Abstract
The article maps the practices and development of Chinese anthropology mainly from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 to the present. A historically contextualized analysis of the research practice of the most impor-tant Chinese anthropologists reveals how the nearly century-old bricolage of Chi-nese anthropology’s experience with various theoretical approaches frames the cur-rent geopolitical ambitions of the PRC. The introduction provides the essential information from the formative pe-riod of Chinese anthropology under the mainland government of the Republic of China (1911–1949). The first part of the text is mainly devoted to the period of the 1950s, when anthropology was repackaged into Sovietized ethnology under the pressure of the Chinese tint of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The political need for the rapid completion of the national project started on the threshold of the 20th century paradoxically forced the scientists to benefit primarily from their rich experience with colonial British and American anthropology from the period before 1949. The result of their work was presented anyway as a merit of advanced science from the Soviet union. The second part of the article mainly describes the period of the 1980s and 1990s, when anthropology and its main protagonists were rehabilitated and recog-nised again after more than twenty years of political campaigns. The main figure of Chinese anthropology, Fei Xiaotong, built his theory of the Chinese nation as a “pluralistic unity” based on his own experience from field research in the 1930s and 1940s in southwestern China. The core of his vision is comprised of his inter-pretation of the historical economic relations between the ethnic groups through whose territories the trade routes (“corridors”) of the Chinese empire ran. Fei’s gen-eralized vision of the Tibetan-Yi ethnic-economic corridor was from the beginning in harmony with the state-promoted Chinese branch of Marxist economic theory, and since the late 1980s it has been underwritten both by the economic policies of the PRC and by the related view of non-Han and later non-Chinese cultures.
The final part then points to the current visions of Chinese anthropology, whose accumulated experience with the construction of its own national identity – mainly following Fei’s theoretical considerations shaped by colonial anthropolo-gies, Sovietized ethnology, and the subsequent phase of the renewal of anthropo-logy as a science of state strategic importance – now frames the concept of Chinese political-economic a global strategy called the “Belt and Road Initiative”.
The final part then points to the current visions of Chinese anthropology, whose accumulated experience with the construction of its own national identity – mainly following Fei’s theoretical considerations shaped by colonial anthropolo-gies, Sovietized ethnology, and the subsequent phase of the renewal of anthropo-logy as a science of state strategic importance – now frames the concept of Chinese political-economic a global strategy called the “Belt and Road Initiative”.
| Translated title of the contribution | Anthropology in Socialist China: From Principal Role in National Identity Construction to Framing of the Global Belt and Road Initiative |
|---|---|
| Original language | Czech |
| Article number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 297-322 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Czech Historical Review |
| Volume | 122 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 15 Jul 2024 |
Keywords
- China
- Chinese Studies
- Anthropology
- Ethnology
- ethnohistory
- Belt and Road Initiative
- History of Science
