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Overseas field trips highlight Chinese view of anthropology

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-07-31 17:13

KUNMING: About 20 Chinese anthropologists have taken field study trips around the world in recent years, in an attempt to educate a Western-dominated system about Chinese thinking.

"The campaign is only in its initial stages, but it shows Chinese scholars are unsatisfied with just learning about the West and examining available knowledge," Gao Bingzhong, a professor with the Peking University, said here Friday.

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Primary destinations of the ongoing studies include France, the United States, Australia, India, Thailand, and Inner Mongolia. Chinese experts usually stayed in the latter country for at least a year, said Gao, an initiator of the unprecedented moves in Chinese anthropological studies.

The anthropologists live and communicate with the local people, observe their life styles and collect first-hand material for research," Gao said at the 16th congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

(IUAES), which will close Friday evening in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, southwest China. The field trips are funded by the academics' respective institutions.

"When experts begin to care about and probe exotic civilizations, it means they are fully conversant with their own cultures. Curiosity about others comes from their cultural disenchantment," said IUAES Vice Chairman Jing Jun.

Western anthropologists have travelled across the world to investigate mankind's issues. Their research results, including those from China, were exhaustively studied by Chinese researchers before they realized the importance of establishing their own point-of-view.

For quite a long time, the West has been an observer and the non-West the object of its gaze, which has gradually led to a subconscious, off-center, impression of the world's disposition, said Zhang Jinling, an anthropologist at Peking University.

"People were surprised to learn a Chinese person was carrying out research when I conducted a field study in France in 2007," said Zhang. He completed a paper last year relating to French lifestyle, based on his trip, which he presented at the conference.

"The Western view's academic domination in anthropology has almost suffocated non-Western concepts of thoughts and weakened cultural diversity," he said.

The first Chinese anthropologist to carry out field study abroad was Li Anzhai, who visited the United States and Mexico in the 1930s. Since then, up until the recent overseas initiatives, Chinese scholars have focused on domestic research.

"When we write about world knowledge in our language and from the point of view of our way of thinking, we are trying to put forward views unlike those of the West, and to take an active part in transforming the world's knowledge system," said Zhang.