Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism

Arif Dirlik · Guannan Li · Hsiao-pei Yen

Feb 2012 · The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

About this ebook

Within this text, the contributors provide a historical perspective on the development of anthropology and sociology since their introduction to Chinese thought and education in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1980s. The authors offer different windows on theoretical and research agendas of anthropologists and sociologists of the PRC and Taiwan, shaped as much by their political context as by disciplinary training. In examining the careers of several individual scholars, they also make note not only of their creative contributions, but also of the resonance of their intellectual concerns with contemporary issues in sociology and anthropology (culturalism, frontiers, women). Finally, the volume is organized loosely around the problem of how to translate these disciplines into a Chinese context(s), the issues of "indigenization" (bentuhua) or "making Chinese" (Zhongguohua), which have haunted the two disciplines since their establishment in the 1930s because of the contradictory expectations that they generate. This is where the case of China resonates with similar concerns in other societies where the disciplines were imported from abroad as products of a Euro/American capitalist modernity, conflicting with aspirations to create their own localized alternative modernities.

About the author

Arif Dirlik taught at Duke University for thirty years as Professor of History and Anthropology before moving in 2001 to the University of Oregon where he served as Knight Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies. After retiring from UO in 2006, he accepted a twoyear appointment as Chair Professor of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was also Honorary Professor of History and Cultural Studies, and Honorary Director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Chiang Chingkuo Foundation AsiaPacific Centre for Chinese Studies. He subsequently has held visiting positions as the Liang Qichao Memorial Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and, most recently, as the Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau in Beijing, and is an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory in Nanjing University. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, USA.