Anthropology in China

Defining the Discipline

Gregory Eliyu Guldin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315488394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Betriebliches Rechnungswesen

This book previously published in 2015 as vol. 20, no. 4 and vol. 21, no. 1 of Chinese sociology and anthropology". Seventh section of Chinese Studies on China series.

Part I

Overview and Historical Background

	GREGORY ELIYU GULDIN
1	Chinese Anthropologies

WHEN SPEAKING of anthropology in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC), it is often best to refer to the anthropological sciences rather than to anthropology. Unlike the situation in the United States, there is no widespread consensus even among its practitioners as to the fundamental nature of the field. In its American version, anthropology has traditionally been seen as an integrated and holistic discipline composed of four subfields: archaeology, physical (biological) anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics. In today’s People’s Republic of China, most of the scientists working in these four “subfields” would themselves vigorously protest their inclusion in any such overarching frame. The essays appearing in this volume reflect just such a fundamental disagreement.

China, of course, is not unique in formulating its anthropology along lines other than those laid down in the United States; Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, among others, have all developed their own definitions and set their own parameters for the “science of man,” to use Clyde Kluckhohn’s phrase. There is indeed something inherently anthropological about this realization that every culture has had its special impact on the structure, function, and use of the social sciences in its own land. This insight, however, raises the old bugaboo of cultural relativism in a new metacontext, for if the social sciences as practiced in a particular country are the product of the unique social forces in that country, how can we speak of a universal anthropology (or any other social science) when each version of anthropology (or whatever) will be hopelessly mired in the particularities of particular times and places?

Leaving aside for the time being such a global question, let us explore the contemporary Chinese anthropological landscape and contrast its contours with its American counterpart. Two university departments, with their attached museums and research institutes, designate themselves anthropology departments and are both located in the south of the country. Zhongshan University in Guangzhou (Canton) and Xiamen (Amoy) University in Fujian province both adhere to the “four fields” approach which is standard in the United States (see the essays by Liang and Chen). Their students are thus exposed to a gamut of courses broadly similar to those of most undergraduate anthropology curricula in America. Undergraduates may major in either archaeology or ethnology at Zhongshan and in archaeology or anthropology at Xiamen. Graduate degrees are offered in archaeology and cultural anthropology; China’s first Ph.D. in anthropology was awarded to China’s first Tibetan doctoral degree holder, Gelek, in July 1986 at Zhongshan.

In the north and much the rest of the country, however, anthropology clearly has another referent, one more in the European and Soviet mode. There anthropology clearly refers to physical anthropology and encompasses mainly the study of human paleontology as well as the study of contemporary human physical variation. The preeminent locus for such studies is the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP). This research institute is the descendant of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of Peking Man fame and today oversees on a national basis investigations into China’s paleolithic and protohominid past.

Oft-ridiculed in the West, anthropometry is a respected component of this version of anthropology. The careful and precise measurement of human variations, from skull size to waistline to posture, is not tainted with racism as it was (and is) in the United States and is seen as a valuable aid to industry and commodity production; it is applied anthropology par excellence. Fudan University’s biology department houses an anthropology section doing just this and other types of physical anthropological research. Zhongshan University also teaches anthropometry to its students as do many biology departments and medical schools throughout the country. The latter two types of institutions are also the loci for what is often another subbranch of physical anthropology in the United States, human genetics. So too are primate studies placed in biology departments, with the most advanced work being conducted in Yunnan.¹

Of all the four subfields of the American version, archaeology and ethnology are the most developed as independent disciplines in China. Archaeologists have their own research institutes, university majors,² and government excavation teams. Of all the anthropologically related disciplines, theirs is the one with the widest popular recognition and the strongest level of university and governmental support. Unlike their American counterparts, however, Chinese archaeologists do not draw a sharp theoretical or organizational distinction between historic and prehistoric archaeology and excavate sites from the Neolithic to the Qing dynasty.

The other key component of American anthropology, cultural anthropology, finds its closest equivalent in ethnology in the PRC. Most ethnologists there are specialists on the non-Han minorities of China who make up 7 percent of the total population; this disciplinary division of labor thus leaves sociology with a clear field to study the Han majority.³ A network of Institutes of Nationalities, sometimes attached to local branches of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), is found throughout areas of the country with significant minority populations. Scholars at these institutions carry out ethnographic investigations as needed by the authorities or as dictated by their own research interests. Similarly, one will also find ethnologists in Beijing and elsewhere at local minzu xueyuan, universities for minority nationality students. For both types of institutions, their Beijing affiliates (CASS-Beijing and the Central Institute of Nationalities) are the most prestigious and important locales of scholarship and influence.

As for the last of the American four fields, anthropological linguistics, this subdiscipline is in China similar to ethnology in being mostly encompassed within the realm of minority studies. Each of the departments and research institutes of anthropology as well as the CASS Institutes of Nationalities and the minzu xueyuan all have their ethnolinguistic specialists on the languages of the local minorities. Other aspects of the linguistics domain, such as semantics, transformative grammars, and the like, are found in the completely separate academic world of linguistics and language study.

The following portrait of anthropology in China of the mid-1980s can thus be drawn: four-fields anthropology established in the south while ethnology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics go their separate ways elsewhere in the country. Nationwide scholarly associations reflect these divisions so that separate organizations exist for anthropologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, linguists, and paleoanthropologists.

West Wind

Given the plethora of institutes, journals, and scholars that now comprise the world of these anthropological sciences, it is hard to imagine that sixty years ago they were in their infancy. Today, Chinese social scientists point to Cai Yuanpei’s 1926 article “On Ethnology” as the first article written by a Chinese advocating anthropology or ethnology. Cai himself, one of the foremost intellectuals of his day, had learned of anthropology from the Japanese, and indeed it was the Japanese who were the first conduit for things anthropological to reach China. By the 1930s, however, European and American influences began to outweigh Japanese as Western works were translated into Chinese, Chinese students went abroad to study, and Western social scientists came to teach and do research in China.

The 1930s, then, saw the emergence of the anthropological sciences in China, but these were disciplines clearly formed in a Western mold. Visitors from abroad—from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Sergei Shirokogorov (the White Russian tutor of Fei Xiaotong before Malinowski) to Davidson Black—taught and propagandized their theoretical perspectives in China. German diffusionism, English functionalism, American historical-particularism, and Japanese classical evolutionary theories all found the academic equivalent of the Open Door in China. No one foreign school dominated, but most significant is the fact that there were no Chinese schools to compete with them. Moreover, in the period before 1949 there was never a Chinese full professor of anthropology; Westerners held all senior posts and Chinese served as junior faculty.

For all of the four fields of anthropological interest the situation in the years before the triumph of the revolutionary forces was basically the same. Chinese absorbed the foreign theories, methodologies, and outlooks of their Western mentors either in China or abroad at their mentors’ home institutions. Those fortunate enough to go overseas would return home to trumpet the perspectives of the particular school they trained in. These returned scholars, people like Liu Han, Wu Dingliang, Fei Xiaotong, Lin Yaohua,⁴ Yang Kun, Pan Guangdan, Ling Chunsheng, Yang Chengzhi, and Wu Wenzao, were to become the leaders of their field in the late prerevolutionary and early postrevolutionary periods and thus comprise the founding generation of Chinese anthropological scientists.

In linguistics, Chao Yuanren, Li Fangkwei, and Luo Changpei introduced Western linguistic methods and theories (basically structuralism) and were heavily influenced by Bloomfield, Sapir, and other anthropological linguists. The American emphases on American Indian languages and the problems encountered in the study of unwritten languages were seen as applicable parallels to the study of China’s minority populations. The Chinese sought to apply similar analyses and methodologies to their work in China.

Foreign influences were also great in physical anthropology and archaeology, as the few great excavations of the prerevolutionary period were all conducted under the leadership of foreigners. Davidson Black, Johann Andersson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and others trained the first generation of Chinese scholars in these fields. Many of these—Wu Dingliang, Pei Wenzhong, Jia Lanpo—got their start at the famous Peking Man site of Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien).

In the pre-1949 period sociocultural anthropology was not well distinguished from the allied fields of sociology and social work. Wu Wenzao in the north and Yang Chengzhi in the south are thus known as the founders of both Chinese sociology and social anthropology. Wu followed Malinowski and so did his students at Yanjing and Qinghua universities, thereby establishing a British perspective in North China. In the south Yang influenced generations of students with a more American definition of anthropology, a definition derived from foreign instructors at the American-run Lingnan University in Guangzhou. Alongside Lin Huixiang of Xiamen University and the University of Manila (also American-run), Yang tutored the future founder of the first anthropology department in post-Liberation China, Liang Zhaotao of Zhongshan University, while Lin had a decisive impact on the founder of China’s second department, Chen Guoqiang of Xiamen University.

Although Radcliffe-Brown did lecture in Beijing for a spell, and although Malinowski is well known as the mentor of Fei Xiaotong, the American influence was also quite strong on early Chinese ethnologists/sociologists, even those in the north. Chinese ethnologists now in their seventies and eighties mention Franz Boas, more than anyone else, as having had the most significant impact on their anthropological development. Lowie and Kroeber were also important influences; one can still see their works today on those bookshelves that survived the Red Guard ravages of the mid-1960s.

War with the Japanese moved the academic centers of China to the interior and the southwest and gave these anthropologists an opportunity to have intensive interaction with China’s own minorities. With war’s end came a flowering of the discipline as new courses, majors, and even a handful of departments were set up (at Qinghua and Zhongshan universities). Research was reform-oriented and sought to aid the national efforts first of defense and then of reconstruction. Although schools from the Boasian historical-particularist to evolutionism all found their adherents, functionalism was probably the preeminent orientation (Chen 1982). With the Guomindang collapse in 1948–49, scholars were forced to choose their futures. Many noted social scientists such as Ruey I-fu, Wei Huilin, and Ling Chunsheng departed for Taiwan to rebuild the institutions and the discipline they had left behind in the new “People’s China” being constructed on the mainland.

North Wind

While some scholars were fleeing New China, others were anxiously wending their way back to the homeland to help build the new society. The majority watched and waited for signs from the triumphant Communist Party. For social scientists, the wait was not long.

Anthropology immediately came under suspicion. After barely a year in existence, Zhongshan University’s anthropology department was suspended in November 1949 and moved as a unit into the sociology department. Other nascent anthropology departments or majors suffered the same fate as the discipline as a whole fell under a cloud. Anthropology in China in 1949 had just begun to take root, to mature, but it had not yet shown its worth (or even what it was) to the public, to the politically progressive forces in China, or even to academia. Having collaborated with colonialism elsewhere, associated with the great imperialist powers of the United States, Great Britain, and France, it is no wonder anthropology was distrusted by the Communists. That functionalism was its preeminent theoretical orientation in China did not help either (Chen 1982).

In 1951 criticism of sociology intensified: it was reactionary, foreign, imperialistic. By 1952 Yanjing’s sociology department was abolished along with its embedded anthropology section. Likewise the fate of Qinghua’s and Zhongshan’s sociology-anthropology programs as the country’s entire higher educational system underwent a massive reorganization. Following the Soviet model, the “bourgeois” social sciences of sociology and anthropology (and others) were proscribed and their adherents scattered to other departments or fields.

For many ethnologists a key decision affecting their futures was the 1951 State Council directive that all scholars in “minority studies” (i.e., those erstwhile anthropologists-sociologists) move to the newly formed Central Institute of Nationalities (CIN)⁵ in Beijing. Fei Xiaotong, Lin Yaohua, Pan Guangdan, Li Youyi, and other top scholars came over from Yanjing and Qinghua universities that autumn. The Central Institute of Nationalities thus came to house most of China’s trained ethnologist-anthropologists, and by the mid-1950s it had become the center for ethnological teaching and theorizing in the People’s Republic. The largest group of students were minority nationality cadres who attended the institute to study nationality policies and nationality theory from a Marxist perspective before returning to their home districts to serve as government and/or party officials.

After the revolution linguistics had also been declared useless and linguistic departments in Zhongshan and Beijing universities abolished. Many linguists at these institution moved to history and Chinese language departments. In 1956, however, the government recognized the need for trained linguists when it established a minority languages institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and transferred a number of linguists to this new unit.⁶ When a new Nationalities Institute was also established under CAS in 1958, both linguists and ethnologists found a new institutional home there as well.

The two institutes were merged in 1961 to function as a centralized research and policy center for the government. Key tasks undertaken at this Nationalities Institute were: (1) the formulation of nationalities policy recommendations for the government based on Marxist-Leninist ethnological theory and practice. A major recipient of such advice would be the national, provincial, and local minwei, or governmental nationalities policy committees, on which ethnologists would sometimes serve in an advisory or support capacity. (2) Research on the minorities’ history prior to 1840 (but also sometimes including late nineteenth and early twentieth century developments). (3) Establishing a library and materials archive for nationality studies. Today the Nationalities Institute, boasting 218 researchers, is the largest component of the autonomous (since 1978) Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The reorganization in 1952, by contrast, did not do away with archaeology and physical anthropology. On the contrary, archaeology began to thrive with official government support and encouragement. Since the pre-Liberation archaeological institutes and their directors had mostly left for Taiwan, a new institutional frame for archaeology was necessary, and the Institute of Archaeology was established under the Academy of Sciences. On the university campuses, archaeology continued to be taught as part of his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I. Overview and Historical Background
• Part II. The Argument for a Four-Fields Anthropology
• Part III. What Is Archaeology?
• Part IV. Paleoanthropology and Neoanthropology
• Part V. Developing Ethnology
• Part VI. Ethnolinguistics
• Index