Decolonial Anthropology in East Asia: De-Westernizing Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract (English)

The discourse of decolonization has increasingly been at the center of efforts to indigenize anthropology and resist Euro-and US-centric thinking in the Global South in the last few decades and “decolonial approach” has become a trendy label for scholarship on knowledge production in East Asia. For instance, Fei Xiaotong, the pioneer Chinese anthropologist who helped established the discipline in China in the 1950s, has been revisited and considered as an exemplary decolonial scholar who integrated Western methodologies and Chinese knowledge in his work (Shen et al., 2024; Sinha & Lakhanpal, 2022). However, the application of Western decoloniality in Asia can be “culturally imperialist” in itself (Parreñas, 2020), as indigenous knowledges might have already been produced along with ideas introduced by the process of Western modernity and a decolonial framework forces a comparative research lens while denying the native possibilities of knowledge production. This paper engages contemporary scholarship mobilizing Fei Xiaotong’s work and explores the frictions the decolonial vision presents for anthropologists in and of China.