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Chinese Anthropology

The Ethnicity of Anthropology in

China
Discursive Diversity and Linguistic Relativity

Naran Bilik
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

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.
Keywords  discursive diversity  ethnicity of anthropology  linguistic relativity

Hierarchical orders of particularism

Universalism and particularism are two extreme edges of a global frame of

reference in scholarship. This statement is oversimplified to cover the
‘order of things’ nicely. In order to have a more authentic picture, we need
some theoretical complication and as much oppositional contrast as inter-
actionism. Time (history) creates power relations that pervade the know-
ledge in the head of an armchair professor. Power contrasts shift within the
spectrum of opposition and grades of distinction while the shift itself is not
one dimensional. What I mean here is that contrast does not always take
place between East and West, South and North. Each has its own headache:
the contrasts are possibly sharper within a particular social space than
beyond.
A united front can redraw a boundary and turn an internecine fight
into a ‘class’ war. Many national minorities in the state of China went
Vol 22(2) 133–148 [0308-275X(200206)22:2; 133–148;023849]
Copyright 2002 © SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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Critique of Anthropology 22(2)

through roughly the same Democratic Reform after 1947 (the year in which
the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the first of the five Chinese
autonomous regions, was founded). Communism won the hearts of mil-
lions of minorities who were willing to jump into socialism by acceptance
of rapid social, cultural and economic transformation, which coincided
with the Nationality Identification Project,1 under the leadership of the
Communist Party of China. Many anthropologists and ethnologists who
converted themselves into Marxists through re-education participated in
this project. In the following years, the Identification Project2 took priority
in the research of Chinese anthropologists and ethnologists. Soviet style
‘etnografia’ (ethnology)3 became the mainstay by way of a paradigm. It is fair
to say that ethnology at that time was a top-down political agenda rather
than a horizontal academic pursuit.4 The main task then was to ‘save the
underdeveloped’ (qiangjiu luohou),5 help promote social transformation
and democratic reform in minority areas, ensure equal political partici-
pation in state affairs, and enrich and improve Marxist social history of
human development through the use of data on the primitive, slave and
feudal-serf societal forms of the Chinese minorities (Nationality Commit-
tee of the National People’s Congress, 1956).
Studies of the majority Han Chinese and minority studies within the
‘bourgeois’ discipline of Western anthropology and sociology had to give
way to minority studies of Soviet ethnology, and later, ‘nationality studies’.
The latter were far more urgent for reshaping the configuration of a new
Chinese nation-state, and more effective for reversing the nationalist
(Kuomingtang) government’s reactionary ethnic policies and Western anti-
Marxist ‘pseudo’ scholarship in the relevant field.6 There was, from the
start, a movement to nativize social sciences in China, and the movement
continues today. At first it was to render the social sciences proletarian.
More recently and more nationalistically it has actually been called
‘nativization’ (bentu hua). Actually, there have been double standards in
terms of social evolution, at least on the part of most Han officials and many
Han intellectuals. ‘Nativization’ of anthropology means to study all ‘ethnic
groups’ equally in China, since there are no racial differences within this
country.7 That means that Chinese ethnology should study indiscriminately
all nationalities within the territory. However, it was not that simple because
study meant hierarchization of different sociocultural communities in
China by order of social evolution underscored by Marxist evolutionary
theory, be it in a Soviet or a Chinese version. Inside China, the Han should
have equal status as a research subject but they do not. The distinction
between sociology and ethnology is often used to hierarchize majority
separation from minorities. Westerners themselves study the Han along
with other minority groups in this country as anthropological subjects
because they all represent Otherness to them.8 It is no accident that Marxist
evolutionary theory and the academic disciplines of anthropology and soci-
ology come from the West and share important theoretical origins.
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Bilik: The Ethnicity of Anthropology in China

Therefore, based on the above discourse, there have been different

versions of ‘nativization’ of anthropology in China. One is ‘Sinicization’ for
Han studies, a blending of sociology and anthropology, a meeting point
between East and West.9 The other is ethnologization of minority studies.
Having said that, we have to concede that such a version of ‘Sinicization’,
that is, the blending of anthropology with sociology, has not been recog-
nized by most ‘true’ sociologists in China. They insist on being sociologists,
as did the doyen of sociology Fei Xiaotung until, in the 1990s, he agreed
again to the designation ‘anthropology’ so long as it was closely linked to
‘sociology’.
Many colleagues, in China and outside, tell me of their impression that
Chinese anthropologists do too much on Other (minority minzu) and too
little on the Han. Yes, I would say that too much has been done on ‘minori-
ties’ outside social and cultural anthropology as a discipline and too little
has been accomplished in order to slot Chinese anthropology into its inter-
national niche.10 We tend to confuse paradigm with agenda. As far as para-
digm is concerned, there have been more Western-style and more
influential anthropological studies of the Han than of minority nationals.
Sociocultural anthropology returned after China started to reform and
academic research in the strict senses became possible. This is a time when
the official configuration of Chinese nationalities (minzu) and the locals’
own versions of linguistic-cultural taxonomy can coexist, as long as there
are no serious political consequences or implications. While Western
anthropology had gone through a long development before it plunged into
a debate on ‘postmodernist’ criticism, the discipline in China has yet to go
through such a rite of passage. Foundations are weak both in fieldwork and
theoretically. With wave after wave of ‘culture craze’, Western anthropo-
logical theories came though translations and academic exchanges into the
unprepared embrace of the then eager-learning Chinese sociocultural
anthropologists. The reflexive ‘writing culture’, reinforced by Said-ian
onslaughts upon orientalism, has deepened ‘nativization’ theorization,
writing and practice in the recovering discipline, largely based on fieldwork
conducted in researchers’ own linguistic communities.11 The value of tra-
ditional cultures increased overnight and anthropology is best poised to
represent and interpret them. To some degree the ‘culture craze’ found in
anthropology a useful tool for digging up old roots. Partly due to linguistic
and cultural readiness, more anthropologists in China tend to study their
own groups, which used to be studied by Western anthropologists as Other.
Cultural roots embrace ethnic feelings easily, and re-orient class boundaries
towards ethnic boundaries. Anthropologists and ethnologists in China with
differing ethnic origins center on their own linguistic communities in a
bounded imaginable space. Minority scholars, benefiting from their Han
mentors and teachers, colleagues and classmates, have found a foot-hold in
their own subjectivity and cultural sensitivity. They have gathered to form
new breeds of local cultural promoters. However, they seem also to have
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Critique of Anthropology 22(2)

withdrawn from the main anthropological arena in China, relying on their

linguistic capital, playing their own ‘lineage’ games.12 It is a time in China
when cultural sensitivity creates tension, and political suspicion structures
the ethnicity of anthropology.
Some Mongolian anthropologists have told me that they tend to avoid
their Han colleagues because they are ‘chauvinistic’.13 It is true that they
seldom talk to their Han counterparts. Tibetan and Yi anthropologists do
not often show up at major anthropological events in China. We do not
hear about as many minority case studies as Han. No doubt, the Danwei
system (very roughly, [Work] Unit System),14 together with the registration
system, has always been persuasively important for social control in China.
Even now, the interplay of academic politics in China is enacted and re-
enacted more often between Danwei than individuals, whatever their social
and cultural backgrounds. But that is not all. Besides Danwei boundaries,
we also have ethnic boundaries, though I reluctantly use the word ‘ethnic’
and only use it very loosely and grudgingly to refer to linguistic and cultural
upbringing.
Scholars in China talk about ‘nativization’ in similar terms, but differ-
ing overtones. Han colleagues talk ‘nativization’ meaning China versus the
West; Mongolian scholars advocate ‘nativization’ hinting at Mongol versus
Han and the West. And so do Yi, Tibetan, Miao scholars, and many others.
Within the Mongolian scholarly community, ‘nativization’ can mean
mother-tongue or even dialect-based scholarship. The checklist has to stop
here, though further fragmentation is still possible. Particularism in China,
as in the rest of the world, therefore, is hierarchically ordered. It is not that
one whole camp versus the other is universalistic. Each higher order can
use ‘universalism’ against the ‘particularism’ of the lower order(s), and it
can also use ‘particularism’ against still higher orders. Each order lives a
dialectical scholarly life, like fire and water, birth and death. Ethnicity can
be a rallying cry for particularistic self-legitimization. It is not only a rally-
ing cry but also an ‘embodiment’.15 Ethnically distinctive linguistic prac-
tice, inherited from ancestors, together with other kinds of enactment
(rituals, shamanistic formulas, consumption, etc.), collapse the duality of
cultural mind and social body. Once, a professor of social anthropology at
Cambridge asked me whether the Mongols could express their identity in
Chinese, by which she hinted at the losing situation of the Mongolian lan-
guage in China. However, it is not a question of the language in its physical
sense (acoustics, orthography, etc.); it is rather a deeply felt somatic sym-
bolism. Linguistic imagination is often more important than the language
itself. Many younger Mongolians have lost their mother-tongue but they still
regard themselves as members of the Mongolian community. They
‘borrow’ images and linguistic practice from their kith and kin who can still
use Mongolian, and build them into their embodied ethnicity. As is com-
monly seen, Mongolian urbanites, including practitioners of anthropology
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and folklore, are more ethnically identified than their rural folks,
disregarding the fact that they have lost almost all of Stalin’s ‘four
commons’.16 It seems that there is a wealth of cultural ‘hybridity’ in them:
they are also competent in Chinese, dressed in Western-style attire, and bar-
gaining on the market.17
However, ‘hybridity’ is a fussy term, the undefined use of which has the
danger of weakening the edge of such conceptions as ‘hierarchy’ and
‘power’ and obfuscating academic ethnicity. ‘Hierarchy’ provides us with
useful food for thought in the anthropological literature.18 Hierarchy
means time and power relations, not 1 + 1 = 2, as if the ‘arts of resistance’
can easily win the war and gain an equal footing with the power center, and
create a merger of equal opportunity. An analysis of interaction without
time and hierarchy would miss the point and can hardly explain sudden
bursts of hostility and riots some time after the merger. Hybridity does not
replace the corresponding old trait in a culture but is juxtaposed to it in
function.19 Borrowing does not necessarily mean indiscriminate blending.
We should agree that ‘Incorporation of the ideology of the dominant group
. . . does not represent a triumph of hegemonic discourse but rather a
successful challenge mounted on the center’ (Turton, 2000: 26). We should
also recognize that it is only a challenge. Hierarchy and power still hold,
especially for the embodiment of ethnicity in a new age of globalized flows
of capital and information, and madness for roots.
Hierarchy does not mean ‘fixity’ either.20 Dualistic structuralism also
excludes the role of time and disrupts the link between the past and present
in linguistic process (Pomorska and Rudy, 1985: ix). Order can change over
time. Western (including Japanese) anthropologists have helped bring up
a new generation of ‘native’ anthropologists with different linguistic,
cultural or identity backgrounds, serving as incubators that produce trans-
national spin-offs. These new orders ignore, contemn, even nullify the pre-
viously held hierarchies and they themselves can also suffer the same fate
at any time. However, the nullification of the previous hierarchies will
create new hierarchies into which ethnicity finds its way. Here we spot an
emerging platform of multi-voices for ‘nativization’, where ethnically
embodied anthropologists from China are enmeshed in a real or imagined
culturally hierarchical topography. ‘Sinicization’ of anthropology, with the
full support of metropolitan dons and their followers, with digitalized print-
ing technology and a wider readership, has been put on top of the topog-
raphy, while the ‘ethnicization’ efforts by minority advocators, who lack
such priorities, have to be content with their pigeonholes down below.21
Both are ‘nativizing’ efforts, but their versions, treatment, visions and
hidden meanings differ. Whether you like it or not, ethnicity is part and
parcel of the ‘nativization’ endeavor, uncomfortably situated in the pecking
order of scholarship, behind which there are cultural embodiments of
different breeds.
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Linguistic relativity22

The French are most sensitive about their language. Even in China we know
that quite well. We learnt in school how a French schoolmaster emotion-
ally taught his pupils to love their French mother-tongue when their home-
town was under German occupation. One of our colleagues recently wrote
a letter in broken French to a research institute in France and received a
warm letter beginning with ‘Thank you for writing the letter in French.’
French literature on anthropology is directly translated far less than
English. Works by Foucault, Bourdieu and other French authors were
largely introduced via English translations. Anglo-Saxon anthropology, be
it updated with French-German methodology and theoretics, is in the main-
stream in China as elsewhere.
In the same vein, anthropology in China is under the sway of Mandarin.
Not a single published textbook of anthropology is written in Mongolian,
Tibetan, Uyghur, Miao, Yi, or in any other of the 17 minorities’ traditional
written scripts. Han field studies are well known within the mainstream
anthropological camp and even beyond, while other studies are less known
or even unknown to scholars studying the Han. Is it because of Han cultural
centrism? Is it because of reverse orientalism on the part of minority
scholars? Is it because of language barriers or lack of resources? Is it because
of historically maintained centre-periphery hierarchy? It could be an inter-
active blending of all these.
There are some felt linguistic demarcations or boundaries along the
line of ‘ethnicity’ among anthropologists in China. No doubt, those who
have the ‘gift’ of English have easy access to all kinds of ‘capitals’ (visiting
scholarships, international conferences, latest versions of new theories, aca-
demic debates and so forth). To make it more complicated and intriguing,
there is a Japanese tradition represented by a different strain of anthro-
pologists who learnt to use Japanese and had the chance to stay in Japan
for a period of time. These different linguistic strains of ‘native’ anthro-
pologists have had more chance to meet at international conferences than
domestic ones, as if comparative studies are possible only in the West, where
they are used in a search for exotica. As Esteban Krotz argues, the socio-
cultural origin of an anthropologist influences his point of departure,
development and results.
[T]his influence will vary when the researchers are part of the same national
(socioeconomic, religious, regional imbalance, ethnic, gender and age group,
etc.) system as those they study, or when they usually live in individual and
socio-cultural conditions totally different from those of the people that they are
temporarily observing or even living with. (1997: 244)

We should admit that ‘influence’ does not mean ‘determination’; anthro-

pologists of the same cultural origin can have different points of departure,
development and results, and those of different social upbringing can
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reach paradigmatic or theoretic agreement. Disagreement or agreement, it

is a matter of degree and gradation rather than absolute cut-offs.
In China, and not only in China, ‘linguistic relativity’ is at the same time
politico-economic relativity that is based on a global flow of ideological dis-
course. With a market economy looming large in China, minorities are on
the losing end with regard to both language and culture. There are three
lines of argument over language teaching in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mon-
golia. One suggests that, for native Mongolian-speaking children at the level
of higher-middle school, Chinese should replace Mongolian. One argues
that Mongolian is a vital carrier of native culture and that it is against state
policies to mutilate the Mongolian language. The last advocates trilingual-
ism, the learning of Mongolian, Chinese and either English or Japanese
(Bilik, 1998: 48–51). Here cultural revival can mean different things for
Han and non-Han. While Confucian temples are rebuilt by the Han to resist
Western cultural invasion, a Chinggis Khan mausoleum is repaired by
Mongols in parallel. The Naxi are busy reconstructing their own images by
re-presenting their matrilineality and their Dongba pictographic writing.
The Yi are rewriting and retelling their history of civilization. Jumping the
pecking order, some Mongolian and Uyghur native speakers go abroad and
pick up English, Turkish and Japanese, bypassing Mandarin. To a moder-
ate extent, Mongolian anthropologists, Uyghur anthropologists, Yi anthro-
pologists and Tibetan anthropologists have each formed their own camp.
There are not as many Han anthropologists studying minority cultures
now as in the past. We can offer some reasons. As previously mentioned, at
first the Western-trained anthropologists in China were re-educated, had to
reject their previous academic discipline and go to work only on the non-
Han Identification Project. They had had to stop their Han studies,
denounced as ‘bourgeois’. Then, due to moneyless research conditions,
they could not go abroad to conduct fieldwork. Reacting to this and
working within the limits of many constraints, political considerations
included, subsequent generations of anthropologists are now reluctant to
study minorities, even less learn their languages. Psychological and linguis-
tic barriers stand in their way to Other cultures, a nice coincidence with the
postmodernist thought: Study Your Own Culture! What is more, it is a tra-
dition that dates back to the major anthropological work conducted by Pro-
fessors Fei Xiaotong and Lin Yaohua during the 1930s and 1940s, who did
fieldwork in their hometowns. Third, other academic genealogies, which
also originated from the West, such as Mongolology, Tibetology, Uyghurol-
ogy, Yi Studies and Dai Studies, coexist with anthropology. These ‘-ologies’
or ‘studies’ are usually tripartite systems that include linguistics, literature
and history, each with its own corpus of jargon and practice. These esoteric
trades of learning rely heavily on textual research, mainly in Chinese, and
have developed a linguistic and disciplinary centrism, allowing no alien
branches of learning, anthropology included, to step in. Fourth, minority
scholars intimidate their Han colleagues by accusing them of not knowing
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Critique of Anthropology 22(2)

the target language and therefore being ignorant of the cultural essence
the language carries.

Nation-building complex

Western thought, via Japan and Russia, has had great influence and con-
tinues to function in a localized way in China and the interpretation of its
history. The ideal of ‘One Nation, One State’ matches easily the trajectory
of Chinese History.23 China of the olden times used to center itself on a
vast expanse of land with imagined ‘civilized’ boundaries that were marked
out according to the judgment of the Center of knowledge, orthography,
codification, and an authority of civility and cultural sophistication. The
greatest difference of emphasis in Western thinking about nation-building
is the way territorial sovereignty, in its physical and substantial sense, is
fought over, negotiated, defined and redefined. It is, however, not difficult
for a modern China to adjust its focus of vision from Center to Peripheries,
from imagining to materializing. Imperial rights of nomination and naming
substantiated in the treasured and effective literary canon, traditionally
reinforced by the visual arts of landscape painting and calligraphy, are held
in high esteem and are still in force. The efforts to build a modern nation-
state parallel those of re-codification through re-identification and reclas-
sification. In terms of ‘ethnicity’ or something nearer to the term, New
China organized many campaigns to identify, classify and rename, in a nor-
malized and politicized fashion, its minority groups. Officially designated
institutions and experts constructed a ‘literary’ standard for grammars of
unwritten minority languages, new or revised Latin-based scripts were intro-
duced for them, ethnonyms and language names were granted. Here we
have the structure of languages and power in China:
(1) The national standard, Mandarin Chinese.
(2) Regional standard languages, including regional varieties of Mandarin Chinese
and regional minority standards, such as Yi, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur.
(3) Primary minority languages, those with historical and/or modern prestige,
usually large populations, and moderate political clout. These include Qazaq,
Korean, Manchu, Zhuang, Naxi and the non-standard Chinese dialects.
(4) Secondary minority (or sub-minority) languages, including numbers of speakers with
no clout such as Evenki, Salar and Va. Often these groups have larger numbers
of speakers elsewhere, hence their designation as Dispersed Nationalities by the
government.
(5) Unrecognized languages, usually unclassified mixed languages such as Wutun
(Gansu) and Äynu (Xinjiang). (Dwyer, 1998: 71)
For academics, including anthropologists, in China there is an unwritten
grammar of ‘ethnicity’ in their scholarly pursuits. China’s anthropologists,
like other scholarly communities at large, are no more an independent
‘class’ or ‘stratum’ than their counterparts beyond the political boundaries.
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Their mental imaginations and physical conditions have long been tied to
the fate of various nation-building efforts of the state by way of re-education,
working in the field or workshops during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the
Cultural Revolution, and others. Some of them have been rebuilt and
remolded into the nation-building complex and tend to look at things, as
if by a touch of contagious magic, in line with the center, throwing them-
selves deep into a Chinese version of French Revolution.
The story for anthropologists of minority origins is more complex.
They have to keep a watchful eye on where they set foot. Their recent
broken history is still beyond the reach of structural amnesia.24 Their
fathers or grandfathers had fought for self-determination with the full
support from the Third International and the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP)25 at an earlier stage. They had then to change position with the
changing world political configuration and military landscape. All ‘ethnic’
parties, organized directly or indirectly by the Third International, dis-
banded themselves and collectively joined the CPC. This historical
switchover took many of their lives. They were charged with treason, put in
jail, tortured, humiliated, and died a brutal or suicidal death. All these,
together with historical records and folktales about inter-ethnic fighting
and slaughter, were built into the upbringing of the next generations.
Generations have not yet stretched far enough to forget this history. They
are willing to join and have indeed joined the nation-building efforts, but
are worried and mistrustful.
Their Han counterpart has a different version of recent broken
history,26 embedded in hatred for the Eight-Power Allied Forces that took
humiliating and devastating revenge for the Boxer Rebellion and for the
later Japanese invaders. All are ‘foreign devils’. Han society has revived Con-
fucianism and many cultural and social traditions that suffered persecution
during the May Fourth Movement of the 1920s and the Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s and 1970s, as a form of resistance against foreign material and
financial advantage. However, such cultural revivals are ‘ethnically’
coloured and minorities with their traditions are doubly marginalized due
to the fact that they must face up to both foreign ‘capitalist’ culture and
Han Confucian tradition. Bounded by the sovereignty of a nation-state, that
is, China, both Han and minority anthropologists are positioned and fixed
in culturally tripartite nation-building efforts. In such an irreversible
endeavor, how to balance the elements or rather relations of elements,
categorized as the Western, the Han and the minorities, is a really delicate
and intriguing operation. Anthropologists who are based in Beijing or
similar metropolises are not yet prepared to confront such a scenario, since
not many minority colleagues are within reach for them. And we must
record that the whole army of anthropologists, in its strict sense, is far
smaller in number than, say, that of sociologists, even less of historians and
literateurs.
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Encompassment and partibility: discourse that makes sense

This description of the academic ‘ethnicity’ curtain I have unfolded, not

without reluctance, is not just intended to sound a cautionary note. We
need to balance essentialism with constructionism, particularism with uni-
versalism. ‘But the dialectic of this process is that of growth and not death,
that of clarification and not the installation or advent of a new dark age,
where only idiosyncratic approaches are celebrated at the expense of con-
sensual or shared understandings’ (Prah, 1997: 442).
To redress the balance, do we need a Mongolian anthropology, a
Tibetan anthropology or something similar to Anthropologies of the South?
Can we really find or create and maintain the boundaries between ‘us’ and
‘others’? In discussing Sahlins’s account of Polynesian ‘heroic history’ with
regard to the fact that chiefs used the pronoun ‘I’ in reference to their
whole group and his consequent emphasis on ‘encompassment’ as ‘the
modality of chiefly action’ (1981: 13–14, 1985: 35–6), and Strathern’s on
‘partibility’, ‘the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action’
(1988: 272–8), Alan Rumsey argues ‘that moments of both encompassment
and partibility are inherent in language . . . and that close attention to the
interaction between the two can yield new insights into the nature of per-
sonhood and social agency’ (2000: 101). Here I would further develop his
theorizing, though my use may not be faithful to his original insight, and
argue that anthropological encompassment (universalism) and partibility
(particularism) are also ‘mutually presupposing dimensions of social inter-
action’. If our discourse is meaningful then it should contain both ‘odds’
and ‘evens’. Differences and particularities create information, similarities
or generalities make decoding possible. China’s anthropology should be
put in the globalized academic milieu, which is based on relations of
relations rather than relations of elements.
Among those relations are the isolating constraints of official and aca-
demic life in China, the work unit and the continuing effects of the desig-
nation Ethnology (minzuxue) and of the Identification Project. With the
work unit come expectations of family-like loyalty. They silence or at least
mute academic criticism of unit colleagues, but they do not prevent inter-
nal tensions and factions, which in turn reinforce personal ties of loyalty.
But younger, particularly foreign-trained academics have been able to some
extent to break free from such constraints and form ties of friendship across
institutional and ‘ethnic’ boundaries. Here lies hope for an academic pro-
fession of anthropology, with its own standards of fieldwork and academic
criticism, with more case studies and more exchanges between fieldworkers,
whatever their nationality. Workshops where case studies are presented and
discussed could include chief informants from the cases studied and thus
networks of lateral scope will increase contact not only between academics
but also between their subjects, breaking down the isolating categorizations
of state.
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Whatever the locale, we do not need to treat it as either a representa-

tive variant of some essential ‘China’ or of a non-Chinese minority. But it
is certainly a locale of the Chinese state. Reflecting this fact in the spectral
academic world is the severe restraint on using cross-border comparative
regions such as ‘Inner Asia’ made famous in English by Owen Lattimore
(1951). Yet even this constraint can be gently challenged. It is for instance
possible for China-based anthropologists to contribute to foreign-organized
symposia on Central Asia or Oasis Society. Foreign connections and foreign
funds help with the holding of workshops and other occasions for crossings
of institutional and sovereign borders. But before going to town with the
deconstruction of the ethnic categories of the Identification Project, aca-
demic front-runners should stop to consider some of its positive benefits.
Among them have been and still are a degree of political autonomy and use
of the local language to high levels of local government and academic
qualification. Deconstruction can become a recommendation for the dis-
solution of such privileges, and play into the hands of policy makers who
favour top-down assimilation, taking away the choice that should remain
with locals to retain or reject their language, and to stake or not to stake
claims to separate culture-cum-nationality. What is needed are more voices
in the same space, not a dissolution and homogenization of cultural and
political space.
‘Consuetudinary jeremiads’ is a useful phrase to describe our
emotional condition, but it is not going to prevent us from communicating
with colleagues at home and abroad with an open mind. The ethnicity of
China’s anthropologists should create a chorus of a new universal anthro-
pology that consists of anthropologies that should not necessarily limit
themselves by ‘ethnic’ boundaries. When we tend to entangle ourselves in
a single boundary, be it ‘ethnic’, linguistic, cultural, behavioral, political,
economical, we should disentangle ourselves by thinking beyond and
within it: beyond, there are other boundaries; within, there are other sub-
groupings or individuals. Partibility, as far as our individual body and mind
are concerned, is limited and limitable; encompassment, relatively speak-
ing, is unlimited and illimitable. To make our discourse sensible we must
know there are many boundaries out there, substantiated both in the
imagination and physically, objectified, and reified. To make our discourse
endurable and sustainable, however, we have to learn and grasp the possi-
bilities of extroversion and introversion across boundaries.
Criticism of Eurocentric and Hancentric exotica or narcissism is only
effective within the frame of reference we are sketching, otherwise it makes
no sense. When we deny that there is something in our mind, it has been
there already. This is where one of the dimensions of Foucauldian great-
ness lies: we share and are part of power, hierarchy, exotica, narcissism and
many other aspects that a hegemony imposes on us and against which we
launch severe criticism. Each of us has been born into a pre-installed struc-
ture or frame of reference without a choice of our own. Such is the way
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Critique of Anthropology 22(2)

Time punishes us. Still we do not give up. On the basis of recognition of
the inequality we are born into and brought up with, we fight it out
together, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder with the prejudiced environ-
ment, beyond the pale of ‘ethnicity’, freeing ourselves from the chains
of farfetched and self-defeating and exaggerated over-essentialized
narcissism.
Mongolian anthropology, Tibetan anthropology, Anthropologies of the
South or not, they should never replace the singular, universalized or uni-
versalizing Anthropology at a much higher level. Particularism or essen-
tialism is just one end of the dialectic relationship, which substantiates it
when unified with universalism. Put another way, they are two sides of the
same coin. Individuality makes things more dependent on each other.27 To
deny this is to cut oneself off.

Notes
1
Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it had never been
made clear how many ethnic minorities there were in China. After the
founding of the People’s Republic of China, to implement the policy of
equality among ethnic groups in an all-round way the state has organized
large-scale investigations since 1953 to identify the ethnic groups. Proceed-
ing from conditions both past and present and in accordance with the
principle of combination of scientific identification and the wishes of the
given ethnic group, every group which accords with the conditions for an
ethnic group is identified as a single ethnic group, regardless of its level of
social development and the sizes of its inhabited area and population. By
1954, the Chinese government had identified 38 ethnic groups in all, after
careful investigation and study. By 1964, the Chinese government had
identified another 15 ethnic groups. With the addition of the Lhoba ethnic
group, identified in 1965, and the Jino ethnic group, identified in 1979, there
are 55 minority ethnic groups which have been formally recognized and
made known to the public. Now, in New China, many minority ethnic groups
which had not been recognized by the rulers of old China have been recog-
nized as they should, and they all enjoy equal rights with other ethnic groups
in China. (Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic
of China, 1999).
2 The Chinese short title for this project is Shaoshu Minzu Shibie, translatable as
the National Minorities Identification Project.
3 ‘Etnografia’ in Russian literally equals to ‘ethnography’, but it is often translated
as minzu xue, namely, ‘ethnology’. Actually, the Russian term ‘etnologia’ is
reserved for theory while ‘etnografia’ is for description.
4 One explanation given by Professor Fei Xiaotong states that after the founding
of the New China, the government needed to establish a People’s Congress of
supreme power, representing all nationalities (or ethnic groups), thereby
realizing the Marxist thought of people’s dictatorship. No one, however, could
then tell convincingly the number of nationalities and their languages in
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China, nor their extant conditions (Fei, 1996). Hence the Identification Project
became a paramount political task.
5
All nationalities are now undergoing rapid changes, and we may have diffi-
culty in correctly grasping the lingering history they experienced if we for a
while failed to make timely record of the original social features. Each nation-
ality will have developed their nationality consciousness by then and they will
have strong feelings for their ethnohistory, and will inevitably ask for scien-
tific evidence for their history, for clarification of their position in the
national history. (Fei, 1988: 115–20)
6
Imperialists conducted research of Chinese minorities to serve their aggres-
sion purpose . . . trying their best to invent and spread theoretical basis for
all kinds of splits and fragmentation, at the expense of telling lies, fabricat-
ing history and facts, covering up true history and facts, in a bid to split the
unity of the Chinese nationalities, dismembering China, and by all farfetched
means to link Chinese nationalities to imperialism. (Liu, 1996: 74–93)
7 ‘There are no racial aliens from the Chinese nationalities, and China has no
colonies . . . the ethnology we need is different in nature from that of the Euro-
American style’ (Cen, 1992).
8 In Chinese discourse, Han scholars are ‘native’ in Western eyes while their
minority colleagues are also ‘native’ in the Han taxonomy. It hints at a ‘pecking
order’ (Hu, 2000).
9 As our previous analysis goes, Han studies in the West is represented by anthro-
pology and Sinology, while in China it is sociology. Such a blending partly
explains the continual entangling of sociology with anthropology in China
today. Recently, the Academic Degree Committee of the State Council has
moved the affiliation of anthropology from under ‘ethnology’ to under
‘sociology’; this rings a bell. There is a structural ‘family resemblance’ to the
West: the mainstream ‘nationality’ is studied by sociology while the sideline
‘nationalities’ are dealt with by ‘ethnology’ or ‘anthropology’. So the decision
is, let’s put the anthropological studies of the Han (West) and the sociological
studies of the Han (China) together! What is left for ‘minority’ studies? Soviet-
style ethnology or its later version of ‘nationality studies’. According to Hu
Hongbao, the term minzu (nationality, ethnie) of that time has become by
default synonymous with ‘minorities’, which has in part led to an understand-
ing that ‘ethnology’ does not study the Han (Hu, 2000). Ironically, the same
Academic Degree Committee of the State Council has placed the ‘revolution-
ized’ version of ‘ethnology’, that is, ‘nationality studies’, to the rank of top-level
disciplines, parallel with the top-level sociology that covers anthropology as
secondary discipline.
10 Professor Wang Ningsheng points out that many investigation subjects of
academic value were forbidden at the time and that reports were full of political
platitudes, forcing reality into the procrustean model of Marxist class analysis
(Wang, 1996: 8).
11 There is no contradiction in the fact that anthropological fieldwork carried out
in Yunnan, one of the most important field sites in southwest China, by Han
anthropologists, has been mostly in minority areas.
12 There are over 10 anthropologists and folklorists of Mongolian origin within
and outside China, who received degrees or training from the UK or USA. The
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Critique of Anthropology 22(2)

Yi also have more than six anthropologists and folklorists with the same
academic background. Gelek, now vice-chair of the Tibetology Center, was the
first PhD in cultural anthropology in China. However, their voices are seldom
heard and seldom actively join important exchanges at the national level.
13 Mongolian scholars trained in Cambridge, UK, set up a Social Anthropology
Center at the Inner Mongolia Teachers’ University during the 1990s, to the
launching ceremony of which came Dr Caroline Humphrey, now professor of
social anthropology at Cambridge. However, these Mongolian coordinators did
not inform their Han colleagues in other parts of China, either because they
did not know them or had no such intention. Recently, Inner Mongolia
University has also set up an anthropology research group, and they only
invited Mongolian anthropologists in Beijing to be associated with them as
visiting professors.
14 It is a traditional socialist workplace that takes care of everything for the staff,
such as marriage, funerals, welfare and housing.
15 ‘Embodiment is a term that collapses the duality of mind and body, then, essen-
tially by infusing body with mind’ (Strathern, 1996: 181).
16 ‘A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life,
and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture’ (Stalin, 1942: 12).
In the Chinese version, minzu used to be translated as ‘nationality’, which was
supposed to embrace the ‘four commons’. In recent years, however, the English
term ‘ethnic group’ has more often been used to designate what is minzu in
Chinese. This is an official change.
17 The Mongolian term for ‘selling’ is khudaldahu, which shares the same word
root with ‘cheating’ (khudal). It is commonly held that traditional Mongols do
not know how to bargain. (However, it depends where they come from. There
has been no lack of Mongolian liars.)
18 Bulag (1998) and Yang (2000) both use the term ‘hybridity’ to refer to the
blending of traditional and foreign elements through political, economic and
cultural encounters. There is no denying that such ‘hybridity’ existed, exists
and will exist. But it has never lost its ‘hierarchical ordering’, that is, the local
society has its ‘stubborn’ cultural grammar that tends to resist sudden changes
at the core.
19 ‘Indeed, a sociology of interaction would be likely to miss the problem and find
sudden bursts of hostility and riots hard to explain. . . . The crucial point is that
coexistence has produced no general ideological synthesis’ (Dumont, 1970:
96).
20 For example, facing the West, both Han and minority scholars are ‘ethnicized’
as subjects of anthropological research agenda despite the fact that when they
are left alone it is thought that only the ‘minorities’ ethnicize, not the majority
Han.
21 It is most difficult nowadays to publish anthropological works in Mongolian or
other minority languages. The previous preferential policies for publishing
ethnic researches are no longer in force. Publishers would rather publish less
in minority languages and more in Chinese to prevent further nosedives in
their economic situation.
22 The ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ proposes that the structure of a language will
affect the way in which speakers of that language think (Barnard and Spencer,
1996: 499). Here I use it to refer, however, to the ‘ethnicity’ of a particular
language (in China) that will affect the way in which speakers (anthropologists)
of that language practice, since the nature of language is a social tool and
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Bilik: The Ethnicity of Anthropology in China

speaking is a cultural practice (Duranti, 1997: 1), or, if we follow Vygotsky, ‘the
use of language creates consciousness and even free will’ (Bruner, 1987: 1).
23 Here I refer to the orthodox version of Chinese history by capitalizing it.
24 In the Nuer way of reckoning genealogy, ‘lineages spring from very few names’
while others drop out, so that only certain lines of descent are remembered.
‘Also, in those lines that persist names drop out of the steps in ascent to the
founder of the clan, so that the distance in generations from the founder of a
clan to the present day remains fairly constant’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1940:
198–200).
25 It appears nowadays more as the ‘Communist Party of China’ (CPC) in such
official English newspapers as China Daily.
26 Here not taken into account are the minority conquerors of China in history,
which can easily fuel hatred and resentment.
27
[In quantum physics] . . . the individuality of the elementary particles is the
more attenuated the more they are engaged in interaction. As, on the one
hand, there is no completely isolated particle and as, on the other hand, the
bonding of the particles into a system is practically never sufficiently
complete for something of their individuality not to remain, it can be seen
that reality seems in general to lie somewhere between the concept of auton-
omous individuality and the concept of a completely fused system. (Dumont,
1970: 40)

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 Naran Bilik is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and head of the
Anthropology and Ethnology Department, Institute of Nationality Studies, Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences. His research areas include symbolic representation of
ethnicity, language and culture. He has conducted fieldwork among the Kimmun,
the Ewenki, the Mongols and the Uyghurs in South and North China. Address: 902,
Building 17, Xibahe Beili, Chaoyang Qu, Beijing 100028. [email: [email protected]]