Anthropology

This chapter explores the development of paleoanthropology and cultural anthropology in China in the 20th century. Paleoanthropology and cultural anthropology not only represent the two major divisions of Chinese anthropology, but also reveal Chinese scholarly pursuits in the establishment of scientific knowledge of the “Chinese”: the temporal search for the first Chinese and the geographical inclusion of who are the Chinese. The introduction of anthropology to China coincided with the formation of China as a nascent modern nation-state. Anthropology, as a product of modern colonial inquiry used by European imperialism to scrutiny its others, thus fulfilled the practical role in reporting, registering, classifying and identifying China's non-Han frontier population and at the same time building a deep Chinese nativism connecting the pre-historical past to the modern Chinese. By tracing how Peking Man became the first Chinese and how the non-Han frontier minorities were inscribed into the genealogy of the Chinese, this chapter attempts to articulate the entangled relations between academic indigenization, nationalism and colonialism in the formation of anthropological knowledge in modern China.