ABSTRACT
This chapter points out that although Malinowski's anthropology began to establish a paradigm on the basis of laboratory, today's Chinese ethnography cannot once again move away from the expression of river civilization. Instead, it needs to find a support point for shifting from people to things, from overly human-centered attention, description and writing, to the investigation of people's dependence, attachment, and observation on natural objects such as rivers and mountains and artificial objects. From the very beginning of its establishment, Chinese anthropology can be said to be village-oriented which emphasizes the society and culture of only one place, without realizing the other dimension of spatial existence. In fact, the real existence of the so-called dimension of lines composed of points has been overlooked.
