ABSTRACT
As the introduction to this volume stresses, ethnography does not arise spontaneously in a vacuum: the conditions of production and the careers and affiliations of the producers are of the greatest importance, not only in understanding individual ethnographies, but also in locating them and the national traditions to which they belong within the “world system” of anthropology, as described by Kuwayama (2004). In this chapter, I examine the conditions of production of anthropology in Asia, concentrating mainly on Japan and China, and compare them with developments in other parts of the world. This may sound an overly broad enterprise, but it also reflects the course which my own academic career has taken over the years, starting in West Africa, then gravitating to the United Kingdom, and finally ending up for more than a decade in Japan, where I have become increasingly concerned with the Asia Pacific. I have also found myself increasingly involved in making anthropology by Asian scholars available to “the discipline,” that is, international dissemination through editing and translation.
