Early twentieth century community studies in Yunnan, China: new perspectives from the sociology of knowledge

• In Event: Rural Education in a Stratified Chinese Society: An Intersectional Perspective

Proposal

Topic and Its Relevance to Comparative and International Education in East Asia

This paper will focus on four studies of Chinese communities, all done in the once remote and inaccessible Yunnan Province between 1936 and 1943. The four young anthropologists and sociologists who produced these community studies came to Yunnan from England, the United States and Northern China. For the most part, these scholars worked in isolation, each knowing little to nothing about the others’ endeavors. Laboring under challenging wartime conditions, they produced four community studies, all published as books in both English and Chinese, that are still in print today.

The scholars’ impact on education and society was great. In the early 20th century, they were educated by the intellectual giants of their time, individuals like Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Park. They, in turn, became influential teachers and renowned social scientists in their respective fields. Their writings shaped worldviews of China as it existed before the Communist Revolution.

A brief summary of the community studies-turned-books and their authors:

• The Tower of Five Glories: A Study of the Min Chia of Ta Li, Yunnan was published in 1941. Its British author, Charles Patrick FitzGerald, did his fieldwork in Dali between 1936 and 1938. FitzGerald is best known for his authoritative textbook, China, A Short Cultural History, which was first published when he was 33 and was remarkably still in print when he died at age 90.

• Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan is a compilation of three community studies, the first by Fei Xiaotong and the second and third by Zhang Ziyi, published in English in 1945. The fieldwork was conducted within a 100-mile radius of Kunming, the provincial capital, between 1939 and 1943. Fei was China’s pre-eminent sociologist of the 20th century.

• Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality was published in 1948. The author, Francis L. K. Hsu (Xu Langguang), did his fieldwork in what he called the “West Town” of Dali in 1941 through 1943. “West Town” is today’s Xizhou. Xu emigrated from China to the U.S. in 1944 and later became president of the American Anthropological Association.

• Village Life in Old China: A Community Study of Kao Yao, Yunnan, was published in 1963. The author, American Cornelius Osgood, collected the data in 1938 in what is present-day Gao Yao, but was prevented by the Sino-Japanese War and later the Communist Revolution from ever finishing his fieldwork. He left China with an enormous collection of everyday objects, which he donated to Yale’s Peabody Museum, where he served as curator for 39 years.

Theoretical Framework—The Sociology of Knowledge

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study.

The paper’s purpose is to discuss the four community studies and the scholars who produced them using this framework developed by sociologist Isaac Reed (2010: 20).

Context of Investigation: Reed maintains that a researcher is not a blank slate when entering a community to do fieldwork. The researcher has a personal history that includes nationality, ethnicity, class and gender. The researcher’s academic history also comes into play. Such factors influence the researcher’s approach to the subject studied.

FitzGerald was British and, with the exception of a yearlong course at the London School of Economics with Malinowski, had no training in anthropological fieldwork before setting off for China. Fei and Xu, both Chinese and both students of Malinowski, did their community studies while working at the Yunnan Station for Sociological Research during the Sino-Japanese War. Osgood, an American on the anthropology faculty at Yale, set out to do a community study in North China, but due to the War, ended up in Southwest China instead. One question to be explored is how the social distance of the researchers from their communities influenced the data collected and their validity. Biographies of Fei (Arkush 1981) and Xu (Hsu 1999) and an autobiography by FitzGerald (1985) will provide insights.

Context of Explanation: A second question revolves around that which the researchers set out to investigate. Communities are mixed—ethnically, class-wise, educationally and along many other axes. Communities have different experiences with outsiders. While a researcher might collect data on a specific behavior, the researcher’s explanation may not be the way community members themselves would explain that behavior. FitzGerald chose to study the Bai of Dali because they were members of a distinct, ethnic minority group. Just four years later Xu chose to study the same people in the same place because they were typical of Chinese people as a whole, that is, of the Han majority population. This is the crux of what is now called the “ethnic error” (Liang 2010: 78). It and similar issues will be examined in the paper.

Research Methods

The first author was a 2017 Fulbright scholar at Yunnan University, where Fei chaired the sociology department. She co-taught (with the second author) a graduate seminar on qualitative research methods in education, using the four community studies as primary sources. She visited three of the four communities as well as the Yunnan Station for Sociological Research. She also worked with the university archivist to collect original source materials.

Foundational works, on the sociology of knowledge, upon which the authors will build:

• Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China by Siu-lun Wong (1979)
• The Saga of Anthropology in China by Gregory Eliyu Guldin (1994)
• Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949 by Yung-chen Chiang (2001)

Contribution

This paper is a work-in-progress. Reed’s contexts of explanation and investigation provide valuable thinking tools to organize the materials collected thus far. A prospectus for a book on this topic may follow. The overarching, long-term goal is to develop a new version of the sociology of knowledge within a particular region of a particular country, that is, Yunnan Province, PRC.

Authors

• MaryJo Benton Lee, South Dakota State University

• Mei Wu, Yunnan University