Inheritance and reflection: “re-study” of three anthropology fieldwork sites in China’s Yunnan Province

This article is a research report involving three anthropological studies conducted during the period of “Kuige” and their “re-studies.” By narrating the project, I set forth my views on the connections and differences between Chinese anthropological explorations from two historical periods. These anthropological explorations refer to the study of Lu Village conducted by Fei Xiaotong, that of “West Town” (Xizhou) by Francis L. K. Hsu, and that of “Pai-IPai” (Dai) villages by Tien Ju-Kang. They were all completed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Each writer extracted a framework to analyze the land system, ancestor worship, and the relationship between humans and gods from the writer’s own field experience. Despite the difference in research methods, all three studies noticed the cultural differences between rural society and modernity. Since 2000, Peking University and Yunnan Minzu University have launched a “Province-university Cooperation Project.” During the project, a research team formed of several young scholars revisited Lu Village, “West Town” (Xizhou), and Namu Village. These writers’ works were based on the data acquired in their fieldwork and drew upon the opinions raised by global anthropologists on “re-study” in recent decades. Considering the dual effects of social change and shifts in academic concepts around “follow-up research,” the scholars put forward several points of view with their ethnographies, which all featured the characteristics of inheritance and reflection. Based on the results of the three “re-studies,” this article emphasizes the importance of the study of public rituals for the research of rural society. This article also attempts to re-examine the methodology of “human ecology,” which profoundly impacts Chinese anthropology and sociology.

Thomas Henshaw, F. R. S. (1618-1700)

ON the 14 October 1675 John Evelyn wrote in his diary: ‘Dined at Kensington with my old acquaintance, Mr Henshaw, newly returned from Denmark, where he had been left resident after the death of the Duke of Richmond, who died there Ambassador’. There is no reference to Henshaw’s house in the histories of Kensington, but a deed of 1695 gives details of the renewal of Henshaw’s lease from the Rt Hon. Edward, Earl of Warwick and Holland, the owner of Holland House, of the manor house of West Town together with some fish ponds and surrounding fields. The ancient manor of West Town occupied the site that now lies between Holland Park Avenue on the north and Kensington High Street on the south, and between the Kensington and Hammersmith boundary on the west and Holland Walk, on the borders of Holland House and Park, on the east. The old manor house, once known as ‘the ould house at Kensington’ stood just to the east of the present church of St Barnabas in Addison Road and was demolished in 1800. Thomas Henshaw’s father, Benjamin, a Captain of the City of London, had resided in the manor house before his death in 1631, while Thomas himself lived there for 50 years from 1650.