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Key Words history of anthropology, reform and opening, communities, lives, nationlism
Abstract Since the beginning of China's Reform and Opening policy in 1978, the anthropological study of China has revived, and anthropology as a discipline has revived in China. Chinese anthropologists have become part of the world community of anthropologists. Anthropology in and about China has described a society occupied both with recovery from the cultural devastation of High Socialism and with progress toward an uncertain modernity. These narratives of recovery and progress can be followed through the anthropological study of communities-rural, urban, and in between--- of individuals' lives, including gender and sexuality, family and marriage, childhood and education, consumption and leisure, and of the nation and its constituent ethnic and regional parts.
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
In 1978 society in China1 was closed to outsiders and closed in upon itself; similarly, Chinese anthropology was discredited and practically out of contact with anthropology in the rest of the world. Now China has undergone the social process of gaige kaifang, or "reform and opening," hereafter Reform, which has been a profound revolution away from the Revolution. Chinese anthropology has opened up as well. The movement away from the study of bounded cultures and discrete communities that has marked anthropology in the past two decades has run parallel to the opening up of China's society and communities, so that Chinese and foreign anthropologists have begun to participate in an evermore integrated conversation about an ever more integrated society.
As anthropologists write about this transformation, they write about two grand, dialectically interlocked sets of themes: themes of recovery from the social and intellectual devastation of High Socialism and themes of progress toward a vaguely defined but highly desired modernity. Like society in general, the anthropology of China has its narratives of recovery and narratives of progress. I first narrate these changes in the institutions of anthropology, and then in the content of anthropological research and writing.
THE INSTITUTIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
The Prehistory of the New Anthropology
Ethnography, in the sense of describing the lives of cultural others, was a long and developed tradition in Imperial China (Hostetler 2001). But social and cultural anthropology (shehui wenhua renleixue) and ethnology (minzuxue) did not develop until the 1930s, when mostly foreign-trained...