The 17th Broadyard Workshop（博雅工作坊）, titled “Anthropological Fieldwork on European and American Society and Culture,” was held at Peking University on February 25, 2019. More than 10 experts and scholars from universities and institutions, including Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Renmin University of China attended the workshop, which was chaired by Gao Bingzhong, a professor from the Department of Sociology, PKU.
China’s overseas anthropological field work has been carried out all over the world, with Europe and America as the areas of relative concentration. This has special significance for area studies involving Chinese anthropology and Chinese social sciences.
At the workshop, the scholars, drawing on their own field experience, analyzed and presented cultural and social representations of European and American society from different angles. Ma Qiang, an associate research fellow from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, discussed his research on the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and Palace of Culture on the transformation of Russian public space in rural areas. He expressed his belief that social transformation is the core proposition of post-socialist ethnographic research as well as an important topic in contemporary Russian social studies. The Orthodox Church and Palace of Culture provide the country’s most important public spaces. Under different times and social systems, the rise and fall of the two have become the epitome of the transformation and reconstruction of Russian rural society during the past 100 years. The two spaces are also symbolic of the ongoing social changes in Russian rural areas.
Liang Wenjing, a teacher at Chongqing University, conducted an in-depth analysis of the moral economy of American non-profit organizations using the Middletown (a pseudonym for Muncie, Indiana) Habitat for Humanity as a case study. The moral economy of non-profit organizations is mainly initiated by a part of the upper- and middle-income class; it accepts and adopts the operation model of the market economy, and is essentially part of the market economy. The market economy needs the moral economy of the non-profit organization to match it.
Focusing on the core issue of shaping people in social reproduction, Shang Wenpeng from the School of Foreign Languages of Jinan University discussed the topic of home schooling in the Boston area in the US. Associate Professor Liu Qian from Renmin University of China shared his experience of conducting field work in a public school in a poor community in the center of Philadelphia, US. Two foreign students from Sweden and Poland shared the results of their fieldwork, one presentation being about the Swedish Sámi and the nation-state’s conflicting understandings of landscape, and the other concerning Chinese migration to Poland.
Prof. Gao Bingzhong summarized the methods of anthropological fieldwork. He pointed out that European and American anthropology has dominated the field for a long time, which is why most research on non-Western populations has been European and American scholars’ observations and research. Anthropology in China has a history of more than a hundred years, but investigation and research about European and American society is comparatively underdeveloped. However, during the past ten years, Chinese anthropology has seen the publication of more than 20 research papers on specific communities in European and American countries, and is in the process of creating a new world of overseas ethnography, becoming a part of the global anthropology community.
Anthropology studies the “other,” but ultimately needs to involve those “others” in a dialogue. Chinese anthropologists and their European and American counterparts must become dialogue partners as an ideological precondition for the three academic communities to become partners.
