Describe the influences and intricate relations between Western anthropologists and Eastern ethnologists.
The relationships of these two fields are very crucial in understanding the progress that has been made by the proponents of the two school of thoughts. In a hierarchical order of knowledge and scholars, the post-socialists (those living in the west and working on the east) are frequently perceived to be a custom that has survived communism from an earlier time.
The first developments of Anthropology in the East was as a result of influences from the European Colonial era. However, this does not mean that anthropology ideologies were directly transplanted from the West to the East, but there has been a complex but distinct relation such that some of the characteristics reflect on the intellectual traditions of the East. The foundation of the Japanese Anthropological Association was influenced by the race theories from the west. Despite the significant influence from the West, Japan has been quite independent of the western institutions. Ethnologists have dominated anthropology in Japan. Most of the work by the Japan anthropologists was largely unknown until the period after the Second World War (Doak, 2006).
In China, the development of anthropology received much influence from Japan, which was rendered primarily problematic as Japan sought after increasing their military influence and control in China. Even though much of the vocabulary used in China is originally from Japan, Chinese scholars turned to the West in the 1920s. Scholars trained in the West and specifically in the United Kingdom had a significant role at the period when ethnology was first being established in China. In the Cultural Revolution period in China links between the anthropology in the Western Europe and the United States and Chinese ethnology were re-established while the influence of Marxist approaches remained dominant (Harrell, 2001).
References
Doak, M. (2006). Romancing the East, Rejecting the West: Japanese Intellectual Responses to Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 26, Number 3, 2006, pp. 402-415.
Harrell, S. (2001). The Anthropology of Reform and the Reform of Anthropology: Anthropological Narratives of Recovery and Progress in China. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 30 (2001), pp. 139-161.
