Shanghai), Catholic (in Beiping, now Beijing), and Western China (in Chengdu) (Wang 1997, 84-96).

However, as a formal discipline, anthropology – often bearing different names – was set up quite late.

Beginning in the late 1920s, some “returned students” brought back, from Europe and America, knowledge of Western-style humanities and social sciences, and, treating them as urgently needed in China’s nation-building projects, began to propagate them in China.

As has been well-established, the term “liuxuesheng,” usually translated as “returned students” or “students studying abroad” (Shu 2011), was a Japanese invention, and centuries back, it referred to those scholars and monks who went to the Tang empire to pursue Chinese wisdom. By the mid-19th century, it had become alternatively a Chinese concept, adopted to refer to the young students who went abroad to learn new ideas and techniques. At the beginning of the 20th century, while the model of the Republic was being imitated in the East, the “students studying abroad” began to focus a great deal more attention on the material and spiritual makings of the Western sciences, believing these to be the factors making possible the growth of power (qiang) of modern nations.

In the new environment of “Westernization,” some of the “students studying abroad,” with their local followers, physicalized the varied conceptions of what in the West was becoming “socio-cultural anthropology” they had learnt in varied Western nations at the institutions where they had worked as researchers and professors, and they formed their own “academic factions” or “schools” (xuepai).

In the early 20th century, anthropology, a discipline ideally comprising ethnographic, ethnological, and theoretical studies of humanity, was practiced in some parts of Europe – for instance, in Germany – as a historical and human geographic (ethnological) synthesis of regional ethnographic knowledge – as a science of the nation. In other parts of Europe – especially in France and Britain – that role had been left to other disciplines, either to the American-style “sacred bundle” of four fields, or to sociology (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 346-381; Stocking 1982).

Whereas in Europe and America, different “national anthropologies” still carried forward their different disciplinary traditions and their respective Enlightenment legacies (historicism, positivism, and utilitarianism), in early 20th century China, they found their own places in the Central Kingdom of the East, and they converged and contested with each other as certain “sub-traditions,” similar to the contention of the varied schools in the warring states period (Liang 1930).

In the late 1920s, Yenching University (Yanda) a foreign university created by the joint efforts of American, Canadian, and British missionary societies in 1919 (Bing 1990) was an important player in social sciences. One of its professors, Wu Wenzao, the leader of the “Chinese school of sociology” was at pains to insert the ethnographic science of “small social areas” into sociology. Roughly at the same time, the ethnologists and historians were working hard to synthesize modern Western learning with Chinese classics in the academic

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including Peking, Amoy [Xiamen], Nankai, Tsinghua College, Hujiang (in Shanghai), Catholic (in Beiping, now Beijing), and Western China (in Chengdu) (Wang 1997, 84-96).

However, as a formal discipline, anthropology – often bearing different names – was set up quite late.

Beginning in the late 1920s, some “returned students” brought back, from Europe and America, knowledge of Western-style humanities and social sciences, and, treating them as urgently needed in China’s nation-building projects, began to propagate them in China.

As has been well-established, the term “liuxuesheng,” usually translated as “returned students” or “students studying abroad” (Shu 2011), was a Japanese invention, and centuries back, it referred to those scholars and monks who went to the Tang empire to pursue Chinese wisdom. By the mid-19th century, it had become alternatively a Chinese concept, adopted to refer to the young students who went abroad to learn new ideas and techniques. At the beginning of the 20th century, while the model of the Republic was being imitated in the East, the “students studying abroad” began to focus a great deal more attention on the material and spiritual makings of the Western sciences, believing these to be the factors making possible the growth of power (qiang) of modern nations.

In the new environment of “Westernization,” some of the “students studying abroad,” with their local followers, physicalized the varied conceptions of what in the West was becoming “socio-cultural anthropology” they had learnt in varied Western nations at the institutions where they had worked as researchers and professors, and they formed their own “academic factions” or “schools” (xuepai).

In the early 20th century, anthropology, a discipline ideally comprising ethnographic, ethnological, and theoretical studies of humanity, was practiced in some parts of Europe – for instance, in Germany – as a historical and human geographic (ethnological) synthesis of regional ethnographic knowledge – as a science of the nation. In other parts of Europe – especially in France and Britain – that role had been left to other disciplines, either to the American-style “sacred bundle” of four fields, or to sociology (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 346-381; Stocking 1982).

Whereas in Europe and America, different “national anthropologies” still carried forward their different disciplinary traditions and their respective Enlightenment legacies (historicism, positivism, and utilitarianism), in early 20th century China, they found their own places in the Central Kingdom of the East, and they converged and contested with each other as certain “sub-traditions,” similar to the contention of the varied schools in the warring states period (Liang 1930).

In the late 1920s, Yenching University (Yanda) a foreign university created by the joint efforts of American, Canadian, and British missionary societies in 1919 (Bing 1990) was an important player in social sciences. One of its professors, Wu Wenzao, the leader of the “Chinese school of sociology” was at pains to insert the ethnographic science of “small social areas” into sociology. Roughly at the same time, the ethnologists and historians were working hard to synthesize modern Western learning with Chinese classics in the academic


spaces they had just hewed out. Several research institutions and universities created their own departments of ethnology and museums of anthropology, and a division of ethnology was constructed within the newly founded Academia Sinica in 1928. The archaeologists, historians and ethnologists at Academia Sinica, and surrounding it, the professors from different universities in Eastern and Southern China, could be said to form a rival to Yenching University’s “Chinese school of sociology” (Hu 2006, 65-68). In the history of Chinese anthropology, scholars speak of the “Southern School” (Nanpai), in opposition to the “Northern,” or, Yanda sociology (Huang 1984, 105-146). Although there were other schools, sociology (coupled with social anthropology) at Yanda and ethnology at the Institute of History and Philology could be said to be two rival “schools,”1 contesting for prominence in an age in which both Westernization (Xi-hua) and Sinification (Zhongguo-hua) were desired as civilizational necessities.

Wu Wenzao and the Yanda school

Wu Wenzao, born in 1901 in Jiangsu, was admitted into Tsinghua College in 1917. He

went to the United States in 1923. At Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he pursued his degrees in sociology. Besides sociology courses, at Columbia, he also took quite a few courses on cultural anthropology offered by the Boasians including Ruth Benedict. After gaining his doctorate, Wu went back to Beiping (present-day Beijing), where he was appointed professor by Yenching University (also referred to as “Yanda”) .

Before Wu was appointed, a sociology department had already existed at Yanda, and in the department there had been Chinese faculty members. Nonetheless, all courses offered were in English and their contents were the same as what the students could read in Anglo-American textbooks.

Soon after he arrived at Yanda, Wu decided to put his project of “Sinification” (Zhongguo hua) into practice. He had maintained that, in China, sociology should be transmitted in the Chinese language, and to set up a model, he composed his syllabus with Chinese characters and lectured in Mandarin.

But Wu’s notion of “Sinification” did not just mean making sociology “Mandarin-speaking”; it also conveyed a different approach to the science. This did not imply carrying out his idea irrespective of external circumstances; on the contrary, as Wu firmly believed, it should be derived from actively interacting with Euro-American intellectual traditions. To establish a “Sinificated sociology,” Wu spent years reviewing major Western sociological and 1 Whereas Yanda sociologists depended financially and institutionally upon support from foreign sources (especially the Rockefeller Foundation; Trescott 1992), institution-building and research at the Institute of History and Philology was directly sponsored by the KMT government (Wang 2006, 209-221). We should not underestimate the impact of the different attitudes of the funding bodies on the schools: profound ethnographic knowledge gained from long-term fieldwork in “small areas” in rural China was highly desired by the Rockefeller Foundation; but the ethnography of such “small social areas” was not at all interesting to those who practiced ethnology or to the Nationalist regime, which demanded a greater scope of national history.

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anthropological strands of thought. By means of synthesizing, he also made great efforts to advance a research method demanded as the main force of his “Chinese” approach. As has been widely known, in the end the “method of community study” (shequ yanjiufa) became the methodological foundation for the Yanda (Northern) School.

One of the main sources of Wu’s method of community study was the writings of the American missionary sociologist Arthur Smith, particularly his Village Life in China (Smith 1899 [2003]) in which the “village-peeping method” was first invented (Wang 2007,164-193).2 However, in their references, Wu and his students only referred to Robert Park’s human ecology, Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnographic science, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism – Western “scientific methods” they borrowed, synthesized, and “processed” in the 1930s.

Yanda sociology’s filiation with Robert Park’s human ecology was formally established in 1932 through Robert Park’s visit (SSYU 1933 [2002]). Prior to his visit to Yanda, Park had traveled extensively in the Asian-Pacific region. In reconsidering “the relations between nations and cultures” with reference to his concept of “assimilation” (Fei 2001, 210), Park took China as an intriguing example of “civilization.” As Park said in his piece “On China” (translated by Wu himself and included in a collection published in honour of Park’s visit), China, “an organic entity that slowly but decisively embraced the diverse cultures of the primitive peoples who were in contact with it,” “changed those cultures, assimilated them, and in the end, incorporated them into the vast complexity of Chinese culture or Chinese civilization” (Park 1933 [2002], 17-18). Contrasting pre-modern China with the European collectivity of nations, Park argued that while the latter grew out of the institution of the State, “out of conquest,” or “extending violence on the neighboring nations, or deploying political means to rule the conquered peoples,” ancient Chinese empire expanded by way of spreading its civilizational influence. “By means of assimilation, China not only incorporated the neighboring weaker nations, but also made those nations that sometimes conquered her adopt the social and moral order of her civilization” (18).

Park’s notion of traditional China’s “civilization” was quite similar to Wu’s theory of the multi-national state. A reading of Wu’s essay “Nations and the state” (published way back in his Columbia years) reveals that a few years before Park’s visit Wu was still making efforts to go beyond the sociology of the State by virtue of old Chinese theories of Great Unity (Wu 1926 [1990]; Wang 2005, 92-102). However, around the year 1932, Wu had become a great deal more interested in methodology. For him, studying China in sociological terms was so natural that it saved a great deal of words about ancient history.

2 Smith, who conducted long-term field studies in Shandong, described imperial China as a great house. He argued that the Western narratives of imperial China before his book was published were wrong to just talk about the big cities of imperial China. He argued that to know the “real China” one should develop a new method, and for him, that was village study. From Smith’s perspective, to see what was contained in the great house of the Chinese empire, one should use the village as a hole in the wall to peek into the secret building of the empire.

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anthropological strands of thought. By means of synthesizing, he also made great efforts to advance a research method demanded as the main force of his “Chinese” approach. As has been widely known, in the end the “method of community study” (shequ yanjiufa) became the methodological foundation for the Yanda (Northern) School.

One of the main sources of Wu’s method of community study was the writings of the American missionary sociologist Arthur Smith, particularly his Village Life in China (Smith 1899 [2003]) in which the “village-peeping method” was first invented (Wang 2007,164-193).2 However, in their references, Wu and his students only referred to Robert Park’s human ecology, Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnographic science, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalism – Western “scientific methods” they borrowed, synthesized, and “processed” in the 1930s.

Yanda sociology’s filiation with Robert Park’s human ecology was formally established in 1932 through Robert Park’s visit (SSYU 1933 [2002]). Prior to his visit to Yanda, Park had traveled extensively in the Asian-Pacific region. In reconsidering “the relations between nations and cultures” with reference to his concept of “assimilation” (Fei 2001, 210), Park took China as an intriguing example of “civilization.” As Park said in his piece “On China” (translated by Wu himself and included in a collection published in honour of Park’s visit), China, “an organic entity that slowly but decisively embraced the diverse cultures of the primitive peoples who were in contact with it,” “changed those cultures, assimilated them, and in the end, incorporated them into the vast complexity of Chinese culture or Chinese civilization” (Park 1933 [2002], 17-18). Contrasting pre-modern China with the European collectivity of nations, Park argued that while the latter grew out of the institution of the State, “out of conquest,” or “extending violence on the neighboring nations, or deploying political means to rule the conquered peoples,” ancient Chinese empire expanded by way of spreading its civilizational influence. “By means of assimilation, China not only incorporated the neighboring weaker nations, but also made those nations that sometimes conquered her adopt the social and moral order of her civilization” (18).

Park’s notion of traditional China’s “civilization” was quite similar to Wu’s theory of the multi-national state. A reading of Wu’s essay “Nations and the state” (published way back in his Columbia years) reveals that a few years before Park’s visit Wu was still making efforts to go beyond the sociology of the State by virtue of old Chinese theories of Great Unity (Wu 1926 [1990]; Wang 2005, 92-102). However, around the year 1932, Wu had become a great deal more interested in methodology. For him, studying China in sociological terms was so natural that it saved a great deal of words about ancient history.

2 Smith, who conducted long-term field studies in Shandong, described imperial China as a great house. He argued that the Western narratives of imperial China before his book was published were wrong to just talk about the big cities of imperial China. He argued that to know the “real China” one should develop a new method, and for him, that was village study. From Smith’s perspective, to see what was contained in the great house of the Chinese empire, one should use the village as a hole in the wall to peek into the secret building of the empire.


Park was invited by Wu to teach two classes, one on “collective behavior” and the other on “sociological methods.” In both classes, Park devoted much time to introducing his approach to the city (Yang 1933 [2002], 179-223), regarding which, during the 1920s, Park, together with Ernest W. Burgess, had rendered an elaborate definition (Park & Burgess 1925).

Wu praised Park for contributing “great insights into the nature of human culture” (Wu 1933 [2002], 17) and argued that the Chicago School of Sociology which Park led made a great contribution to the world’s sociology. Nonetheless, just like Arthur Smith, Wu believed that because the disposition of traditional China was contrary to the urban, Park’s human ecology of the city could not be applicable to the study of Chinese society without modification. The sociology of urban America was not inspiring, unless it was seen as providing a counter-example for China, a collection of communities deeply rooted “in the soil.” For Wu, Park’s model would have been better, had it been based upon the observation that, while “the city is the laboratory of Occidental sociology, the village is that of Oriental sociology” (13), and had it restricted itself to the method of community study, which, once widely applied, could be a great “theoretical and methodological perspective on human communal life, good for the study of tribal, rural, and urban societies” (16).

Wu had been quite familiar with the Boasian approach to ethnography. By 1935, in addition, he had not only achieved a thorough understanding of the ethnographic science advanced by Malinowski (he sent Fei Xiaotong [Hsiao-tung Fei] to study with Raymond Firth and Malinowski in 1936) but also had come to know Radcliffe-Brown’s work.

In autumn of 1935, Wu had a chance to invite Radcliffe-Brown (then a professor at the University at Chicago) to lecture (Chiao 1987; SSYU 1936 [2002]). Like Park, Radcliffe-Brown was keenly interested in the civilizational totality of the Central Kingdom. In the early 1930s, he had spent time learning about sinology, and in particular about Marcel Granet’s sociological sinology. In the hope that he could add some complementary perspective to Granet’s model, he even devised a plan to test it in some selected ethnographic settings in the countryside (Wu 1936 [2002], 270). At Yanda, Radcliffe-Brown was invited to give lectures on “The concept of function in the social sciences” and “The current state of anthropology.” According to Wu, he also voluntarily offered a lengthy lecture on his ideas of rural community study. In the lecture, entitled “Suggestions for the sociological investigation of Chinese rural life” (Radcliffe-Brown 1936 [2002]), Radcliffe-Brown outlined his structural-functionalist approach to ethnographic holism, and discussed what his young colleague Robert Redfield was attempting to develop in his anthropology of peasant societies. He dwelt heavily upon two aspects beyond what he described as “synchronic or monochronic study.” These included the study of the interrelationship between the chosen ethnographic locality and other localities and the greater areas in which the localities are parts and the “diachronic” study of changes in the interrelationship between the community and its outside worlds, including those in the more distant or nearer past.

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Radcliffe-Brown’s “Suggestions for the sociological investigation of Chinese rural life” became a great inspiration to Wu’s students. Wu himself translated and published the text. A couple of years later, in several pieces on the method of community study, he combined Radcliffe-Brown’s points concerning the importance of examining the “inside-outside” and “past-present” relations of rural communities with Park’s concept of human ecological “adaptation,” and he turned them into something which inspired Fei’s study of the local gentry’s active response to the “industrial powers” radiating from the treaty port of Shanghai (Fei 1939) and Lin Yuehua’s innovative biographic ethnography on the different extents of adaptation of local fortunes to the treaty port of Fuzhou (Lin 1941).

As Maurice Freedman (1962 [1979]) observed, almost as soon as the social sciences were established in China “anthropology and sociology were intertwined – to be disentangled in a strange way” (373). The method of community study was what “disentangled” sociology and anthropology.

In the 1930s, at Yanda, the tendency toward ethnographicizing and Sinificating sociology was becoming ever more visible. This was roughly in a line with the trend of the Anglo-American sociologizing movement, whereby the distinction between ethnology and social anthropology was re-defined as more or less the difference between history and science (Rowlands 2008). In both Anglo-American sociologized anthropology and in Yanda-type ethnographicized sociology, ethnographic excavations of contemporary locations of social life became a self-assigned task of the anthropologists who strove to break with 19th century evolutionist and early 20th century diffusionist geo-histories of “cultural survivals.” However, sociology at Yanda in the pre-war years seemed to be a lot more radical than the sociologized ethnography in the West.

Although Park and Radcliffe-Brown (and perhaps Firth and Malinowski too) emphasized the science aspect of sociology, with regard to Chinese society, they expressed a strong interest in history. In both Park’s “Orientalism” of the Eastern way of assimilation and Radcliffe-Brown’s “sympathy” toward Chinese civilization, a strong long-term sense of temporality was expressed. Interestingly, the foreign sense of temporality was excluded by Wu in his selective inclusion of Western intellectual achievements. What distinguished Yanda sociology from Western sociologies thus seemed to be that the break with history of the discipline had different meanings for Anglo-American mentors and their Chinese followers.

In a way, the break, for either Park or Radcliffe-Brown, did not consist in the rejection of “Oriental heritages” – it merely meant the rejection of “conjectural historical reconstructions” of “human history” in ethnology. It was expressed either, as in the case of Park, in the extension of German (in particular, Georg Simmel’s) sociology of culture, or manifested, as in the case of Radcliffe-Brown, in the transplantation of Durkheimian sociology of religion into the ethnographic excavations of the social life of the Andaman Islanders and post-imperial Chinese peasants.

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Radcliffe-Brown’s “Suggestions for the sociological investigation of Chinese rural life” became a great inspiration to Wu’s students. Wu himself translated and published the text. A couple of years later, in several pieces on the method of community study, he combined Radcliffe-Brown’s points concerning the importance of examining the “inside-outside” and “past-present” relations of rural communities with Park’s concept of human ecological “adaptation,” and he turned them into something which inspired Fei’s study of the local gentry’s active response to the “industrial powers” radiating from the treaty port of Shanghai (Fei 1939) and Lin Yuehua’s innovative biographic ethnography on the different extents of adaptation of local fortunes to the treaty port of Fuzhou (Lin 1941).

As Maurice Freedman (1962 [1979]) observed, almost as soon as the social sciences were established in China “anthropology and sociology were intertwined – to be disentangled in a strange way” (373). The method of community study was what “disentangled” sociology and anthropology.

In the 1930s, at Yanda, the tendency toward ethnographicizing and Sinificating sociology was becoming ever more visible. This was roughly in a line with the trend of the Anglo-American sociologizing movement, whereby the distinction between ethnology and social anthropology was re-defined as more or less the difference between history and science (Rowlands 2008). In both Anglo-American sociologized anthropology and in Yanda-type ethnographicized sociology, ethnographic excavations of contemporary locations of social life became a self-assigned task of the anthropologists who strove to break with 19th century evolutionist and early 20th century diffusionist geo-histories of “cultural survivals.” However, sociology at Yanda in the pre-war years seemed to be a lot more radical than the sociologized ethnography in the West.

Although Park and Radcliffe-Brown (and perhaps Firth and Malinowski too) emphasized the science aspect of sociology, with regard to Chinese society, they expressed a strong interest in history. In both Park’s “Orientalism” of the Eastern way of assimilation and Radcliffe-Brown’s “sympathy” toward Chinese civilization, a strong long-term sense of temporality was expressed. Interestingly, the foreign sense of temporality was excluded by Wu in his selective inclusion of Western intellectual achievements. What distinguished Yanda sociology from Western sociologies thus seemed to be that the break with history of the discipline had different meanings for Anglo-American mentors and their Chinese followers.

In a way, the break, for either Park or Radcliffe-Brown, did not consist in the rejection of “Oriental heritages” – it merely meant the rejection of “conjectural historical reconstructions” of “human history” in ethnology. It was expressed either, as in the case of Park, in the extension of German (in particular, Georg Simmel’s) sociology of culture, or manifested, as in the case of Radcliffe-Brown, in the transplantation of Durkheimian sociology of religion into the ethnographic excavations of the social life of the Andaman Islanders and post-imperial Chinese peasants.


The ethnographicization of sociology as advocated at Yanda sounded rather similar to the efforts of those (such as Mauss) who sought to open the eyes of the sociologist to the worlds of the ethnographer, but it did not really have the same implications.

In 1938, three years after Radcliffe-Brown’s visit to Yenching, Fei Xiaotong completed a thesis in London. Fei, who had previously completed a more structural-functionalist kind of ethnographic research among the Yao (Wang & Fei 1936 [1988]), now defined his aim of ethnographic study as a description of situations of socio-economic change. As he said, “An adequate definition of a situation, if it is to organize successful actions and attain the desired end, must be reached through a careful analysis of the functions of social institutions, in relation to the need that they purport to satisfy and in relation to other institutions on which their working depends” (Fei 1939, 4).

Durkheimian sociology, which had been translated into Chinese as early as the mid-1920s by left-wing scholar Xu Deheng (1925), was introduced briefly in Wu’s outline of Radcliffe-Brown’s theory as one of the philosophical sources of social anthropology (Wu 1936 [2002], 239-270). But it did not really catch the attention of the Yanda sociologists.3 Wu listed four contributions of Radcliffe-Brown. Comparative sociology, or what Radcliffe-Brown deployed to subsume ethnology, was listed as the last; the other three contributions listed were: 1) Radcliffe-Brown’s re-unifying of anthropology and sociology, as Durkheim and Mauss did; 2) his redefinition of “function” and “meaning”; 3) his training of field research experts. As a careful scholar, Wu did not miss the more subtle aspects of Radcliffe-Brown. He mentioned Radcliffe-Brown’s argument that a social system was both a linkage of a particular social group to the natural and material world and an internal integration of “humans” (Wu 1936 [2002], 255). Wu also noticed that by the early 1930s Raymond Firth had added cultural area and contact studies to Radcliffe-Brown’s project of Australian ethnography (263). However, Wu’s interest was mainly the re-unification of sociology and anthropology in the method of community study.

In describing Radcliffe-Brown’s reunifying of anthropology and sociology, Wu said that sociology and anthropology were combined in the 19th century, in the works of Comte, Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan. But in the 20th century, “the great fighter of American historical particularism Alfred Kroeber sought to re-divide the two disciplines” and “that is entirely a mistake” (250). Meanwhile in Paris, when Mauss established an ethnological research institution, “his original plan was to train fieldworkers,” “but Mauss only lectures theoretically,” “thus the fieldwork validations of Durkhiem’s theory did not really exist in Paris” (251). Wu argued that Radcliffe-Brown’s Andaman Island study (1922) was the first and best example of combined sociology and anthropology, being a synthesis of theory and fieldwork.

Although Wu’s second point about Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution was about the redefinition of “function” and “meaning,” it was mentioned only in passing. Throughout the

3 An exception seems to be Tian Rukang (1946 [2008]), one of Fei’s assistants during his war-time Yunnan years, who applied Durkheimian sociology in his study of Baiyi [now the Dai] festivals in Mangshi of Yunnan.

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long paragraphs intended as validating his point, Wu discussed community study. Radcliffe-Brown’s sociological study of the Andaman Islanders became a fine example of how a community should be studied as a whole, a foundation of social life, a social structure, and a “social system” (255).

Concerning Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution to the cultivation of field research expertise, Wu mentioned Radcliffe-Brown’s work in Australia, listing the names of many of his students (262). Later in his article, Wu said that Radcliffe-Brown’s piece on rural community study turned “the vast country of China” into “an experimental area of his comparative sociology” (266).

Shirokogoroff’s critique

Before the Second World War, the “sociologists” at Yanda quite successfully erected a

structure for the flourishing village ethnography. To adapt the science learnt from their Western mentors to a comparative enterprise in which the study of Chinese sociey – defined more or less as the peasantry – has a proper part, the method of community study was advocated. According to Wu Wenzao, the best way to develop a Chinese sociology was to begin with the study of Chinese society, and the best way to achieve this was to meticulously examine certain selected small “social areas” and then compare them with their counterparts studied in the same manner, and finally draw generalizations. The method, being a synthesis of the village-peeping methodology, human ecology, ethnography, and structural-functionalism, was not characteristically Chinese. But to Wu Wenzao and his followers, it enabled the Yanda school to patiently induce from their village ethnographies an overall understanding of China, which was gradually facilitating the “Sinification” of Western learning.

Several decades later, Freedman, who, like Park and Radcliffe-Brown, was inclined to characterize China in terms of its unity, said the following about the community study method:

...it must strike us as a particularly ironical one if we remember that it springs directly from a preoccupation with totalities. When we study primitive societies we must take them in their entirety, but as soon as we turn to complex societies we find our instruments so adapted to the investigation of the small in scale that we must carve out from the unmanageable whole little social areas which, if I may make a pastiche of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, are epitomes of convenient size (Freedman 1963 [1979], 383). Freedman was rightly sarcastic about the “Sinificated” sociology, but he was perhaps

mistaking Yanda sociology as the only Chinese anthropology, having blinded himself to other parts of the grand picture of human science in pre-war China.

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long paragraphs intended as validating his point, Wu discussed community study. Radcliffe-Brown’s sociological study of the Andaman Islanders became a fine example of how a community should be studied as a whole, a foundation of social life, a social structure, and a “social system” (255).

Concerning Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution to the cultivation of field research expertise, Wu mentioned Radcliffe-Brown’s work in Australia, listing the names of many of his students (262). Later in his article, Wu said that Radcliffe-Brown’s piece on rural community study turned “the vast country of China” into “an experimental area of his comparative sociology” (266).

Shirokogoroff’s critique

Before the Second World War, the “sociologists” at Yanda quite successfully erected a

structure for the flourishing village ethnography. To adapt the science learnt from their Western mentors to a comparative enterprise in which the study of Chinese sociey – defined more or less as the peasantry – has a proper part, the method of community study was advocated. According to Wu Wenzao, the best way to develop a Chinese sociology was to begin with the study of Chinese society, and the best way to achieve this was to meticulously examine certain selected small “social areas” and then compare them with their counterparts studied in the same manner, and finally draw generalizations. The method, being a synthesis of the village-peeping methodology, human ecology, ethnography, and structural-functionalism, was not characteristically Chinese. But to Wu Wenzao and his followers, it enabled the Yanda school to patiently induce from their village ethnographies an overall understanding of China, which was gradually facilitating the “Sinification” of Western learning.

Several decades later, Freedman, who, like Park and Radcliffe-Brown, was inclined to characterize China in terms of its unity, said the following about the community study method:

...it must strike us as a particularly ironical one if we remember that it springs directly from a preoccupation with totalities. When we study primitive societies we must take them in their entirety, but as soon as we turn to complex societies we find our instruments so adapted to the investigation of the small in scale that we must carve out from the unmanageable whole little social areas which, if I may make a pastiche of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, are epitomes of convenient size (Freedman 1963 [1979], 383). Freedman was rightly sarcastic about the “Sinificated” sociology, but he was perhaps

mistaking Yanda sociology as the only Chinese anthropology, having blinded himself to other parts of the grand picture of human science in pre-war China.


The ethnographicization of sociology took place at Yanda and exerted great influences upon the younger generation students surrounding Wu. However, outside Wu’s spheres of influence, there were other trends.

When Radcliffe-Brown resided at Yanda, “Father Wilhelm Schmidt entrenched himself behind the castle-like structure of the Catholic University of Peking, while Professor S.M. Shirokogoroff was on the faculty of Tsing Hua University” (Hsu 1944, 13). By the 1930s, Wilhelm Schmidt, a Roman Catholic priest and diffusionist ethnologist, had promoted the ethnology of cultural areas, layers, and civilizational centers (Brandewie 1990). Sergei M. Shirokogoroff, born in 1887, received his training in ethnology in Paris in the 1910s. In 1910, he returned to Russia and become a professor at the University of St. Petersburg. His work was focused upon Siberia and Manchuria. During the Soviet Revolution, he fled to China, where he worked in various institutions including Shanghai University (1922), Amoy [Xiamen] University (1926), Sun Yatsen [Zhongshan] University, Academia Sinica in Guangzhou (1928), and Tsinghua University (1930-39). Shirokogoroff specialized in ethnology and physical anthropology.

Schmidt left behind nothing on the Yenching sociologists’ view of community study. However, one can imagine that as a diffusionist ethnologist he could not be more opposed to Radcliffe-Brown, the Durkheimian who had sought to remove ethnology from social anthropology a decade before. Shirokogoroff, a few years later, published a critical article on the Yanda methodological narrative, straightforwardly arguing that the method of community study, “cannot become a defendable assumption.” Shirokogoroff argued that Chinese lives were not fixed in the villages and those who fixed these lives in the villages were sociologists who did not have proper training in ethnography. Because the Yanda sociologists mainly borrowed their ideas from Western social science, they “attacked the problem from the sociological side, the theory of which had been built on the facts of non-Chinese social experience,” which gave them “rather confused ideas about China” (Shirokogoroff 1942, 4). In a long footnote, Shirokogoroff further said that what the method of community study was about was making the opinions of Chinese students “formed according to the aims of various ‘engineers’ and practical sociologists” (3-4, footnote).

As Shirokogoroff argued, ethnographic work should comprise making maps of ethnic groups, compiling gazettes of localities, conducting fieldwork, doing museum-type studies, and so forth, and ethnographers of China should pay attention to ethnic and regional complexities. As early as in the 1930s, Shirokogoroff had advanced a theory of “ethnos,” or what he alternatively called “psychomental complex,” which amounted to a bio-cultural perspective on the ethnology of inter-societal interactions (Shirokogoroff, 1935).

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Ethnologists, historians, and the nation While foreign scholars residing temporarily or permanently in China reacted strongly to

the Yanda school, those working in the national scientific research institutions were developing different projects of disciplinary formation from Yanda sociology.

A year before Wu Wenzao was appointed professor at Yanda, in March 1928, the Institute of Social Science Research had been inaugurated in the newly established Academia Sinica. The institute had a division of ethnology. Cai Yuanpei, the president of the Academia, gave himself a position in the division. As early as 1906, Cai had gone to Leipzig University in Germany, where he studied for three years. In 1911, he visited Europe for the second time: this time, apart from Germany, he also visited France, staying in the two countries for a total of four years. During these two periods, Cai studied philosophy, aesthetics, and ethnology. In 1925, Cai again went to Germany to study ethnology; before then, he had taught ethnology in Peking University for several years. Cai had broad knowledge of European ethnology, and he was particularly familiar with evolutionist and diffusionist theories. For him, such theories were especially useful for modern Chinese scholars who had the mission of inquiring into the deep history of progress of the Chinese nation and the immense diversity of ethnic cultures existing within its boundaries.

Cai (1926 [1962]) held a two-level perspective of the discipline. To him, ethnography was the descriptive foundation of a deeply historical and comparative science named ethnology. It consists of detailed accounts of the groups on the margins of civilization. Cai was keen to promote ethnology simply because he regarded the science to be of great benefit to the cultural modernization of China, especially to the inculcation of Republican public “aesthetics” of the museum which, as Cai, anticipated, would upgrade Chinese people’s cultural tastes.

To push forward his project of national ethnology, Cai appointed the French-trained ethnologist Ling Chunsheng as the head of the division.4 Ling, born in 1902 in Jiangsu, was in Paris from 1926 to 1929. During this period, the Année Sociologique was making its own sociological ethnology out of its critical engagement with German ethnology. Ling directly worked with Mauss and Paul Rivet. Later in his life, in the 1950s and ‘60s, he devoted most of his time to tracking the routes of connectivity between Chinese ceremonial and cosmological systems and ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations and to conceptualizing the macro-region called “Circum-Pacific” (Ling 1979). However, in his earlier life, he made himself a great fieldworker, adventuring into the ethnic regions to study ethnologically local material, social, and spiritual systems. Heilongjiang, West Hunan, Zhejiang, Yunnan, and Western Sichuan were the core areas of his field studies.

In his first monograph, The Heze in the Lower Valley of Songhuajiang River (1934), Ling had defined ethnography in dramatically different terms from Wu Wenzao’s method of

4 Other members of the division included the German-trained philologist Shang Chengzu, the German sinologist Fritz Jaeger (Yan Fuli), and the American-trained cultural anthropologist Lin Huixiang.

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Ethnologists, historians, and the nation While foreign scholars residing temporarily or permanently in China reacted strongly to

the Yanda school, those working in the national scientific research institutions were developing different projects of disciplinary formation from Yanda sociology.

A year before Wu Wenzao was appointed professor at Yanda, in March 1928, the Institute of Social Science Research had been inaugurated in the newly established Academia Sinica. The institute had a division of ethnology. Cai Yuanpei, the president of the Academia, gave himself a position in the division. As early as 1906, Cai had gone to Leipzig University in Germany, where he studied for three years. In 1911, he visited Europe for the second time: this time, apart from Germany, he also visited France, staying in the two countries for a total of four years. During these two periods, Cai studied philosophy, aesthetics, and ethnology. In 1925, Cai again went to Germany to study ethnology; before then, he had taught ethnology in Peking University for several years. Cai had broad knowledge of European ethnology, and he was particularly familiar with evolutionist and diffusionist theories. For him, such theories were especially useful for modern Chinese scholars who had the mission of inquiring into the deep history of progress of the Chinese nation and the immense diversity of ethnic cultures existing within its boundaries.

Cai (1926 [1962]) held a two-level perspective of the discipline. To him, ethnography was the descriptive foundation of a deeply historical and comparative science named ethnology. It consists of detailed accounts of the groups on the margins of civilization. Cai was keen to promote ethnology simply because he regarded the science to be of great benefit to the cultural modernization of China, especially to the inculcation of Republican public “aesthetics” of the museum which, as Cai, anticipated, would upgrade Chinese people’s cultural tastes.

To push forward his project of national ethnology, Cai appointed the French-trained ethnologist Ling Chunsheng as the head of the division.4 Ling, born in 1902 in Jiangsu, was in Paris from 1926 to 1929. During this period, the Année Sociologique was making its own sociological ethnology out of its critical engagement with German ethnology. Ling directly worked with Mauss and Paul Rivet. Later in his life, in the 1950s and ‘60s, he devoted most of his time to tracking the routes of connectivity between Chinese ceremonial and cosmological systems and ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations and to conceptualizing the macro-region called “Circum-Pacific” (Ling 1979). However, in his earlier life, he made himself a great fieldworker, adventuring into the ethnic regions to study ethnologically local material, social, and spiritual systems. Heilongjiang, West Hunan, Zhejiang, Yunnan, and Western Sichuan were the core areas of his field studies.

In his first monograph, The Heze in the Lower Valley of Songhuajiang River (1934), Ling had defined ethnography in dramatically different terms from Wu Wenzao’s method of

4 Other members of the division included the German-trained philologist Shang Chengzu, the German sinologist Fritz Jaeger (Yan Fuli), and the American-trained cultural anthropologist Lin Huixiang.


community study. For him, the “isolate” of the ethnographic unit should not be a small social area; instead, it should be much broader, involving the ethnic, regional and linguistic totality of the chosen group (zu). This was roughly the definition adopted by Shirokogoroff in his Ethnographic Study of China. Ling devoted an extensive part to his monograph to the description of the culture of the Heze. He defined “culture” in terms of what consisted of “material, spiritual, familial, and social life of [the Heze])” (Ling 1934, 1:1). To present a whole perspective of “culture,” Ling depended upon the data he and his co-worker’ (Shang Chengzu’) had amassed in their fieldwork journey to many of Heze regions. But Ling did not see “first hand data” as adequate facts. Believing that “the culture of the Heze” was much influenced by frequent inter-cultural and inter-ethnic contacts among the ancient Asian peoples, Manchurians, and the Han, Ling devoted a large part of his study to the language complexity of the Heze and another large part to Heze stories which, to him, could historicize what he had closely observed in the field.

In describing the social life of the Heze, Ling displayed a good understanding of the ethnology he had learned from Mauss and Paul Rivet, who between the two wars, advanced a theory of civilization, an idea that allowed the Année Sociologique to take inter-cultural technological and intellectual borrowings as a great part of history (Mauss 2006). Ling emphasized inter-cultural borrowings as manifested in material, spiritual, familial, and social aspects of the Heze culture. However, to reorient the direction of cultural diffusion from that observed by the 19th century European sinologists, Ling insisted that cultural contacts in Northeastern China mostly occurred among the local tribes. These included the groups belonging to the Tungus. But Ling argued that the Tungus were not pan-Eurasian as maintained by many European ethnologists and sinologists; rather, they were part of the Eastern Yi (Dongyi, or Eastern Barbarians in China), a bio-cultural sector of the Eastern Macro-region of classical China.

Ling did his pioneering ethnological work in the Institute of Social Science Research. But when the work was published, he was already a research professor at a bigger institute, that of Philology and History. It was the place where a group of distinguished scholars were led by Fu Sinian in working toward a new history of the Chinese nation.

Fu Sinian (Fu Ssu-nien), in his university student (Peking) years was deeply influenced by Hu Shi, but he also studied abroad for many long years. Between 1919 and 1926, he pursued graduate study in experimental psychology, physiology, mathematics, and physics at Edinburgh University, University College London, and the University of Berlin. During these years, instead of what he majored in, he developed a strong interest in comparative linguistics and history. In 1926, Fu was appointed professor of literature and history at Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou, then in 1928, he was assigned to the mission of creating the Institute of History and Philology.5

Soon after Fu began to write, he had advanced a new synthesis of the Qianjia textological school of early Qing and the objectivist and state-centric historiography of modern German 5 For an analytical biography of Fu, see Wang 2006.

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historicism, especially that of Leopold vön Ranke. In the article he wrote to inaugurate the institute, Fu expressed his disagreement with neo-Confucian and other “subjective views (zhuguan) of history,” and argued that the aims of the Institute’s work were to “construct history and philology in accordance with the same scientific standards as biology and geology” and to “claim China as a center of scientific oriental studies” (Fu 1928 [2003], 3:12). Like Shirokogoroff, Fu was keenly interested in the ethno-genesis of the Chinese people. Also like Shirokogoroff, he paid special attention to the ethnic and regional complexities of historical China. However, more than Shirokogoroff, Fu was focused on the study of the ancient Chinese “nation,” which, as Fu believed, achieved its integration – the “union of contraries” of the Yi and Xia bio-cultural systems – long before the age of empire (Qin).

One of Fu’s most famous works is “An essay on the East and West of Barbarians and the Civilized” (Yixia dongxi shuo), conceived in 1923, written in 1931, and published in 1933. In this piece, Fu combined archaeological and archival materials to illustrate the interaction between two geographic and racial-cultural regions of China, the East and the West. He described the “tribes” in the East as Yi, and those in the West as Xia. According to Fu, the central geographic arenas where the contesting tribes played their roles were the valleys of the Yellow River, Ji River, and Huai River. The contests, themselves, brought about inter-racial and inter-cultural relations construed as “mixing” (hunhe) which, to Fu, pushed forward the progress of empire. As Fu supposed, “the two systems struggled against each other because they confronted each other, they conjoined because they struggled, and they progressed because they conjoined (Fu 1933 [2004], 211).

To substantiate his history of the nation, Fu depended upon a multi-disciplinary team, made possible by the recruitment of a whole group of established scholars and a large number of young talents. Prior to 1937, those who worked under him involved textologists, linguists, archaeologists, and ethnologists, among whom was the American-trained Li Ji.

Li Ji (Li Chi), after pre-college training at Tsinghua, was admitted into the Department of Psychology at Clark University in the US, where he moved to demography and graduated as a sociologist. In 1920, Li began to study anthropology at Harvard University. At Harvard, he worked with the ethnologist Roland Dixon and physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, and his thesis on the formation of the Chinese people was awarded a Ph.D in 1923. Having worked as a lecturer in anthropology and sociology at Nankai, and as a lecturer in Guoxue or Chinese cultural studies at Tsinghua, in 1929, Li Ji joined the Institute of History and Philology and directed its section of archaeology.

In 1928, Li Ji had published in English a revised version of his dissertation, The Formation of the Chinese People (1928), which dealt with the origins of the Chinese people in terms of physical anthropology, archaeology, ethnology and history. Li did not have Fu’s sort of interactive model, but he was also interested in the conjoining of a variety of ethnic groups into a civilizational totality. Obviously, more than Fu, he emphasized the contribution of technological progress to the making of Chinese civilization. Pottery, bronze, writing, the art of sacrifice, war vehicles, and stone crafting were presented as six progressive stages of

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historicism, especially that of Leopold vön Ranke. In the article he wrote to inaugurate the institute, Fu expressed his disagreement with neo-Confucian and other “subjective views (zhuguan) of history,” and argued that the aims of the Institute’s work were to “construct history and philology in accordance with the same scientific standards as biology and geology” and to “claim China as a center of scientific oriental studies” (Fu 1928 [2003], 3:12). Like Shirokogoroff, Fu was keenly interested in the ethno-genesis of the Chinese people. Also like Shirokogoroff, he paid special attention to the ethnic and regional complexities of historical China. However, more than Shirokogoroff, Fu was focused on the study of the ancient Chinese “nation,” which, as Fu believed, achieved its integration – the “union of contraries” of the Yi and Xia bio-cultural systems – long before the age of empire (Qin).

One of Fu’s most famous works is “An essay on the East and West of Barbarians and the Civilized” (Yixia dongxi shuo), conceived in 1923, written in 1931, and published in 1933. In this piece, Fu combined archaeological and archival materials to illustrate the interaction between two geographic and racial-cultural regions of China, the East and the West. He described the “tribes” in the East as Yi, and those in the West as Xia. According to Fu, the central geographic arenas where the contesting tribes played their roles were the valleys of the Yellow River, Ji River, and Huai River. The contests, themselves, brought about inter-racial and inter-cultural relations construed as “mixing” (hunhe) which, to Fu, pushed forward the progress of empire. As Fu supposed, “the two systems struggled against each other because they confronted each other, they conjoined because they struggled, and they progressed because they conjoined (Fu 1933 [2004], 211).

To substantiate his history of the nation, Fu depended upon a multi-disciplinary team, made possible by the recruitment of a whole group of established scholars and a large number of young talents. Prior to 1937, those who worked under him involved textologists, linguists, archaeologists, and ethnologists, among whom was the American-trained Li Ji.

Li Ji (Li Chi), after pre-college training at Tsinghua, was admitted into the Department of Psychology at Clark University in the US, where he moved to demography and graduated as a sociologist. In 1920, Li began to study anthropology at Harvard University. At Harvard, he worked with the ethnologist Roland Dixon and physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, and his thesis on the formation of the Chinese people was awarded a Ph.D in 1923. Having worked as a lecturer in anthropology and sociology at Nankai, and as a lecturer in Guoxue or Chinese cultural studies at Tsinghua, in 1929, Li Ji joined the Institute of History and Philology and directed its section of archaeology.

In 1928, Li Ji had published in English a revised version of his dissertation, The Formation of the Chinese People (1928), which dealt with the origins of the Chinese people in terms of physical anthropology, archaeology, ethnology and history. Li did not have Fu’s sort of interactive model, but he was also interested in the conjoining of a variety of ethnic groups into a civilizational totality. Obviously, more than Fu, he emphasized the contribution of technological progress to the making of Chinese civilization. Pottery, bronze, writing, the art of sacrifice, war vehicles, and stone crafting were presented as six progressive stages of


Shang civilization. Between 1928 and1937, Li directed the excavation of Yinxu, a famous Shang Dynasty site (Li 1977). From Fu Sinian’s perspective, the work was highly important because it would validate his own argument that the racial-cultural factors making the “Central Kingdom” consisted of both Xia and Yi varieties. Li amassed a large cache of data on the Shang remains, which further enabled him to compare pre-Shang civilization with Yangshao and Longshan cultures, and to argue that the creators of Shang civilization were of a different racial-cultural system from the agricultural cultures –they were hunters with a strong religion, originally from the East. The system was a highly mobile one which allowed social groups living in it to bring in cultural inventions from all directions.

“Rivalry of brotherhoods”

To understand the making of Chinese sub-traditions of anthropology (or simply,

“anthropologies”), we need a geographical perspective. Elsewhere (Wang 2015, 136-166), I have presented Chinese geography in terms of a

concentric order of three rings, or that of outer, intermediate, and core circles. The outer circle refers to the realms distant from the imperial frontiers and national borders, to the worlds of Western and non-Western societies far away from the Central Kingdom. Unlike the “outer ring” (the primitive world) for Euro-American anthropology, in post-Opium-War China, this is not limited to the circle of the “savage” – rather they are a great mixture of “primitive,” “semi-civilized,” and “civilized” peoples. The intermediary circle is composed of contact zones between China and the outer circle. The human collectivities in the intermediary circle are still “others”; but as in-between types, they are far more familiar than those in the outer circle, being better in terms of “ni” (you), the second person pronoun. Finally, we come to the core circle, where a hierarchy of villages, towns, and metropolises accommodate the Han collectivities.

Some of the Chinese anthropological ancestors had been keenly interested in studying the collectivities of the outer circle. For instance, Wu Wenzao himself did his first empirical study on the English side of the story of the Opium War, and during the Second World War he had an opportunity to visit India and examine the interrelationship between democracy and the caste system (Wu 1943 [2010], 333-346). Nonetheless, once it came to the issue of disciplinary formation, Wu and his followers and rivals diverted their ethnographic interest away from the Euro-American nations; they took them instead as sources of theory and method, with which they were to examine the societies and histories of internal others. Consequently, the order of the three rings was reorganized into the duality of the circle of the intellectuality of the knowing partners and the “lifeworlds” projected in ethnography.

Eventually, despite all their differences, both the Yanda school of sociology and the Academia Sinica school of ethnology made their disciplines largely distinct from the anthropologies of “empire-building” and more akin to those of “nation-building.”

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As Stocking (1982) points out, in contrast with anthropologies of empire-building, which tended to focus on the distant “dark-skinned” primitive other or the outer circle for Western anthropology, “in many parts of the European continent, the relation of national identity and internal otherness, tended, in the context of nineteenth century movements of cultural nationalism, to be a more focal issue; and strong traditions of Volkskunde developed quite distinctly from Völkerkunder. The Former was the study of the internal peasant others who composed the nation, or potential nations within an imperial state; the latter was the study of more distant others, either overseas or farther back in European history” (170).

The Yanda sociologists were described by the others as the “Anglo-American faction” (Yingmei pai), whereas the Academia Sinica ethnologists had mainly followed the continental European style and its American version. Despite their varied backgrounds, the difference between the two groups of scholars can be seen as the division of labor between those who focused their attention on the internal peasant others (the collectivities in the core circle) and those who concentrated upon the more distant others of the non-Han “racial-cultural systems” or the minority minzu (the collectivities in the intermediary circle).6

Both Yanda and Academia Sinica schools were “international”: in making their different “anthropologies,” they were both heavily influenced by the Western – Anglo-American and continental European – traditions with which they engaged; but, constrained by the principles of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991), neither developed out of their academic internationality any theory of “cultural internationalism.” In works by the members of both schools, “supra-national processes” were ethnographically examined; but they had been viewed either as “external influences” of the modern industrial world (Fei 1939; Lin 1941) or as “internal relative differences” enriching the civilizational wealth of China (Ling 1934).

To a great extent, the rivalries of the two mainly arose from the fact they were “brotherhoods” sharing the same ambition to make a bounded nation.

“Segmentation” during and after the War By the mid-1930s, in spite of the importance of other centers, many sociologists and

anthropologists were attached or semi-attached to either Yanda or Academia Sinica.

6 Shirokogoroff and his fellow ethnologists were perhaps right about the limitation of the method of community study; but paradoxically, they themselves also practiced different sorts of ethnography of “isolates.” Even though these were bigger in size than the Yanda kind of small social areas, they were still “isolates,” and they were those found only in the identified ethnic minority areas. The ethnographies of such did not automatically yield the totality the ethnologists sought to identify. By means of making it seem as if China was simply made of certain “bigger objects” of ethnological study (the relatively distant others within the national borders), they in effect missed out the other half of China – the large peasantry and its attached “great traditions.” The ethnographers, consequentially, had to leave the task of “totalization” to their superiors – historians such as Fu Sinian. It is thus probably true that without a combination of sociology and ethnology as well as history, a holistic perspective of civilization in the East could not be developed.

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As Stocking (1982) points out, in contrast with anthropologies of empire-building, which tended to focus on the distant “dark-skinned” primitive other or the outer circle for Western anthropology, “in many parts of the European continent, the relation of national identity and internal otherness, tended, in the context of nineteenth century movements of cultural nationalism, to be a more focal issue; and strong traditions of Volkskunde developed quite distinctly from Völkerkunder. The Former was the study of the internal peasant others who composed the nation, or potential nations within an imperial state; the latter was the study of more distant others, either overseas or farther back in European history” (170).

The Yanda sociologists were described by the others as the “Anglo-American faction” (Yingmei pai), whereas the Academia Sinica ethnologists had mainly followed the continental European style and its American version. Despite their varied backgrounds, the difference between the two groups of scholars can be seen as the division of labor between those who focused their attention on the internal peasant others (the collectivities in the core circle) and those who concentrated upon the more distant others of the non-Han “racial-cultural systems” or the minority minzu (the collectivities in the intermediary circle).6

Both Yanda and Academia Sinica schools were “international”: in making their different “anthropologies,” they were both heavily influenced by the Western – Anglo-American and continental European – traditions with which they engaged; but, constrained by the principles of “imagined community” (Anderson 1991), neither developed out of their academic internationality any theory of “cultural internationalism.” In works by the members of both schools, “supra-national processes” were ethnographically examined; but they had been viewed either as “external influences” of the modern industrial world (Fei 1939; Lin 1941) or as “internal relative differences” enriching the civilizational wealth of China (Ling 1934).

To a great extent, the rivalries of the two mainly arose from the fact they were “brotherhoods” sharing the same ambition to make a bounded nation.

“Segmentation” during and after the War By the mid-1930s, in spite of the importance of other centers, many sociologists and

anthropologists were attached or semi-attached to either Yanda or Academia Sinica.

6 Shirokogoroff and his fellow ethnologists were perhaps right about the limitation of the method of community study; but paradoxically, they themselves also practiced different sorts of ethnography of “isolates.” Even though these were bigger in size than the Yanda kind of small social areas, they were still “isolates,” and they were those found only in the identified ethnic minority areas. The ethnographies of such did not automatically yield the totality the ethnologists sought to identify. By means of making it seem as if China was simply made of certain “bigger objects” of ethnological study (the relatively distant others within the national borders), they in effect missed out the other half of China – the large peasantry and its attached “great traditions.” The ethnographers, consequentially, had to leave the task of “totalization” to their superiors – historians such as Fu Sinian. It is thus probably true that without a combination of sociology and ethnology as well as history, a holistic perspective of civilization in the East could not be developed.


At the Yanda school, among others, Fei Xiaotong, Lin Yuehua, and Chu Tongzu (Chu Tung-chu)7 grew into a generation of internationally recognized anthropologists who made a “Chinese phase in social anthropology” (Freedman 1963 [1979]).

Wu’s disciples did not form a monolithic collectivity; although they shared certain sociological tendencies, they were sub-divided. Thus obvious variations can be detected in Fei, Lin, and Chu’s writings.

The field of sociology at Yanda did not all become Wu’s sphere either. Li Anzhai (Li Anche), Wu’s contemporary, had joined the sociology department in 1926. Li went to Berkeley in 1934. Through the introduction of Paul Radin, he was accepted by the Zuni, among whom he conducted a pioneering Chinese ethnographic study of an American Indian group. During the War, while Wu and Fei went to Yunnan, Li went to Sichuan. In 1938, he was appointed professor of sociology by Western China University, and he started his prolonged project of Tibetan anthropology (Li undated; Chen 2010).

Before the war, the ethnology of Academia Sinica also expanded. In the early and middle 1930s, ethnological studies continued to move in two directions. The historiographic studies of what had been called “Zhongguo minzushi” or “History of the making of the Chinese nation(s)” continued to extend their influence.8 At the same time, more ethnographic studies were being carried out.

Working with Ling were two other influential figures in Chinese ethnology, Rui Yifu and Tao Yunkui.

Rui, a graduate of foreign language studies from Southeastern University in Nanjing, joined Ling in 1930. In almost all the major studies conducted by Ling in the 1930s and 1940s, Rui was his coordinator.

Tao, having graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin in 1924, went on to study genetics and ethnology in Berlin University and Hamburg University. In 1934, he joined Ling, and went with him and others to Yunnan to study ethnic minorities in Yunnan and in the Yunnan-Vietnam and Yunnan-Burma border areas (see Tao 2012). The Yunnan anthropological survey project lasted for two years; during the period, Tao Yunkui was in charge of physical anthropological and folkloric studies. During the War, Tao remained in Yunnan where he occasionally worked together with Wu and his students.

At some of the national universities, Academia Sinica-style ethnology recruited some part-time members. Yang Chengzhi, a Sun Yatsen University ethnologist, for instance, was 7 Chu Tongzu, Fei and Lin’s contemporary, went to the Graduate School of Yanda in 1936 to work with Wu and Yang Kaidao. He made himself a synthesis of both professors: combining Wu’s sociology and Yang’s history, he turned himself into a social historian, writing extensively on the history of Chinese law and bureaucracy. Between 1945 and 1965, Chu worked as a research fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. His studies were focused on history. In 1972, he published one of his masterpieces, Han Social Structure (Ch’u 1972), a book on the Han Dynasty initially intended as part of the Han Project organized by Karl Wittfogel. 8 These studies, exemplified by Wang Tongling’s History of the Making of the Chinese Nation and Lu Simian’s book with exactly the same title, both published in 1934 (Wang, 1934; Lu, 1934 [1996]), used Chinese archives as the prime sources with which to reflect on ethnic diversity, inter-ethnic relations, and unification in pre-modern China.

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appointed field researcher by both his university and Academia Sinica to conduct fieldwork in Yunnan in 1928. Among those who went together with him was Shirokogoroff. Shortly after he returned to Guangzhou, he went to Paris to study ethnology. In 1934, he obtained a certificate from Ecole d’Anthropologie de Paris, and in 1935, he further gained a doctorate from I’Institut d’Ethnologie. With a doctorate in ethnology, he returned to Sun Yatsen University and worked as a professor (see Yang 2004).

Lin Huixiang, an Amoy University anthropologist who studied with an American anthropologist H.O. Beyer in the Philippines, started to teach anthropology as early as 1924. Influenced by American cultural anthropology, he was keenly interested in cultural area studies, mythology, primitive art, and material culture. In 1934, he established Amoy University Museum of Anthropology (see Lin 2013).

Ma Changshou studied cultural sociology at Central University in Nanjing; like Lin Huixiang, he was more influenced by cultural anthropology and ethnology. Like Ling Chunsheng, Ma Changshou was more inclined to conduct synthetic ethological ethnography, and thus was seeking to bring linguistics, material culture, social life, and intercultural relations into a singular ethnographic monograph (Wu 2009, 116-130).

There were also independent ethnologists. Yang Kun was a fine example. In 1921, Yang Kun was admitted into Sino-French University in Lyon. There in France, he joined the Communist Party. Between then and 1927, Yang involved himself in many political activities both in France and China. But in 1927, feeling disappointed at politics, he joined the Année Sociologique in Paris. He studied with Mauss and Granet. In December 1930, he and his wife, Zhang Ruoming, took a train through Berlin, Moscow, and Siberia, arriving in Beiping in January 1931. Yang moved between national universities, Catholic universities, and Anglo-American universities in Beiping. For quite a few years (1937-1941), he joined the Yanda sociology department. But he consistently promoted French sociology and ethnology (see Yang 1991).

Wu Zelin, who gained all his degrees in America between 1922 and 1927, was quite a different person too. Wu’s thesis was on “American attitudes toward the Blacks, the Jews, and the Orientals.” Influenced by his mentors including Robert Park, he was one of the pioneers of Chinese sociology of race relations and urban issues. Soon after graduation, Wu went to Europe to survey social conditions in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The project may be defined as the earliest example of modern Chinese anthropology of Western societies. In 1928, Wu was appointed chair of sociology in Daxia (Great China) University of Shanghai. In Shanghai, Wu and his followers advocated a different sociology from Yanda’s. Social problems, demography, and race issues were three of his main research interests (Zhang 2008, 11-19).

In the few years before the War, in all the three circles (Han, ethnic and foreign) of Chinese ethnographic work (Wang 2015: 136-166), there were not only frequent academic exchanges between Chinese and Euro-American scholars, but also ethnographic – in the broad sense of the term – studies. The core “ethnographic regions” (Fardon 1990) were two,

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appointed field researcher by both his university and Academia Sinica to conduct fieldwork in Yunnan in 1928. Among those who went together with him was Shirokogoroff. Shortly after he returned to Guangzhou, he went to Paris to study ethnology. In 1934, he obtained a certificate from Ecole d’Anthropologie de Paris, and in 1935, he further gained a doctorate from I’Institut d’Ethnologie. With a doctorate in ethnology, he returned to Sun Yatsen University and worked as a professor (see Yang 2004).

Lin Huixiang, an Amoy University anthropologist who studied with an American anthropologist H.O. Beyer in the Philippines, started to teach anthropology as early as 1924. Influenced by American cultural anthropology, he was keenly interested in cultural area studies, mythology, primitive art, and material culture. In 1934, he established Amoy University Museum of Anthropology (see Lin 2013).

Ma Changshou studied cultural sociology at Central University in Nanjing; like Lin Huixiang, he was more influenced by cultural anthropology and ethnology. Like Ling Chunsheng, Ma Changshou was more inclined to conduct synthetic ethological ethnography, and thus was seeking to bring linguistics, material culture, social life, and intercultural relations into a singular ethnographic monograph (Wu 2009, 116-130).

There were also independent ethnologists. Yang Kun was a fine example. In 1921, Yang Kun was admitted into Sino-French University in Lyon. There in France, he joined the Communist Party. Between then and 1927, Yang involved himself in many political activities both in France and China. But in 1927, feeling disappointed at politics, he joined the Année Sociologique in Paris. He studied with Mauss and Granet. In December 1930, he and his wife, Zhang Ruoming, took a train through Berlin, Moscow, and Siberia, arriving in Beiping in January 1931. Yang moved between national universities, Catholic universities, and Anglo-American universities in Beiping. For quite a few years (1937-1941), he joined the Yanda sociology department. But he consistently promoted French sociology and ethnology (see Yang 1991).

Wu Zelin, who gained all his degrees in America between 1922 and 1927, was quite a different person too. Wu’s thesis was on “American attitudes toward the Blacks, the Jews, and the Orientals.” Influenced by his mentors including Robert Park, he was one of the pioneers of Chinese sociology of race relations and urban issues. Soon after graduation, Wu went to Europe to survey social conditions in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The project may be defined as the earliest example of modern Chinese anthropology of Western societies. In 1928, Wu was appointed chair of sociology in Daxia (Great China) University of Shanghai. In Shanghai, Wu and his followers advocated a different sociology from Yanda’s. Social problems, demography, and race issues were three of his main research interests (Zhang 2008, 11-19).

In the few years before the War, in all the three circles (Han, ethnic and foreign) of Chinese ethnographic work (Wang 2015: 136-166), there were not only frequent academic exchanges between Chinese and Euro-American scholars, but also ethnographic – in the broad sense of the term – studies. The core “ethnographic regions” (Fardon 1990) were two,


the Han and the non-Han, in each of which there were interactions between different individuals and groups. The division between Yanda sociology and Academia Sinica ethnology was manifested in the division of “ethnographic regions.”

However, during the War, the situation altered. All the major centers of Chinese sociology and ethnology moved to the Southwest. Yenching, Tsinghua, and Nankai universities moved from Beiping to Kunming and became “Southwest Associated University” (Xinan Lianda). Wu established a sociology department in Kunming. Fu Sinian led his Institute of History and Philology in a migration which ended up in Li Zhuang, a prosperous village along the Youngzi River in Sichuan. All studies continued without the disturbance of war in a remote village unmarked on maps.

In 1938, Fei returned to China via Vietnam. He joined Wu in Kunming. At Kuige (a small temple for the literacy god) in Chenggong County, not far from Kunming, between 1938 and 1942, he headed Yunnan University’s sociological research unit where he not only created a seminar similar to Malinowski’s but also accumulated a number of community ethnographies, seeking to combine them into a wholistic perspective of “peasant China” (Fei & Chang 1951). Meanwhile, several researchers working at Kuige produced works quite influential in the English-speaking world, including Francis Hsu’s Under the Ancestor’s Shadow (1949).

During the war, the national political and cultural centers moved temporarily into the Southwest, where ethnic diversity and border issues were passionately felt. Ethnological knowledge of ethnic diversity and inter-cultural relations became highly desired by the Nationalist government. Substantial grants for research were provided, and ethnologists and sociologists came to join forces. Ethnologists who had studied such issues in the first few years in the 1930s continued their work. Wu Wenzao and Wu Zelin and many of their sociological followers transformed themselves into ethnological sociologists. For instance, Lin Yaohua, who became famous for his work on a Fujianese village, joined Li Anzhai in Chengdu. There, they together worked toward the reformation of the discipline.

Like Yanda, West China University in Chengdu was founded by Anglo-American missionary societies. Prior to the war, a group of foreign anthropologists with a missionary background, including Daniel Dye, Thomas Torrance, and J.H. Edgar, who combined zoology, botany and ethnology, had developed their own anthropological and sociological programs. In 1914, they established in the university a general museum combining all their varied interests, and as early as 1922, they founded the West China Border Research Society. Between then and the Chinese anthropologists’ arrival, an important transitional figure was David Graham, a man originally working in Yenching University, who was appointed curator of the museum. Graham was opposed to the diffusionism of Dye, Torrance, and Edgar. He also turned the general museum into an ethnological and archaeological museum by clearing away its zoological, botanical and geological contents (Li 2008). In 1938, Li Anzhai joined West China University and started to sociologize its ethnological and

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anthropological programs. But before that Li had conducted fieldwork among the Tibetans. His sociology had an ethnological aspect and was quite different from community studies.

The study of Tusi, or native chiefs, in Southwest China and in Chinese history was emphasized at West China University. The institution of Tusi, a sort of tool of indirect rule invented in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, was officially announced out of date in the early Qing. But in many parts of Southwest China, in the first half of the 20th century, the institution still existed, and Tusi, the native chiefs, were still exerting influence on local societies. How to replace indirect rule with direct national rule? Ethnologists such as Ling, sociologists such as Wu, and social anthropologists such as Lin felt obliged to provide an answer (Gong 2004, 373-392).

Between ethnologists and ethnological sociologists, important differences existed. Whereas ethnologists at Academia Sinica tended to be a lot more centralistic in their arguments about ethnic and border issues, ethnological sociologists, influenced by Anglo-American ideal models of assimilation (Park), indirect rule (Malinowski), and cultural relativism (Boas), were a lot more open to the intermediate forms of bureaucratic rule. The two “schools” had an opportunity to express themselves politically during the war.

On 13 February, 1939, the famous modern historian Gu Jiegang published an article entitled “The Chinese nation is only one” (Zhonghua Minzu shi yige) in the weekly journal of Border Studies of Yishi Daily based in Kunming. 9 In the article, Gu called for young intellectuals to make contributions to the national unification and self-strengthening of China.10 As soon as Gu’s article was published, both Fu Sinian and Fei Xiaotong expressed their viewpoints too. Fu Sinian and some others wrote enthusiastically to support Gu, whereas Fei Xiaotong and friends advised caution against Gu’s political appeal. In a moment during the war, Chinese intellectuals living in the Southwestern “borderland” were divided into two rival groups – those who insisted that “the Chinese nation is only one,” and those who still tried to accept the great ethnic diversity of China (Zhou & Zhang, 2007).

Shortly after the war, all the sociologists and ethnologists returned to their original academic home bases. However, before they settled down, civil war broke out. In 1949, the KMT Army was defeated, and Academia Sinica moved together with its old patron, the KMT, to Taiwan. Fu Sinian, Li Ji, Ling Chunsheng, Rui Yifu, and many great historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists left the mainland. Almost all the sociologists and social anthropologists working in missionary universities chose to remain in the mainland, with the sincere hope for the realization of Mao’s “new democraticism.” However, “new

9 Soon the article was re-published in many other newspapers, including Zhongyang Ribao, Dongnan Ribao, Xijing Pingbao, and the provincial daily newspapers. 10 He opposed any extension of the concept “minzu” (nationalities or ethnic groups) into China. He argued that for the benefit of the Chinese people in the difficult time of war, the history and current situation should be re-conceptualized. Intellectuals should bravely accept the “fact” that China had been a unity long ago. They should abandon the wrong definition of the Chinese nation as a unity of five or more different “minzu.” Instead, they should accept the “contemporary fact” that China was better perceived as a unity of just three cultural groups, the Han, the Muslims, and the Tibetans, and try to reduce by means of research and practice the differences between them or among the border tribes.

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anthropological programs. But before that Li had conducted fieldwork among the Tibetans. His sociology had an ethnological aspect and was quite different from community studies.

The study of Tusi, or native chiefs, in Southwest China and in Chinese history was emphasized at West China University. The institution of Tusi, a sort of tool of indirect rule invented in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, was officially announced out of date in the early Qing. But in many parts of Southwest China, in the first half of the 20th century, the institution still existed, and Tusi, the native chiefs, were still exerting influence on local societies. How to replace indirect rule with direct national rule? Ethnologists such as Ling, sociologists such as Wu, and social anthropologists such as Lin felt obliged to provide an answer (Gong 2004, 373-392).

Between ethnologists and ethnological sociologists, important differences existed. Whereas ethnologists at Academia Sinica tended to be a lot more centralistic in their arguments about ethnic and border issues, ethnological sociologists, influenced by Anglo-American ideal models of assimilation (Park), indirect rule (Malinowski), and cultural relativism (Boas), were a lot more open to the intermediate forms of bureaucratic rule. The two “schools” had an opportunity to express themselves politically during the war.

On 13 February, 1939, the famous modern historian Gu Jiegang published an article entitled “The Chinese nation is only one” (Zhonghua Minzu shi yige) in the weekly journal of Border Studies of Yishi Daily based in Kunming. 9 In the article, Gu called for young intellectuals to make contributions to the national unification and self-strengthening of China.10 As soon as Gu’s article was published, both Fu Sinian and Fei Xiaotong expressed their viewpoints too. Fu Sinian and some others wrote enthusiastically to support Gu, whereas Fei Xiaotong and friends advised caution against Gu’s political appeal. In a moment during the war, Chinese intellectuals living in the Southwestern “borderland” were divided into two rival groups – those who insisted that “the Chinese nation is only one,” and those who still tried to accept the great ethnic diversity of China (Zhou & Zhang, 2007).

Shortly after the war, all the sociologists and ethnologists returned to their original academic home bases. However, before they settled down, civil war broke out. In 1949, the KMT Army was defeated, and Academia Sinica moved together with its old patron, the KMT, to Taiwan. Fu Sinian, Li Ji, Ling Chunsheng, Rui Yifu, and many great historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists left the mainland. Almost all the sociologists and social anthropologists working in missionary universities chose to remain in the mainland, with the sincere hope for the realization of Mao’s “new democraticism.” However, “new

9 Soon the article was re-published in many other newspapers, including Zhongyang Ribao, Dongnan Ribao, Xijing Pingbao, and the provincial daily newspapers. 10 He opposed any extension of the concept “minzu” (nationalities or ethnic groups) into China. He argued that for the benefit of the Chinese people in the difficult time of war, the history and current situation should be re-conceptualized. Intellectuals should bravely accept the “fact” that China had been a unity long ago. They should abandon the wrong definition of the Chinese nation as a unity of five or more different “minzu.” Instead, they should accept the “contemporary fact” that China was better perceived as a unity of just three cultural groups, the Han, the Muslims, and the Tibetans, and try to reduce by means of research and practice the differences between them or among the border tribes.


democracism” did not bring prosperity to sociology. Neither sociology nor social anthropology was permitted by the new regime. Soviet ethnographia, or “the study of every phenomenon of social life within a particular historical framework, in terms of the process of its origin and development, and its causal determination” (Petrova-Averkieva 1980, 19), was brought into play; re-named minzu yanjiu (ethno-national research), it became the officially designated professional identity for sociologists and social anthropologists as well as ethno-historians and historians involved in minzu research projects.

Wu Wenzao went in 1946 as the leader of a political Chinese delegation to Japan. Between then and 1951, he conducted extensive surveys of Japanese society. In 1953, when the Central Minzu College was established in Beijing, the new capital, he was appointed professor of minzu yanjiu. In 1957, he was attacked as a “rightist.” Between 1959 and 1979, without the opportunity to study China sociologically or ethnologically, he devoted most of his time to translating Western studies of world history. In 1979, three years after the end of Cultural Revolution, he was elected advisor to the newly established China Sociological Society. Wu passed away in 1986. In his later years, he wrote several influential articles concerning the changes in ethnology in the post-war West (Wu 1990).

Between 1949 and 1966, Chinese ethnology and sociology were all transformed into “ethno-national research.” Different perspectives and orientations of pre-1949 sociology, anthropology, and ethnology were criticized and abandoned.11 The work of New China’s ethno-national researchers became chiefly – if not solely – concerned with the identification of ethnic minorities and with the location of their histories and “social types” (shehui xingtai) in the evolutionary temporality. Both parts of the work were done for the sake of bringing ethnic minorities into the “Great Family of the Socialist State.” For that purpose, diffusionism, functionalism, Durkheimian sociology, and historical particularism were all denounced. Many big-name sociologists turned themselves into “historical materialists” at least for the sake of appearances (Wang 2005, 32-71).

Across the Strait, in Taiwan, Ling Chunsheng established the Ethnology Institute in 1956. Later Ling devoted most of his energy to the study of inter-cultural macro-regions, which somewhat reversed his earlier postulation of China as a self-contained universe of ethnic diversity. His successor, Li Yiyuan, developed a mixture of American-style cultural anthropology and structuralism. Under both Ling and Li’s leadership, the Ethnology Institute at Academia Sinica covered ethnology, sociology, and psychology. In the 1990s, sociology and psychology succeeded in gaining independence; they established separate institutes. In the same period, within the Ethnology Institute, ethnographicized and sociologized anthropology of the British kind became a predominant paradigm. 11 Fei Xiaotong, who led all Chinese sociologists to work for “nationality policy,” was of course not exempted from the list of attacked “rightists.” Lin Yaohua, who between 1947 and 1949, still working in Yenching University, had become a Morganian ethnologist, wrote a physical anthropological history of mankind, a history of primitive society, and some pieces on ethnological regions. He became a Communist Party member on the same day that Fei was attacked. Li Anzhai established the first modern primary school in Tibet in 1950 and was quite deeply involved in China’-Tibetan affairs. From 1961, he worked in Sichuan Normal University as an English teacher.

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In the Institute of History and Philology, now located at Nankang in Taipei, along with the expansion of critical studies of the nationalism of modern Chinese historiography, archaeology, and linguistics and critical studies of ethnicity inspired by new Anglo-American social science writings, the old image of a civilizational entity comprising rich ethnic diversity has become a target of postmodernist critiques.

Conclusion

In a couple of years, in mainland China, anthropology will mark the fourtieth anniversary

(since 1979) of its restoration. Looking back at the decades just passed, and comparing them with previous periods, our colleagues will sing the praises of their success in creating a flourishing discipline, or disciplines. Considering the recent growth of a whole range of items, including the numbers of anthropological programs, teaching and research staff and students, publications, translations, conferences, and so on and so forth, one can easily find “prosperity” to be a suitable word for describing the situation of contemporary Chinese anthropology.

In the ethnographic areas in the Han and non-Han regions or in the contact zones between them, numerous projects have been implemented, and they have yielded extensive results. Along with the opening of fieldwork sites and universities to the outside world, more and more foreign researchers have done fieldwork in Chinese localities and they have lectured in many Chinese universities.

In the past decade or so, our new-generation colleagues have conducted more fieldwork abroad; consequentially, the geographic coverage of Chinese anthropology has also extended beyond the frontiers of the Central Kingdom.

Moreover, in all the three “circles” – Han, ethnic, and foreign – of Chinese ethnography, more of the important topics our pioneers did not manage to focus on – for instance, religious, historical anthropological, and political ones – have been quite thoroughly considered, and new topics – for instance, those of urbanization, migration, health care, environmental issues and ethno-ecology, disasters, tourism, landscape, and heritage – have attracted more attention.

The rapid growth of anthropological “productivity” in China has been made possible by a few factors. The “open-door policy” implemented since the end of the 1970s has allowed a lot of exchanges between Chinese and foreign scholars and academic institutions and made possible the intensification of inter-cultural circulation of ideas and the realization of Chinese-foreign research collaboration, and it can be said to have been one of the main factors (Harrell 2001). However, this factor has proven to be easily alterable: let’s not forget that just a couple of years after the re-opening of the discipline, in 1983, anthropology suffered from an organized criticism of its involvement in promoting “bourgeois ideas of alienation” (zichan jieji yihua sixiang); that between 1989 and 1995 the discipline experienced quite a major decline because of increased ideological monitoring, and that in the past few

112

Wang Mingming

In the Institute of History and Philology, now located at Nankang in Taipei, along with the expansion of critical studies of the nationalism of modern Chinese historiography, archaeology, and linguistics and critical studies of ethnicity inspired by new Anglo-American social science writings, the old image of a civilizational entity comprising rich ethnic diversity has become a target of postmodernist critiques.

Conclusion

In a couple of years, in mainland China, anthropology will mark the fourtieth anniversary

(since 1979) of its restoration. Looking back at the decades just passed, and comparing them with previous periods, our colleagues will sing the praises of their success in creating a flourishing discipline, or disciplines. Considering the recent growth of a whole range of items, including the numbers of anthropological programs, teaching and research staff and students, publications, translations, conferences, and so on and so forth, one can easily find “prosperity” to be a suitable word for describing the situation of contemporary Chinese anthropology.

In the ethnographic areas in the Han and non-Han regions or in the contact zones between them, numerous projects have been implemented, and they have yielded extensive results. Along with the opening of fieldwork sites and universities to the outside world, more and more foreign researchers have done fieldwork in Chinese localities and they have lectured in many Chinese universities.

In the past decade or so, our new-generation colleagues have conducted more fieldwork abroad; consequentially, the geographic coverage of Chinese anthropology has also extended beyond the frontiers of the Central Kingdom.

Moreover, in all the three “circles” – Han, ethnic, and foreign – of Chinese ethnography, more of the important topics our pioneers did not manage to focus on – for instance, religious, historical anthropological, and political ones – have been quite thoroughly considered, and new topics – for instance, those of urbanization, migration, health care, environmental issues and ethno-ecology, disasters, tourism, landscape, and heritage – have attracted more attention.

The rapid growth of anthropological “productivity” in China has been made possible by a few factors. The “open-door policy” implemented since the end of the 1970s has allowed a lot of exchanges between Chinese and foreign scholars and academic institutions and made possible the intensification of inter-cultural circulation of ideas and the realization of Chinese-foreign research collaboration, and it can be said to have been one of the main factors (Harrell 2001). However, this factor has proven to be easily alterable: let’s not forget that just a couple of years after the re-opening of the discipline, in 1983, anthropology suffered from an organized criticism of its involvement in promoting “bourgeois ideas of alienation” (zichan jieji yihua sixiang); that between 1989 and 1995 the discipline experienced quite a major decline because of increased ideological monitoring, and that in the past few


years for the same reason it has become a lot more difficult to publish studies on sensitive religious and ethnic issues.

Obviously there have been other more important factors. Paradoxically, an important one has been the “insensitivity” of our colleagues toward the crisis of the discipline deeply troubling our colleagues in the West and the South.

Since the late 1970s, in the West, anthropologists have been torn between self-criticism and struggles to return to the old glories of the “view from afar” (Marcus and Fischer 1986); in the South, they have instead striven to clear away the discipline’s colonial physicality and spirituality from national anthropologies (Fahim 1982; Escobar 1993; Krotz 1997); in contrast, in the East (at least in China), anthropologists, including newly returned students from abroad and locally trained scholars, have seemed to hold together as a certain “union” and, cheerfully neglecting the social, epistemological, political and ontological problems of anthropology, have fought for the good life of the discipline.

One can explain this insensitivity by considering the fact that social anthropology and ethnology, once prosperous, had gone through all the forceful party-state organized denunciations never witnessed in most other contexts. However, whatever explains the insensitivity, the disciplinary flowering it has yielded should not be taken for granted. Underneath the surface of the “union,” the old “intra-national” disciplinary tensions have continued to affect the social lives of Chinese anthropologists.

Three decades ago, those who called themselves “ethnologists” successfully gained support from the Ministry of Education and Committee of Ethnic Affairs to designate the interrelationship between ethnology and anthropology as “ethnology (encompassing cultural anthropology).” In 1995, a group of anthropologists came together in Beijing and produced a counter proposal. They produced a petition and handed it in to the Ministry of Education, in which they argued that anthropology should be an independent discipline. The person in charge of disciplinary divisions in the Ministry responded to the anthropologists by saying that “anthropology” sounded strange to the Chinese people, and even to him, and it seemed to be a useless discipline, being unrelated to “our socialist modernization.” He did not disagree with the idea of more independence for anthropology. But he kindly expressed his concerns about the future of an independent but vaguely defined and useless discipline: unlike ethnology which has lived on funds provided by the Committee of Ethnic Affairs, anthropology had difficulties in finding resources other than from foreign grants. In the end, taking the point of Fei Xiaotong, then vice-president of the National People’s Congress, the Ministry of Education decided that anthropology should be included in “greater sociology,” a more obviously useful-sounding sub-discipline, whereas ethnology should continue to be a “first rank discipline.”

Currently, sociology, ethnology, and anthropology, all of which have been borrowed from the West, have once again become several contesting “sub-traditions,” co-existing in Chinese anthropology, having separate institutional and personal relational bases.

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The divisions of Chinese human sciences are not as different as people think from those engaging our forerunners decades ago, and they remind us a lot of the old tensions agitating our ancestors. This need not mean that the present is the same as the past. Taking the example of “ethnology,” while still expanding as a discipline in the ethnic minority universities, it has dramatically changed by becoming far less ambitious about making long-term historical inquiries into the processes of inter-cultural relations, in which most of the earlier Western and Eastern ethnologists were interested, and by surviving ever better on the platform of specific policies. The rivalry between the “brotherhoods” of sociology and ethnology has continued on the level of utility, and it has become a contest over the practicality of social science – with anthropology tending to be left to the domain of the “impractical.”12

What is worse, the balance – though limited – of the selective traditions our pioneers achieved has somehow gone with the wind. Among Chinese human scientists, too many have devoted themselves to “the ethnography of the abstract” instead of “the science of the concrete,” and too many have had to become “practical” anthropologists, ethnologists, or sociologists by virtue of using theories and methods to justify policies, so much so that much of our intellectual productivity can only be said to have been outcomes of the habitual academic practice.

A few years ago, to outline contemporary Chinese intellectual landscape, I depicted the “mainstream” discourses of “civilization” by virtue of a topography of certain rival “sub-traditions.” In terms of restoring our cultural glories, should we learn from our ancestors, or should we borrow from the foreigners? As I (2014b) described, in varied ways, contemporary Chinese thinkers and political ideologues have divided themselves between those who have defined their perceived “right thinking” as having sprung from China’s own cultural ancestries and those who have treated it, one way or the other, as the outcome of following the Western way, the model embraced to keep China continuously moving forward in order to revitalize the old “golden age” of the Central Kingdom.

The same pursuits have emerged in Chinese ethnographic discourses. There, the cultural struggle, aimed at realizing a return to the Central Kingdom, has been continued between those who have simplistically repeated Western theories and those who have sought to make anthropology a part of the “nativistic” claims of intellectual and political Chineseness.

A lot of debates have stemmed from the fact that proper combinations of the “descent” and “exchange” models have yet to be developed. However, it is a fact that in spite of their differences, the divided sub-traditions have in effect been similar in nature.

In an age in which all sorts of “insensitivity” and “confusion” have emerged in the East, it is important to consider how the traps our pioneers did not avoid continue to trouble us, and

12 The “impractical” aspects of anthropology have been objected to, quite paradoxically, by a great many returned overseas anthropology students and locally educated anthropologists who have sought so desperately to pursue the practicality of their discipline through Western-style medical, tourist, heritage, and post-disaster cultural studies.

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Wang Mingming

The divisions of Chinese human sciences are not as different as people think from those engaging our forerunners decades ago, and they remind us a lot of the old tensions agitating our ancestors. This need not mean that the present is the same as the past. Taking the example of “ethnology,” while still expanding as a discipline in the ethnic minority universities, it has dramatically changed by becoming far less ambitious about making long-term historical inquiries into the processes of inter-cultural relations, in which most of the earlier Western and Eastern ethnologists were interested, and by surviving ever better on the platform of specific policies. The rivalry between the “brotherhoods” of sociology and ethnology has continued on the level of utility, and it has become a contest over the practicality of social science – with anthropology tending to be left to the domain of the “impractical.”12

What is worse, the balance – though limited – of the selective traditions our pioneers achieved has somehow gone with the wind. Among Chinese human scientists, too many have devoted themselves to “the ethnography of the abstract” instead of “the science of the concrete,” and too many have had to become “practical” anthropologists, ethnologists, or sociologists by virtue of using theories and methods to justify policies, so much so that much of our intellectual productivity can only be said to have been outcomes of the habitual academic practice.

A few years ago, to outline contemporary Chinese intellectual landscape, I depicted the “mainstream” discourses of “civilization” by virtue of a topography of certain rival “sub-traditions.” In terms of restoring our cultural glories, should we learn from our ancestors, or should we borrow from the foreigners? As I (2014b) described, in varied ways, contemporary Chinese thinkers and political ideologues have divided themselves between those who have defined their perceived “right thinking” as having sprung from China’s own cultural ancestries and those who have treated it, one way or the other, as the outcome of following the Western way, the model embraced to keep China continuously moving forward in order to revitalize the old “golden age” of the Central Kingdom.

The same pursuits have emerged in Chinese ethnographic discourses. There, the cultural struggle, aimed at realizing a return to the Central Kingdom, has been continued between those who have simplistically repeated Western theories and those who have sought to make anthropology a part of the “nativistic” claims of intellectual and political Chineseness.

A lot of debates have stemmed from the fact that proper combinations of the “descent” and “exchange” models have yet to be developed. However, it is a fact that in spite of their differences, the divided sub-traditions have in effect been similar in nature.

In an age in which all sorts of “insensitivity” and “confusion” have emerged in the East, it is important to consider how the traps our pioneers did not avoid continue to trouble us, and

12 The “impractical” aspects of anthropology have been objected to, quite paradoxically, by a great many returned overseas anthropology students and locally educated anthropologists who have sought so desperately to pursue the practicality of their discipline through Western-style medical, tourist, heritage, and post-disaster cultural studies.


simultaneously to ask what intellectual architecture we can build upon the foundations our ancestors laid.

We have reflected on the contesting disciplinary sub-traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. Let me say that I do admire the old achievements, and in a recently compiled collection of reviews (Wang ed. 2010), I have expressed a certain attachment to them. However, I have also had to point out that both the main schools were passionately involved in nation-building. To help build the nation, Yanda sociologists tended to provide empirical data on small rural areas awaiting national industrialization and urbanization, while Academia Sinica ethnologists and historians were at pains to re-discover imperial China as a self-contained “union of contraries” and as a creation story of the Central Kingdom. Thus, either by reducing their country to a mere collectivity of rural villages, or by imposing a newly imagined entirety on their nation’s “feudalistic” pasts, both schools “nationalized” the complex alternations of order and chaos through Chinese history.

Prior to modern times, China was a supra-societal (supra-national) system (Wang 2015), a world with great intra-civilizational variations and “supra-societal” connections with other worlds, and this continued to be true even for modern scholars, those who sought to Sinificate but could not do so without also Westernizing, and those who devoted themselves to a “scientific Oriental studies in China” but could not create it without concepts and images coming from the West.13

Such historical conditions were more or less those which Mauss and his colleagues sought to reconstruct.

In Paris, between 1913 and 1930, many elements of ethnology were being re-incorporated into the Année Sociologique. Mauss, drawing and in turn bearing on German diffusionism and American cultural anthropology, wrote ethnological essays to emphasize the importance of studying what he called “phenomena of civilization” – the borrowing of technology and the principles of social organization, and the propagation of what “seems the most private to the life of societies – secret societies or mysteries, for example” (Mauss 2006, 60). Mauss pointed out that the “phenomena of civilization,” often mistaken as national, were essentially international. They could be defined, in opposition to “social phenomena” which are specific to the super-organisms of nations, “as those social phenomena which are common to several societies, more or less related to each other, be it through prolonged contacts, through some permanent intermediaries, or through relationship from common descent” (61).

Ling Chunsheng, who had the rare opportunity to work with Mauss and his colleagues in the late 1920s, must have at least heard about the Maussian idea of civilization, but he did not start his study of the “phenomena of civilization” until the 1950s. For, in the Republican era, Ling had to devote most of his time to conducting ethnographic research among ethnic minorities within the boundaries of China, and to relating fieldwork data to the history of ancient Chinese “national integration.”

13 Republican Chinese social sciences were more like China itself, an empire-turned nation, a “continent” in itself, striving to absorb technologies and mentalities from the exteriors.

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We should not blithely assume that micro-sociological and ethnological ethnographies only yielded “anthropologies at home” devoid of any sense of the other. In fact, most anthropologists active in the Republican era knew well the importance of respecting the institutions, customs, and beliefs of the “internal others,” and they followed too closely the model of science disseminated from the West to pay sufficient attention to the epistemological implications of “local knowledge,” which paradoxically was what characterized the anthropologies of “empire-building.” However, compared with the anthropologies developed at the Euro-American centers, these Eastern anthropologies were indeed much less concerned with the universal implication of doing ethnography among peoples in the “outer circle.” Also, compared historically with classical and imperial ethnographies, they were likewise much narrower in the cosmo-geographic scope of inclusion. In the long centuries prior to the 20th century, in all kinds of Chinese records (zhi), other humans, things, and divinities occupied an outstanding position. Of course, these beings were not in all cases “represented” as civilizational equals or superiors; from time to time, they were treated rather as inferior. But in many records, curiosity about the other found its intellectual, literary and philosophical expressions (Wang 2014a). Compared with these records, the Republican narratives of the closer others could be said to be a lot more “self-contained,” if not ethnocentric.

In consideration of the fact that Republican sociology and ethnology were restricted to the ethnographies of “internal others,” perhaps one mission the new generations could accomplish would indeed be extending the geographic scope of Chinese ethnography beyond the frontiers, by means of which, they could hope to bring about a “compensation.” The “compensation,” as some would suppose, would make Chinese anthropologies more “international” or more like those practiced in the Western anthropologies of “empire-building”.

To put it in Lévi-Strauss’s words (2013), in such anthropologies from the “center”, The anthropologist simply invites each society not to believe that its institutions, its customs, and its beliefs are the only one possible. He dissuades it from imagining that, because it believes them good, these institutions, customs, and beliefs belong to the nature of things and that one can with impunity impose them on other societies, whose system of values is incompatible with its own. (43) It is absurd to predict that Chinese anthropologies of distant others will be totally

removed from the “anthropological manifesto.” However, will our mimetic practice of the anthropology of distant others mislead us into the old trappings, for instance, that of the “colonial situation” (Stocking ed. 1991)? Will it contradict what has been promised for the opening of the non-Western and non-hegemonic landscapes of anthropology (Escobar & Lins Ribeiro 2006)? Will certain “indigenous perspectives” of the other – so readily available in the classical and imperial “wisdoms of the world” – be essential to the imagining of a Chinese anthropology of the distant?

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We should not blithely assume that micro-sociological and ethnological ethnographies only yielded “anthropologies at home” devoid of any sense of the other. In fact, most anthropologists active in the Republican era knew well the importance of respecting the institutions, customs, and beliefs of the “internal others,” and they followed too closely the model of science disseminated from the West to pay sufficient attention to the epistemological implications of “local knowledge,” which paradoxically was what characterized the anthropologies of “empire-building.” However, compared with the anthropologies developed at the Euro-American centers, these Eastern anthropologies were indeed much less concerned with the universal implication of doing ethnography among peoples in the “outer circle.” Also, compared historically with classical and imperial ethnographies, they were likewise much narrower in the cosmo-geographic scope of inclusion. In the long centuries prior to the 20th century, in all kinds of Chinese records (zhi), other humans, things, and divinities occupied an outstanding position. Of course, these beings were not in all cases “represented” as civilizational equals or superiors; from time to time, they were treated rather as inferior. But in many records, curiosity about the other found its intellectual, literary and philosophical expressions (Wang 2014a). Compared with these records, the Republican narratives of the closer others could be said to be a lot more “self-contained,” if not ethnocentric.

In consideration of the fact that Republican sociology and ethnology were restricted to the ethnographies of “internal others,” perhaps one mission the new generations could accomplish would indeed be extending the geographic scope of Chinese ethnography beyond the frontiers, by means of which, they could hope to bring about a “compensation.” The “compensation,” as some would suppose, would make Chinese anthropologies more “international” or more like those practiced in the Western anthropologies of “empire-building”.

To put it in Lévi-Strauss’s words (2013), in such anthropologies from the “center”, The anthropologist simply invites each society not to believe that its institutions, its customs, and its beliefs are the only one possible. He dissuades it from imagining that, because it believes them good, these institutions, customs, and beliefs belong to the nature of things and that one can with impunity impose them on other societies, whose system of values is incompatible with its own. (43) It is absurd to predict that Chinese anthropologies of distant others will be totally

removed from the “anthropological manifesto.” However, will our mimetic practice of the anthropology of distant others mislead us into the old trappings, for instance, that of the “colonial situation” (Stocking ed. 1991)? Will it contradict what has been promised for the opening of the non-Western and non-hegemonic landscapes of anthropology (Escobar & Lins Ribeiro 2006)? Will certain “indigenous perspectives” of the other – so readily available in the classical and imperial “wisdoms of the world” – be essential to the imagining of a Chinese anthropology of the distant?


These issues remain to be debated (Wang 2015, 395-417); but one thing is certain – that the geographic expansion of the ethnographic enterprise and the internationalization of anthropology are two different things, with the latter more profoundly related to our reflections. If our ancestors were limited, it was not because they were not international enough – in fact they all spent years in the West and used a lot of Western ideas and disciplinary icons. Nor was it because they never studied places beyond China’s frontiers: as we saw, the father of Chinese rural sociology, Wu Wenzao, wrote his thesis on English treatments of the Opium War; Lin Anzhai did his fieldwork among the Zuni; Wu Zelin composed a sociology of Western racial-cultural relations; and Fei Xiaotong published extensively on England and America (Wang 2008). No – the true problem is that an international social science without a theory of internationality – at the moment, it is better understood in Mauss’s terms as “civilizations” rather than “global societies” – is not true to itself, let alone true to the phenomena it sought to decipher or evoke. In the future, Chinese anthropologists will continue to do ethnography in different locales where they will continue to apply the methods their pioneers advanced for the studies of “small social areas” and larger ethnological bio-cultural groups “here and there” in all of the three circles. But they will find it ever more necessary to open the “isolates” to each other in ways in which, all over the world, they have been inter-connected and differentiated in the past and the present, in order for each to be understood simultaneously in its own and other terms, and in order for ethnographic narratives to be true to the worlds of the “phenomena of civilization” in which their subjects of study have been integral parts.

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