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

7. Southeast and Southwest

Chapter 7 Southeast and Southwest: Searching for the Link between “Research Regions” Wang Mingming The rethinking of anthropology beginning in the 1970s offered insightful ideas in individualizing and globalizing the local ethnographic method. Yet anthropologists have overdone this “rethinking” by erasing a crucial fact—any ethnographic research is carried out in regional circumstances, and many anthropological theories are regional in nature. Just as Richard Fardon has pointed out: “The inscription of locality has been one of the more complex results of the history of ethnography ... regional specialism is a practical consideration which pervades our attempts to research and to write about researching.”1 Therefore, “[t]rying to discuss ethnography without specific attention to place and time is indeed tantamount to cutting away the ground on which the fieldwork took place.”2 Fardon and others define “locality” not only as a geo-political unit, but also as a geographical unit for academic research. Certainly, this is part of the “postcolonial” geo-political division, but it mainly refers to the hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, Melanesia, and South Asia that have had a strong influence on important streams of anthropological thought. In my opinion, the re-regionalization of anthropology depicted by Fardon has great potential yet to be recognized: it will help us more accurately grasp the epistemic characteristics of anthropology and re-conceive new possibilities in the anthropological discipline based on research within the realm of locality. Fardon’s assertion is also important to the carrying-on and rethinking of Chinese anthropology. In Chinese anthropology , the “southeast,” which covers Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang, and the “southwest,” which includes Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, have gradually become what I call the “research regions” through purposeful or coincidental effort by local or foreign scholars since the nineteenth 162 · Wang Mingming century. The “research regions” refer to areas that have been studied by local, non-local, or foreign anthropologists and have thus become part of a certain research legacy and research style. The social study of the Han in the southeast and the ethnological study in the southwest have developed independently into separate fields. Like those world anthropological regions listed by Fardon, the southeast and southwest of China have also produced important research results that shaped Chinese anthropology. These results need to be further recognized. As with the hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, Melanesia, and South Asia, reviewing and rethinking the development of the research on Southeast and Southwest China will help us re-conceive anthropology on a larger scale, but first of all, Chinese anthropology. For this reason, I have run a series of anthropology workshops since 2007. In January 2007, I organized a workshop on “Han Popular Religion” in Quanzhou in the coastal area of Southeast China. In August of the same year, I organized another workshop for “southwestern anthropology ” in the ancient city between the Cang Mountain and the Er Lake in Southwest China. Why cross from the southeast to the southwest? What makes me, a researcher of the southeast, be interested in the southwest ? Why should an anthropologist of the southeast engage in questions concerning the southwest? I have attempted to define the study of the Han as the “core” and that of other ethnic groups as the “intermediary” in Chinese anthropology.3 Why should researchers of the two circles, separated by such a distance, engage in dialogue with each other? The reason why I tried my best to forge a tie between the southeast and the southwest is because I believe, on the one hand, that the dividing of the “research regions” by local studies could reveal how regional typifications have affected the discourse of anthropology, and, on the other hand, that only through transcending “localism” can we solve problems within the “research regions” and widen our perspectives to discover innovative ideas for the discipline. The “ethnological locality” depicted by Fardon and others contains different sizes and China, one of the “anthropological regions,” could not be included on the map of the “small regions” (although anthropological research on China has never been conspicuous on the atlas of world anthropology). To a large degree, South Asia can be compared to China, in what sinologists called the “world order.”4 That means, when we divide “research regions” into something like the “southeast” and the “southwest ” we should also keep in mind that such “locality” is but a part of the Southeast and Southwest: Searching for the Link between “Research Regions...