Reevaluation of Anthropological Theories in the Realm of Chinese Studies: 12 Topics

Keywords

Chinese Studies　,　Anthropological Theory　,　History of Studies　

Objectives

Anthropological research on Chinese society got into full swing in the early 20th century, and a wide range of studies have been conducted by Japanese, Western, and Chinese researchers. In the beginning, Chinese society held promise as a place to conduct research on a plural society that differed from “primitive” societies, and in the 1960s ethnographies were written about it as a comparison with African studies. But after that Chinese studies moved forward in an independent direction. This made dialogue with other fields of anthropology difficult, even within East Asian studies, and it became largely isolated in anthropology. However, looking back on anthropological research on China, it was among the first in contemporary anthropology to discuss topics such as the relationship between state and society, political economy, individualism vs. holism, and ontology. The objective of this project is to outline the history of theories in Chinese studies across 12 topics in which a vast amount of research has been accumulated in the field (family, gender, community, ethnicity, religion, fengshui, ecology, food, art, tourism, media, andurbanism) in order to enable dialogue with anthropological theories.

Research Results

Over the approximately three-and-a-half years from 2019, the research group presented and discussed sociocultural anthropological research on Chinese studies (Chinese ethnography) with the aim of re-evaluating its significance. As stated in the subtitle, the research group originally planned to examine 12 topics: family, gender, ethnicity, community, urbanism, feng shui, religion/beliefs, food, environment/ecology, tourism, art, and media. However, during the course of discussions, it became evident that considerable research has also been accumulated in the fields of medicine, music, performing arts, and cultural heritage. As mobility across fields is integral to understanding modern day China, and it is also necessary to address the relationship between museums and anthropology, the number of topics covered was increased in order to reassess trends in Chinese ethnography from a more holistic perspective.
The group’s presentation focused not only on the trends in each topic, but also on the discussion of how each trend relates to anthropological theories. This revealed several points, which are described as follows. First, the discipline of Chinese ethnography has evolved from its earliest stages into the study of a complex society. Accordingly, there was a strong interest in history and literaturefrom the early stages of Chinese ethnography, as well as the emergence of theories on state-society relations. Second, in addition to early work on structural and symbolic analysis in Chinese ethnography, studies analyzing colonialism, the nation’s political economy, and de-territorialized economic networks had emerged before the 1980s. Furthermore, there has been considerable attention paid to the relationship between the human and non-human, as evidenced by feng shui, food, and art.
Although Chinese ethnography has sometimes been viewed as moving in an independent direction within anthropology, a thematic reevaluation of research trends reveals a certain degree of correlation between Chinese ethnography and anthropological theory. It can be said that a holistic view of Chinese ethnology has not always been clear, partially due to the fact that conventional studies of Chinese ethnology in Japan have not reviewed topics such as gender, art, and cultural heritage. The discussions and findings of this research group represent a new step forward in the dialogue between Chinese ethnography and anthropological theory.