Introduction: “Overseas ethnography” and the audiences of academic anthropology in China

Abstract

This essay introduces the translations of two articles by Gao Bingzhong on the topic of “overseas ethnography” in China. In these essays, Gao attempts to create more space for Chinese anthropologists to do ethnographic research outside of China, rather than focusing on research in their own country. Gao provides a liberal defense of the anthropological enterprise while contributing to the literature on world ethnographies. His essays also illuminate the conditions of writing in the official spaces of Chinese academia, and, hence, its problematic distance from other spaces of world anthropology.