The Present State and Future Tendency of Anthropology in China

Abstract

This article holds that anthropology in China has now stepped into a new significant period of development from its rise in the 1980s to the present. Due to its equivocal and unstable status, it is developing with great difficulty. The author thinks that "sinicization" will be the focus of its future development tendency, and suggests that, at the turn of the century, the trend in Chinese anthropology should be that its anthropologists tend toward uniting; applied anthropology will be developed; modern anthropology in China will be challenged by whether or not anthropological knowledge and indigenous anthropology will prevail in China, and whether or not it will be internationalized.