The Anthropology of Reform and the Reform of Anthropology: Anthropological Narratives of Recovery and Progress in China

Abstract

▪ Abstract Since the beginning of China's Reform and Opening policy in 1978, the anthropological study of China has revived, and anthropology as a discipline has revived in China. Chinese anthropologists have become part of the world community of anthropologists. Anthropology in and about China has described a society occupied both with recovery from the cultural devastation of High Socialism and with progress toward an uncertain modernity. These narratives of recovery and progress can be followed through the anthropological study of communities—rural, urban, and in between—of individuals' lives, including gender and sexuality, family and marriage, childhood and education, consumption and leisure, and of the nation and its constituent ethnic and regional parts.