ABSTRACT
The conflicts, false starts and at times even almost complete annihilation that have characterized the development of anthropology in China make the title of this chapter much more than facile rhetoric. In Western academia, the legitimacy of a separate field variously called cultural anthropology, social anthropology or ethnology is usually taken for granted; in fact, much too much is taken for granted perhaps given the considerable overlap with adjacent fields such as sociology, geography, folklore studies, cultural studies, political science, economics, law, history or linguistics. China – and with it many other Asian, African and Latin American countries – on the other hand has always had a rather ambiguous attitude towards the division of labour within the Western social sciences and the humanities.1
