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

10. From Sinicization to Indigenization in the Social Sciences

Chapter 10 From Sinicization to Indigenization in the Social Sciences: Is That All There Is? Allen Chun Within this chapter, I trace in the development of social sciences (mainly anthropology and psychology) in Taiwan trends in indigenous theory, as a function of “mainstream” theoretical debates as well as “local” discourses. In both cases, the interpretation of “culture” as a framework on which it is possible to articulate native theory represents the primary problematic issue. One might ask, by what sense or authority does the native “know” or understand in indigenous terms and does this really qualify as cultural interpretation in disciplinary or theoretical terms? One might also ask whether such subjectivity is seminal at all, when other disciplines seem to consider it less or not even relevant. Problematizing the Study of Culture in Anthropology and Psychology The common concern with culture in certain schools of anthropology and psychology is a point of departure allowing me to address specific problematics that link both disciplines, especially in reference to the possibility of native theory and the role of native academics in articulating it. The content of such theory and the subjective identity of the scholar are two distinct issues that have been improperly understood in the literature; thus the main goal of my paper is to establish a framework for recasting the epistemological and methodological dimensions of this problem in better light. Anthropology (or any social science) in Taiwan as an academic discourse practiced in a local setting by native Chinese seems concrete and unambiguous, but it is in fact a problematic entity whose multiplicity of meaning lies in its concatenation and whose contradictions arise from our misunderstanding of exactly what is local and/or 256 · Allen Chun native about it. It would be easy to write a descriptive history of the development of anthropology in Taiwan as a discipline. Many institutions hold retrospective conferences every ten years to produce a summary account of past research and future directions based on a laundry list of publications produced by their major contributors, so there is no lack of such compilations of developments in the discipline, if that is what one means by disciplinary formation. However, it is important to establish as a point of departure whether the disciplinary formation of anthropology refers primarily to its content, as the study of primitive cultures or folk societies , or to its existence as an institutional formation, however defined. In practice, especially in its professionalization, both have evolved hand in hand, but I argue that they are analytically distinct phenomena whose frame of reference has important ramifications for how we understand its concatenated existence and operation. If I define anthropology by the former, I should not be limited to academic anthropology or the work of trained scholars associated with institutions that are also part of a larger modern transformation. There have always been folklorists and local historians whose work and data have provided rich sources for academic anthropologists, but to frame such studies as a point of departure would shed a different light on what academic anthropology is as a specific genre of knowledge. Whatever traditions of knowledge shape anthropology , one cannot at the same time deny that anthropology as a field of knowledge is dominated by professionally trained academics operating in institutions that are regulated by rules and mindsets that seriously shape the way such knowledge is conducted, produced, and disseminated. To take seriously disciplinary formation as a phenomenon of academia, one cannot be blind to the functioning of academia as well as its link to society, and even to the state. The Rise and Fall of “The Native’s Point of View”in Anthropology Anthropology in the 70s and 80s was dominated mostly by rifts between two different kinds of approaches, one generally advocating objective, scientific, or materialistic approaches and one advocating subjective, interpretive, or culturalist approaches. There are many other schools of thought, but it suffices to say that theoretical debates in different eras have been epitomized by different conflicts of thought. Without doubt, the dualistic opposition between structuralism and functionalism, From Sinicization to Indigenization in the Social Sciences · 257 materialism and culturalism, etc., had specific nuances that must not be reduced to easy dualisms, but the advent of subjective, interpretive, and culturalist approaches in effect recognized for the first time the seminal existence or primary importance of the “native’s point of view.” This term itself was made famous in an...