ABSTRACT
In 1989, I returned to the city of Quanzhou, where I was born and grew up. But this time, I was here to study it as an anthropologist. Prior to my fi eldwork, I had studied anthropological theories and ethnographic methodology in London. I was told by my teachers that conducting an ethnography of one’s own society was unlike doing ethnographies of other places where the researcher naturally views the local society through the perceptive eyes of a stranger. In the case of anthropology at home, one should try to distance oneself from one’s own familiar houses, relatives, friends, streets, and so on in order to gain the perspective of an anthropologist. I was not entirely convinced (I thought that the schools I attended had already detached me from home and created too wide a gap between me and my home community). But I saw no harm in experimenting with it in the earlier stage of my research. I looked for things unfamiliar to me. I acquired two maps, with the help of which I tried to gain a bird’s-eye view of my city.
