CSAC Monograph 10

Perspectives on Chinese Society

Anthropological Views from Japan

Edited by Suenari Michio, J.S. Eades and Christian Daniels

The period since the Second World War has seen the rapid growth of anthropological interest in Chinese society. At first, most of the work was carried out in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Overseas Chinese Communities, but since the late 1970s, there has been an increasing volume of material from the People's Republic itself, much of it written by Chinese and Japanese scholars based in Japan. However, until now, this Japanese-based body of work has been little known elsewhere, mainly because little of it has been translated into English.

The aim of this book is to make more widely available a representative selection of recent work in this field. The seventeen papers originated from a research project into the cultural dynamics of relations between the Han Chinese and surrounding minorities, organised at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and at a panel on recent Japanese research on China, organised by the University of Tokyo, at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

The book begins and ends with an historical overview of Japanese research into Chinese society and its relation to developments in anthropology elsewhere. The fifteen case studies in between survey the interrelations between kinship and marriage, imigration, religion and ritual, and the formation of ethnic identity. They are based on fieldwork among the Han Chinese and minority groups in the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.

CSAC Monographs 10

Perspectives on Chinese Society

Anthropological Views from Japan

Edited by

Suenari Michio

J.S. Eades

Christian Daniels

Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury, England

in association with

The Institute for the Study of the Languages and Cultures of Asia and of Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan 1995

List of Contributors

Preface page vii