This book arises from a series of workshops examining the formation of academic disciplines in 20th-century China. There exists among the scholarly community an active debate between the merits of academic universalism and the need to “indigenize” such disciplines. This book focuses specifically on the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, and evaluates the need to Sinicize or “make Chinese” these Western-derived sciences – a topic that has been probed by scholars in both disciplines since the 1970s. The authors of this collection contribute new dimensions to the conversation.
The two lead articles by Dirlik and Wang establish the theoretical context of the collection by contrasting how academic indigenization was portrayed in China in the 1930s versus the 1980s. Dirlik poses a problematique of nationalization and indigenization, with the former referring to the felt need to add a dimension of Chinese society examples into the social sciences to make a given social science truly universal, while the latter wrestles with the question as to “how different” a nation's social science is or should be from the same discipline in other countries. Is a “Chinese anthropology” different from an “anthropology of China”? Dirlik thinks that today's calls for the nationalization of the social sciences is fundamentally different from the justified calls of the 1930s and 1940s, and is instead “unduly defensive and retrogressive” given the fact that today's China is no longer the object of imperialist hegemony but is instead a major global player. Dirlik here and elsewhere in his review makes the valid observation of how these discussions of both universalism and indigenization serve political purposes and must be understood in their political contexts. Wang's article makes a number of similar observations, while giving more details from the 1930s and even from the 1950s. His article reads well and argues convincingly that “academic universality and indigenization complement each other,” particularly when calls for indigenization are not merely a xenophobic rejection of the foreign but a legitimate call for incorporating local knowledge and alternative perspectives (p. 58).
Three articles on Taiwanese social science in the 1980s and 1990s elaborate on how this topic is being reconstituted in more recent contexts. Articles by Ya-chung Chuang, Maukuei Chang and Allen Chun all point to the importance of Taiwan's political context in understanding the indigenization issue. Indigenization appeared first as a pro-government defence of Chinese tradition and then during the 1980s and 1990s, within the context of a challenge to Kuomintang political legitimacy, it turned the politically subversive corner from “Sinicization” towards “Taiwanization” with the “bentu” movement. On an oddly parallel track, in the PRC Sinicization had earlier served the purposes of political orthodoxy during the 1950s, as making the social sciences “more Chinese” made them more politically palatable, but later it served as the pathway to ease these disciplines into China in all their manifestations, theoretical schools, and approaches – “Sinicized” or not. The Taiwan social science articles make for an interesting counterpoint to the China / PRC articles.
Four articles focus on individual Chinese sociologists/anthropologists of the 1930s (Sun Benwen, Lei Jieqiong, Huang Wenshan and Li Anzhai), one focuses on regional studies, and the remaining final three chapters do not relate to the book's topic at all.
Overall, the book is strongest with its clear recounting of the 1980s rethinking among some Chinese sociologists and anthropologists in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong of their place in the social science world as the PRC re-joined the larger academic universe and as Taiwan liberalized. One particular strength is the comparison of the different shapes that this debate has taken in the People's Republic and in Taiwan. Also insightful is the comparison of academic discourses of the 1930s with those of the 1980s and 1990s. This focus, however, comes at the expense of other decades only glossed in the discussion, and with little attention being given to non-Chinese and non-Anglo-American anthropologists such as scholars in the Soviet Union, Marxists and Maoists (or even the French and Germans). Greater attention, too, could have been paid to how anthropology was conducted in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong, although this is perhaps an inconvenient topic to be raised by Hong Kong-based scholars. Also, the usage of the key English terms “indigenization,” “Sinicization” and their Chinese cousins “bentuhua” and “Zhongguohua” gets a bit confusing following each author's slightly different ascription of meaning to these terms; a stronger editorial hand would have helped in this arena as would some stronger attention to a somewhat uneven editing effort.
This collection is of greatest potential usefulness to those already aware of some of the dimensions of the debate and searching for some insightful discussions of the influence of political contexts on the “formation of the disciplines” in contemporary Chinese societies.
