ABSTRACT
Some twenty-six years ago Malinowski was visited by Professor Wu Wen-tsao of Yenching University. He learned from him, as he tells us, ‘that independently and spontaneously there had been organized in China a sociological attack on real problems of culture and applied anthropology, an attack which embodies all my dreams and desiderata’. These words were written in 1938 in the Preface to Fei Hsiao-tung’s Peasant Life in China, a book which Malinowski thought would be counted ‘as a landmark in the development of anthropological field-work and theory’. One reason for Malinowski’s confidence in Fei’s work was that it pushed the frontiers of anthropology outwards from savagery to civilization. And Malinowski went on to quote a forecast he had made on another occasion: ‘ “The anthropology of the future will be … as interested in the Hindu as in the Tasmanian, in the Chinese peasants as in the Australian aborigines, in the West Indian negro as in the Melanesian Trobriander, in the detribalized African of Haarlem [sic] as in the Pygmy of Perak”.’
