An Anthropology of "Applied Anthropology" in Postwar Hong Kong (original) (raw)

Anthropology of 'Applied Anthropology' in Postwar Hong Kong

Mainland has been characterized by the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization during the past 30 years, which brought a broad range of population movements and in turn led to the loosening of the social integration and the rapid changes of traditional culture. Population movements put urban, environment, culture and even diseases in motion, and brought out a series of new phenomena and new problems, basing on which the applied anthropology developed rapidly and diversely in mainland. Although the name, applied anthropology, covered different areas of research, but there was still one core issue behind diverse academic focuses, which could be picked out as flows in the process of social transformation.

Anthropology in Hong Kong According to the GSAP: A Celebration of Public Outreach

Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology

This paper examines what the Global Survey of Anthropological Practice reveals about anthropology as practiced in Hong Kong, and notes that the statistical data offered by Hong Kong Anthropological Association members does not reflect professional anthropology in the city. This is because the Hong Kong Anthropological Society is a non-professional association dedicated to bringing anthropological knowledge to a larger public, with an astonishing diversity of members from all walks of life. The paper suggests that this motley society, in its implicit repudiation of anthropological professionalism, may offer a modest lesson in how, even in a society in which the number of anthropologists is too tiny to create a viable professional organization, bringing anthropology to the public may nonetheless be eminently achievable.

History, Practice, Limitations, and Prospects: Anthropology in China

Vibrant, 2022

Anthropology in China has a century long history. This article examines its origin, development, practices, and limitations throughout history briefly. It is argued that the history of anthropology in China has always been influenced by the state politics; its ups and downs has been determined by the state policy, and thus lacks academic autonomy. In the era of reform-open, however, Chinese anthropology received its spring. Several fields of new were developed along with international anthropology; the discipline has produced many PhDs. Many universities and colleges have established their own programs or departments. There are some problems, however, are underneath. Nonetheless, all negative conditions would push Chinese anthropologists forward to learn more, strengthening theoretical and critical thinking and searching for new subjects and new problems.

Introduction: A Chinese century in anthropology?

Social Anthropology, 2009

This special issue comes at the time of an imminent watershed in anthropology. Many decades ago, Maurice Freedman in his 1962 Malinowski Lecture foresaw the coming of a 'Chinese phase in social anthropology' (Freedman 1979). The anthropology of China did undoubtedly grow and develop in the decades that followed, but I believe that it is only now that the anthropology of China is ready for the qualitative leap in its importance that Freedman implied. However, I would contend that this has less to do with the efforts of China anthropologists than with the rise of China as a global power. Suddenly, anthropologists, like other social scientists, for the first time since Japan before the Second World War, have to come to grips with a society outside the Western core that self-consciously and self-confidently seeks a place at the centre of the global stage. With this, the anthropology of China has a unique opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the discipline of social and cultural anthropology. Like China itself, China anthropology already has come a long way. The earliest fieldwork studies were done by Sinologists around the turn of the 20 th century. With the fall of the empire in 1911, such Sinologists mostly turned to textual studies, deeming postrevolutionary China no longer of relevance for an understanding of Chinese culture. In the 1920s and particularly the 1930s, foreign anthropologists, including several big names in the field, certainly were interested in China, spending time there teaching, learning Chinese, or sometimes even embarking on fieldwork. However, the practical problems of doing fieldwork in a country embroiled in warlordism, civil war and the war against Japan proved too much for almost all of them; in the event, only a few foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese completed and published first-hand fieldwork during this period. Curiously, it was only in the final few years before the communist victory in 1949 that a number of mainly US-based anthropologists commenced fieldwork projects in China, too little and too late to establish China as a proper ethnographic area. In China itself, anthropology and sociology had made a decent start, but, with a few notable exceptions, was published quite naturally mainly in Chinese and remained outside the mainstream of international anthropology. After the communist victory, foreign researchers were completely banned from China, while the fledgling native tradition of anthropological research was suppressed together with most other social sciences. Chinese anthropologists either had to stop working altogether or else were put to work on the national project of China's ethnic mapping, becoming 'ethnologists' in the process. Gradually, a reversal of roles emerged

Chinese Anthropology and the Contemporary World

Malighetti R. 2014, Chinese Anthropology in the Contemporary World in Sai Han, Social Changes in China, Ming Qing Studies, Rome, pp. 107-123.

Chinese Anthropology and the Contemporary World in Sai Han, Social Changes in China, Ming Qing Studies, Rome, pp. 107-123.

Flanagan, Patricia, Hong Kong – Cultural Transformation of the Public Sphere

IN: Curry, Janel; Hanstedt, Paul, (ed.) Reading Hong Kong Reading Ourselves, City University of Hong Kong Press, pp. 64-89. ISBN 978-962-937-235-4 This book, written by fourteen reflective scholars about living and learning from Hong Kong,builds on the growing interest of using place as text while providing a model of deepening crosscultural encounters. Each chapter is written in a personal and experiential style, exploring Hong Kong through the lenses of a range of disciplines that shaped individual author s perceptions and encounters. The city is like a text one reads and deciphers, linking one s sense of other cities with one s present experiences of this city in this moment of time. In reading the city, readers discover not only what is out there in the ever moving surround of Hong Kong s urban life, but also what is inside oneself as newcomer and as from another city and culture.