Fei Xiaotong and the Vocabulary of Anthropology in China

[JCCP 1.1 (2015) p77-89] ISSN 2040-0837 Fei Xiaotong and the vocabulary of anthropology in China CCPNStevan Harrell Abstract: Fei Xiaotong’s series of essays, based on his lectures on ‘Rural Sociology’, was published in the 1940s as Xiangtu Zhongguo. It is a landmark for the indigenization of anthropology in non-Europhone countries and cultures, in that it begins the process of creating a technical anthropological vocabulary in the Chinese language. Fei, having obtained his doctorate at the London School of Economics, understood clearly the English-language vocabulary of anthropology, and thereby understood where that vocabulary was and was not appropriate to understanding Chinese society. He realized that direct translation of English terms into Chinese could sometimes create confusion and misunderstanding, and so in addition to using conventional Chinese translations of English terms, he invented a series of new Chinese terms he considered more appropriate to the analysis of Chinese society. Unfortunately, the Communist Revolution interrupted Fei’s indigenization project, superimposing translationsGLobal of terms from the Marxist ethnological tradition developed in the Soviet Union. Today, however, as anthropology everywhere outside Euro-America continues its quest to indigenize, Fei’s early attempt at indigenization can serve as a partial guide to creating an appropriate anthropological vocabulary in Chinese, and perhaps as an example for how to create such a vocabulary in other languages. Keywords: vocabulary, translation, indigenization, anthropology, China I often remark to graduate students in anthropology, and not entirely facetiously, that the way to make a name for yourself in our pre- or non- paradigmatic science is to name something else, to invent a term. Having done the thickest ethnographic description in the world pales in importance before having first used the word ‘liminality’ or ‘traveling theory’ or even ‘thick description.’ A term has to stick, of course, and one can be judged to have had one’s term stick when it gets cited in a tertiary mode, particularly if it earns the classifier ‘notion,’ or even better, ‘concept’ as in ‘Jo Schmo uses Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to look at...’. Here Jo Schmo has done all right, Journal of China in Comparative Perspective《中国比较研究》 © CCPN Global 全球中国比较研究会 78 Stevan Harrell but Pierre Bourdieu has arrived. In other words, a case can be made that our discipline, our discourse, revolves around vocabulary. It can be argued that as long as anthropology is practiced in a world of unequal power relations (Said, 1978), theories developed in the metropole are inherently prejudicial to practice that increasingly emanates from the periphery. Anthropology is tainted with colonial and neo-colonial aims, personnel, and theoretical arguments. I think this is true, and I think that the survival of the discipline in the next fifty years probably depends on our being able to CCPNcome up with a satisfactory answer to the question of whether our discourse is inherently colonial or Eurocentric, and thus will pass with the passing of the colonial and Eurocentric world order just as scholasticism passed with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, or Neo-Confucian lixue (理学) passed with the May 4th movement, or whether we can develop a multilateral or decentered discourse that will still speak to important questions in the world order of our grandchildren. As China continues its ‘peaceful rise’ and its effort to reassume what its leaders assume is its deserved place in the international company of nations, the question of how Chinese scholars are approaching the problem of de-colonializing or de-Eurocenticizing the social sciences takes on added importance. China is one of the few countries that has moved from peripheral to central status in the world system, and as this happens, intellectual developments in China are becoming more and more difficult for the rest of the scholarly world to ignore. GLobal Perhaps ironically, however, as Chinese intellectual life becomes more relevant to the rest of the world, and as the Chinese government continues its push to get the world to learn Chinese, through Confucius Institutes all over the world and through generous scholarship opportunities for foreign students, foreign languages are getting less attention in the United Kingdom and other countries, and authorities there have raised the alarm that there is ‘a decline in modern language learning’ (British Academy, 2009). And nowhere is the knowledge of language more important than in the social sciences, which are not built on mathematical concepts but on linguistic ones. If, as I suggested above, the discipline of anthropology revolves around vocabulary, then we can see readily how the role of vocabulary in anthropology provides a more specific context in which to address the general questions of China and the role of language in our contemporary world. We know, of course, that in the early years of anthropology (say until the 1960s), the vocabulary of our discipline was overwhelmingly English-language vocabulary (with a considerable dollop of French thrown in, and a tiny pinch of German), even when the practitioners were natives of the countries that usually formed the object of anthropological research (even Jomo Kenyatta used English to write Facing Mount Kenya (1938), and certainly Talal Asad used English to write and edit Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973). But there have been exceptions from early on, and these exceptions increase as various Fei Xiaotong and the vocabulary of anthropology in China 79 former object countries, including notably those in the Sinophone world, develop anthropological discourses of their own, and of course are faced with translating the vocabulary and concepts of anthropology into a host of languages. There are two kinds of question about the vocabulary of anthropology in languages other than those of the discipline’s founders. One concerns translation: as theorists of translation have emphasized from the beginning, words don’t match in different languages, or else translation would be a mechanical exercise CCPN(see Steiner, 1975; Schulte and Biguenet, 1992). ‘Community,’ ‘Gemeinschaft,’ ‘kyoodootai共同体’ and ‘shequ社区,’ although they are ‘standard’ translations of each other, do not mean the same thing. The fact that the referents of these terms overlap but do not coincide influences the way the corresponding concepts will evolve differently as they appear in the anthropologies written in the different languages. As a frequent translator of Chinese-language anthropological writings into English, I realize this acutely, and have even written on what the most appropriate English translation for a term like minzu (民族) might be1 (2001: 29-48). When on rare occasions I have tried to write anthropology in Chinese, I encounter two additional questions: Do I really think in different concepts when I write in Chinese, and when I translate my own Chinese into my native English, how close is the result to what I would have written had I composed the piece in English in the first place (Harrell and Li, 2011; Harrell, 2002)? These were certainly questions that Professor Fei must have faced when he wroteGLobal Xiangtu Zhongguo in Chinese (1948) and Peasant Life in China (1939) in English. All of them are practical questions which in addition have theoretical and philosophical reverberations far beyond anthropology. On a slightly less practical level, how well do translated terms used in anthropology resonate with their linguistic environment, which we can assume in most cases to be the elite, intellectual discourse in their various communities? Are there differences between the ordinary use of the terms and their anthropological use? Do they introduce concepts that are alien to, or somehow don’t seem to fit with, the conceptual universe, the ordinary intellectual vocabulary, commonly used in that language? Do they force anthropologists working in that language to use concepts alien to that broader intellectual community, and if so does this alienate the anthropologists from that community, or make their writings inaccessible to others outside the discipline? Muxi Shehui (母系社会) is certainly a clear Chinese translation of the English matrilineal society, but it means something different in a society where people are taught from childhood that matriliny is a primitive state that we all shared in the past, even though most anthropologists in China have recently rejected the antiquated Morganian paradigm of social evolution. 1. There isn’t really a good one: see Harrell, 2001: 29-48. 80 Stevan Harrell Or perhaps we are being too negative here. Perhaps borrowed and/ or translated vocabulary can be turned to appropriately native ends, and borrowed or translated terms can be turned to more native referents, shedding new light on local phenomena. As an example, the Chinese term tuteng (图腾), which is not even a translation, but a direct borrowing of an English (actually Algonkian) term, totem, does not seem to have the baggage in Chinese that it has acquired in the Anglo-French world with its genealogy from Rivers (1909) to Radcliffe-Brown (1929) to Lévi-Strauss (1962), and can be used in a rather CCPNmore simple and straightforward sense of an animal or plant that stands metonymically for a people or an ethnic group. Or there is still another possibility to consider, which is the main topic of this article: have anthropologists in countries outside the Euro-American

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