A Chinese Phase in Social Anthropology

^ OME twenty-six years ago Malinowski was visited by Professor Wu _ Wen-tsao of Yenching University. He learned from him, as he tells WJus, 'that independently and spontaneously there had been organized in China a sociological attack on real problems of culture and applied anthropology, an attack which embodies all my dreams and desiderata'. These words were written in I938 in the Preface to Fei Hsiao-tung's Peasant Life in CAhina, 2 a book which Malinowski thought would be counted 'as a landmark in the development of anthropological field-work and theory'. One reason for Malinowski's confidence in Fei's work was that it pushed the frontiers of anthropology outwards from savagery to civilization. And Malinowski went on to quote a forecast he had made on another occasion: ' anthropology of the future will be. . . as interested in the Hindu as in the Tasmanian, in the Chinese peasants as in the Australian aborigines, in the West Indian negro as in the Melanesian Trobriander, in the detribalized African of Haarlem sic as in the Pygmy of Perak. ' We are now in the midst of the future of which Malinowski wrote. If we ignore the reference to the Trobrianders (who generously provide opportunities to present-day anthropologists for fruitful non-field work), some of us might well say that the prophecy erred only in suggesting that we are equally interested in savagery and civilization. The bold ones among us might not be shy to confess that Hindus and Chinese seem rather more interesting than Australian aborigines. This is the point from which I start. Since the thirties a number of Chinese, British and American anthropologists let us call them 'social', most of them will not object have tried to study Chinese society. What can we learn from their efforts to go beyond the older bounslaries of their subject? I shall suggest some answers to this question which should enable us, like the eponym of my lecture in his time, to guess at the near future of social anthropology. The young Fei Hsiao-tung was one of several Chinese eager to study their own society by methods developed for investigating primitive social life. Francis L. K. Hsu, who followed Fei's example in taking his Ph. D.