About me
I have been working on the study of China in American anthropology during the time of the PhD period. The study of China in American anthropology has been continuously nurtured and grown in an academic history process involving Sinology, China studies, history, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and other disciplines, extending to today to become a research field with a profound historical background, strong comprehensiveness, and interdisciplinary characteristics.
To better understand the diversity and complexity presented by American anthropological studies of China after the reform and opening up, I foucus on the anthropology departments of American universities which I take as the starting point of the research, with time, the inheritance of academic research paradigms, and ethnographic outcomes as the vertical axis, and the research of East Asian studies and academic institutions outside the anthropology departments as the horizontal axis for expansion. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, it comprehensively narrates the origins of the diverse traditions behind current American China studies.
For the purpose to understand China studies and the Chinese society and culture, I have done researches from a "polyphonic" perspective, arguing that the academic characteristic of traditional diversity creates a polyphonic nature in the presentation of Chinese ethnographic works. At the same time, the complex identity—Americans studying China in China—also gives the author a strong polyphonic perspective when facing fieldwork experience and ethnographic writing. The Chinese landscape reflected and generated from its ethnographic presentation and subjective expression also has a polyphonic quality. More importantly, today, forty years after China's doors have reopened, the remarkable achievements of overseas China studies have made an outstanding contribution to the world's understanding of China.
