当历史走进人类学家——评萧凤霞《踏迹寻中:四十年华南田野之旅》

When History Approaches Anthropologists——Review on Helen Siu's Tracing China: A Forty Year Ethnographic Journey in South China

耶鲁大学萧凤霞(Helen Siu)教授将她40年华南研究的成果付梓成书,这部书一方面可以理解为历史人类学视角的中国研究,另一方面又包含了作者的华南研究对历史人类学的诸多理论思考,包括文化、权力、空间、人的能动性以及结构化过程等。笔者尝试从本书中萧凤霞的10多篇民族志研究,依据历史人类学的脉络来梳理萧凤霞在40年华南研究中的理论贡献,希望有助于理解40年来历史视角如何影响了中国的人类学研究,思考历史视角如何融入中国人类学以及对人文社会科学的影响。

Helen Siu,a professor of Anthropology at Yale University,distilled forty years of field research into a coherent personal narrative in book form. The book applies a perspective of historical anthropology to the study of South China. She used her field observations to illuminate key issues in anthropology,history and literature,such as culture,history,power,place,human agency and structuring. The review teased out the theoretical contributions of Siu's work by reviewing a dozen of her essays included in the book. It hopes to illustrate how Chinese anthropology and historical anthropology intertwine productively to impact a range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.