The Forming of World Subjects: Promoting Intersubjective anthropologies between China and Southeast Asia

Seminar with Haoqun Gong, Associate Professor at the Institute of Global Ethnology and Anthropology, Minzu University. She is also a visiting fellow at IIAS, Leiden University.

Abstract

In the forming of global society, it is necessary to establish the subjects of cognition such as “who I am”, “who you are” and “who we are”. World anthropologies could promote the formation of global society through intersubjective anthropological studies. Intersubjective anthropological studies mean that anthropologists from different areas become the subjects of knowledge producing to each other, and try to go beyond the unidirectional colonial anthropology, which could not make its narrative of the others to be the narrative of us. This paper will examine the modern social discourse of South-east Asia in China and the separate situation between Chinese anthropologists and Thai anthropologists, and try to show how the self-centered national anthropology limits the potentiality of cultural critique. This paper advocates that Chinese anthropologists need to establish the Chinese consciousness based on reflexivity instead of provincialism.