In this article, I attempt to review the anthropological research on China conducted in the twentieth century by Japanese scholars or Chinese scholars educated in Japan. I will refer both to studies of the Han Chinese, and to studies of the Chinese minority groups in mainland China. Anthropological studies of the Hong Kong Chinese will also be included, because they have played an important role in the history of the anthropological study of Chinese society. Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities lie outside the range of this review. I have tried to include as many works as possible in so far as they are based on original data collected through fieldwork or social surveys, but of course the list may not be complete.

View full abstract

The stream of studies of Taiwan Aborigines by Japanese scholars typically reflects the features of the passive isolation from the outer world of Japanese anthropology. It is not total separation from the rest of the world, but while there are some belated efforts to catch up with theoretical "developments" in Western anthropology, these are rather slow. This might be strange considering the normal curiosity of the Japanese towards the outside world. The barrier of language might be one of the major factors impeding two-way communication. For many Japanese researchers, reading foreign languages is hardly any problem, while writing in a foreign language is a time-consuming penance. A writer can probably write several papers in Japanese for domestic readers in the same time as it takes to write a single paper in a foreign language, but despite this, a paper written in a foreign language is generally only regarded as the equivalent of a paper in Japanese. Even if it is regarded as more prestigious it is likely to have fewer readers. So, the problem does not end with the language barrier but is related to the wider socio-cultural environment. The language barrier also works against foreign anthropologists. Very few western anthropologists have carried out fieldwork among the Taiwan Aborigines because most of the basic material is in Japanese and Chinese. Judging the papers written so far, their quality is not so low as might be expected from the use of the word "isolation." To use Eades' three-stage framework in his comparison of the development of anthropology in China with that in West Africa (Eades 1995), most of the studies seem to represent the first or the second stages, i.e. the classification of ethnic groups and the analysis of their social structures. But, on closer inspection, some papers may also include elements of the third stage, that of cultural analysis, even if they are not fully developed. The fuzzy boundary between the stages arises from the fact that these studies are not directly related to the mainstream of Western anthropology; so it is rather hard to classify a paper as belonging to a particular stage. It is difficult to classify most of the papers after 1945 as belonging entirely to the first phase. Since these studies are not the result of the interchange of ideas with scholars outside, the similarity with other work may be the result of convergence. For instance, we can find an interest in dynamic historical change even in the work before 1945, for example in the attempt to trace the migration of the aboriginal groups in Utsushikawa et al. (1935). The isolation and having a small tightly-knit circle of scholars has not been without its merits. These include a saving in time and energy in letting people know what is already known, and an avoidance of repeating what has already been done. The island has provided a wealth of data for researchers, both in the historical materials accumulated since the census by the Dutch in the 16th century and in opportunities for fieldwork. Having a small circle of scholars has encouraged interdisciplinary research through personal contacts with scholars in different disciplines. And easy geographical access to Taiwan has made research through repeated field trips possible. But with the recent rapid changes in Taiwanese society, these merits might turn out to be demerits. There are problems for anthropologists who want to continue to do research on traditional culture through older informants.

View full abstract

Bali is a society which has been well researched by Japanese anthropologists, and it has also been studied by Japanese in other disciplines. However, for this review we have selected only academic papers or books in the area of cultural anthropology; mainly based upon fieldwork, and even here we have been unable to cover everything because of space and other limitations. Yoshida's review deals with studies of Balinese ritual and cosmology; Nakamura concentrates upon studies of Balinese social organization, and Kagami deals with studies of contemporary issues in recent Japanese anthropological work on Bali.

View full abstract