Introduction: China as Context

In this introduction the editors outline the background to, aims and structure of the China as Context volume. As we discuss here, sixty years have passed since Maurice Freedman called for ‘A Chinese Phase in Social Anthropology’ (1963). Despite earlier attempts to revitalise Freedman’s call and promote the significance of China for anthropological theory, this vision has largely been ignored. Today, most discussions about China – both scholarly and lay – continue to be underpinned by an unspoken assumption that the country represents a fundamentally different ‘Other’ that exists apart from the ‘real’ world and is thus unsuitable for wider theorising. As we outline, the editors and contributors to this edited volume argue that without taking China seriously, that is without considering China as a sizeable agent, a prominent locus of knowledge production, and a new discursive topos of an emerging post-global imaginary, anthropologists may fail to adequately analyse the present and make sense of both the material and immaterial forces that animate it. Taken together as they are in this collection, ‘China’ and ‘context’ reveal complexity, ambiguity, and inconsistency in the lives of people at the cutting edge of geopolitical power shifts and help refocus scholarly attention around the scope and purchase of critical theory at the end of Western globalisation. Revealing – as the chapters here do – what it means to live in a world where ‘China’ becomes the ordinary ‘context’ for diverse ‘field sites’ and research practices carried out in them offers an antidote to anthropological and other ethnographic work which has for too long gestated within and against the foil offered by Anglo-American neoliberal globalisation and critical responses to it.