After relocating to a Chinese context, anthropology inevitably went through a process of domestication: successive initiatives have been undertaken to make the discipline Chinese. This article aims to examine the aspirations and experiments of domesticating anthropology in China by looking at several moments of its development including the emerging globally focused Chinese anthropology. The objective here is not to retrace the history of the discipline in China in detail, but to identify specific moments while placing them within the broader context of a modern division of intellectual labour and power relations.
Contemporary discourses of “Asian Century” or “Chinese Century” lead to the belief that economic growth and participation of world politics of Asian nations are changing today’s world. However, we also wonder to what extent it will restructure our world, if today’s world and our common future are still conceptualized and imagined according to the foundation of knowledge that was and is still offered by the history of Western civilization and if we still remain as consumers of universal modernity within the language frame of development and modernization. This article offers some reflections on the decoloniality of knowledge in the Chinese context. To better understand the historic process as well as to open discussions to make possible changes from a broader perspective, we will look at two moments in Chinese academia: one is related to educational movements in the beginning of the last century and the second is in regard to some new trends in the current Chinese anthropological scene.
Géopolitique de la connaissance et transferts culturels La colonialité intellectuelle dans l'histoire de la Chine moderne : de la « Bourse scolaire de l'indemnité des Boxers » à l'Institut franco-chinois de Lyon
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