The Ethnicity of Anthropology in China: Discursive Diversity and Linguistic Relativity
Author(s)
Bilik, Naran
Abstract
Chinese anthropologists have been attempting to locate anthropology in China, debating the legitimacy of its bentu hua, or ‘nativization’. However, a second careful look will take us to a more complicated landscape. While China, as one of the ‘mis-imagined’ homogeneous world-level communities has to face the West, its minority groups, whether ‘imagined or not’, have to confront both the Han world and the West. In connection to the hegemony of a market economy, which sidelined the minorities, the ‘ethnicity’ of anthropologists reflects their respective upbringing or ‘habitus’. A sub-version of Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativity bites here: anthropologists who master different languages tend to merge into linguistically demarcated separate interest groups. Looking at the underlying implications will lead our analysis metaphorically to a broader view of the extant dilemma global social sciences and humanities have been trapped in.
