Table of Content

20 July 2026, Volume 46 Issue 4

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Two Ways Out of "Primitive Society": The Culture Theory of the Chinese Community Study and Malinowski's Theory of Culture Contact

Geng TIAN

2026, 46(4):  1-32. 

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Given the one of the interwar intellectual consensuses that anthropology could go beyond the "primitive society", how did the community studies of the Yenching School carry on the exodus of the "primitive society" into an intellectual agenda of rebuilding the cultural nation? This paper compares the two ways out of the "primitive society" led by Bronislaw Malinowski and the cultural theory of the Chinese Community Study. Malinowski raised a deeply presentist idea of culture contact which theorized contact into a generative mechanism of culture by its own. Malinowski's way eventually joined an internationalist regime which downplayed the role of sovereign state and blurred the boundary between civility and primitivity. In contrary, the critiques of internationalism among Chinese intellectuals after the WWI provoked the community study to direct the exodus of the primitive society into renewed studies of frontiers, a powerful sociological path towards nation building in the cultural sense. The correspondence between community and frontier politics generated a dynamic analysis of the cultural boundary and therefore extended community into the cultural constitution of nation. Methodologically, this paper tries to depart from the two major frameworks of writing disciplinary history: reception and contact, and tries to rewrite the exchanges between intellectual thoughts from a sympathist perspective, i.e. the common sensibility of the intellectuals on world changes and theoretical minds. This perspective might help present the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese academic histories.

The Common Foundation of Civilizations: Marcel Mauss on Civilization in the Singular

Zhuofeng JIANG

2026, 46(4):  33-63. 

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The selective appropriation of Marcel Mauss's theory of civilization in contemporary scholarship-both Western and Chinese-betrays a persistent anxiety about how to articulate the relationship between Civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural, and in doing so obscures the intellectual evolution through which Mauss himself sought to reconcile universality and particularity in response to successive historical crises. This article reconstructs Mauss's trajectory as a movement across three positions: a "strict pluralism" before the First World War, a "qualified singularism" in its immediate aftermath, and a mature position of "constitutive tension" by the late 1920s. The pre-war elaboration of the "hyper-social system, " developed with Durkheim, already opened up a methodological space for the singular, but its principal aim was to secure the scientific legitimacy of civilizations in the plural against older unilinear narratives of Civilization. By treating civilization as a pre-given "system of solidarities, " this early framework neither identified the mechanisms by which social facts travel across boundaries nor furnished any normative ground for the bonds it described. After the war, Mauss turned toward a normative project centered on a "world human civilization, " yet this construction was repeatedly stalled by contradictions internal to its point of departure-the nation. The decisive breakthrough came with the dynamics of exchange elaborated in The Gift: through the risk-laden circuit of giving, receiving, and returning, "moral persons" simultaneously establish their own limits and their entanglement with others. Transposed to the civilizational register, the antagonistic interplay of "borrowing" and "refusal" emerges as the micro-mechanism through which universality is generated. In his 1929 lecture, Mauss reclassifies Civilization in the singular not as an a priori principle but as a "common fund" accumulated at the "limit" through the antagonistic interaction of plural civilizations-a fund that arises as the historical consequence of such interaction and, once arisen, in turn constitutes the empirical precondition for civilizations to individuate themselves and engage in exchange. This rereading unsettles the binary that has organized recent civilizational analysis between "integrationist" and "relational" approaches; it also engages the contemporary Chinese effort to rethink China through the category of civilization, suggesting that the distinctiveness of Chinese civilization resides precisely in the particular manner of its long entanglement with countless others through which the common fund of humanity has been jointly shaped; and it offers, finally, a sociological account of a modern order of coexistence grounded not in consensus but in tension.

The Dialectic of the Individual and the Collective: Mauss on Totality in French Socialist Thought

Ziyang PAN

2026, 46(4):  64-97. 

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Marcel Mauss employs a sociological interpretation of the Russian Revolution to illuminate the predicament between the modern individual and the collective, and responds to this predicament through the concept of totality. The anomie in the economic sphere and other sphere in modern society are, to a significant extent, associated with the rise of the "individual". By imposing "collectivity" upon individuals, and by abolishing freedom within the economic sphere through collective norms and organization, this project of social transformation could not, in Mauss's view, bring about the society it envisioned. Instead, it produced a modern state characterized by social disintegration. The fundamental reason, Mauss contends, is that this project failed to recognize the economy as a total social fact: to negate the economy is simultaneously to negate society itself. This rejection also presupposes an opposition between the individual participating in free exchange and the collective conceived as the bearer of moral authority. Yet the individual and the collective are not necessarily opposed. Within the framework of a total symbolic system, individuals are able to enter into relations with others voluntarily without necessarily being subsumed into the collective, and the two therefore always retain the possibility of mutual integration and transformation. Accordingly, the society envisioned by Mauss is not a coercive organizational order grounded in a collective morality that negates the individual. Rather, it is a total social configuration that treats the collective's value orientation as a spiritual fact while simultaneously preserving the space and boundaries of individual freedom. Politically, this vision finds its expression in the form of French socialism endorsed by Mauss. Only such a socialism, he argues, can establish forms of collectivity while avoiding the political dangers inherent in coercive social organization, thereby making a flourishing social life possible.

The Construction of Human-AI Coexistence: Evidence from Palliative Care Social Work Practice

Longtao HE, Jing ZHANG

2026, 46(4):  98-135. 

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Artificial intelligence is increasingly entering palliative care and social work, yet bringing technology into care does not necessarily mean that it becomes part of care. Existing studies have largely followed two lines of inquiry. One highlights the potential of AI to improve efficiency, prediction, and service delivery, while the other focuses on ethical concerns such as surveillance, algorithmic bias, and dehumanization. More recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has moved beyond this opposition by treating AI as a socio-technical actor involved in human-technology relations. Even so, relatively little attention has been paid to how AI becomes embedded in everyday care practice and how human-AI coexistence is gradually produced through interaction, negotiation, and organizational adaptation, particularly in emotionally demanding and ethically sensitive settings such as palliative care.This article examines these questions through an AI-enabled palliative care social work intervention undertaken in a tertiary hospital in China. Rather than evaluating whether AI improves care outcomes, the study focuses on the practical processes through which AI is incorporated into care relationships. Qualitative inquiry was embedded within the intervention evaluation and drew on interviews with patients, family caregivers, social workers, healthcare professionals, and AI developers, together with participant observation, system interaction records, and field notes. This research design made it possible to follow AI as it moved through everyday practice and to examine how its role was continuously shaped by different actors.The findings suggest that AI does not enter care as a stable or predetermined technological actor. Instead, its place within palliative care is progressively established through ongoing adjustments to local contexts, emotional exchanges, and ethical deliberation. As AI is adapted to existing routines, communication styles, and professional practices, it gradually shifts from a digital tool to a participant in care relationships. At the same time, emotional support becomes reorganized rather than automated. AI helps sustain communication, encourages emotional expression, and extends opportunities for interaction, while social workers remain responsible for interpretation, relationship building, and professional judgement. Ethical responsibility also emerges as a negotiated accomplishment. Decisions about risk, intervention, and accountability continue to rely on professional deliberation, with AI functioning as a source of support rather than an autonomous decision-maker.Based on these empirical observations, the article develops a framework of adaptation—senti-modulation—co-governance framework to explain the making of human-AI coexistence in palliative care social work. The framework argues that coexistence should not be understood simply as collaboration between humans and technology. Rather, it is a socially situated process through which AI acquires presence, relational significance, and legitimacy in practice. By shifting attention from technological capability to the social conditions that make coexistence possible, this study contributes to sociological debates on digital care, extends STS discussions of human-AI relations, and offers an empirically grounded account of how AI is domesticated, negotiated, and governed within contemporary care practices.

Action Ethics and the Medical Order in the Evolution of State-Family Relations: A Longitudinal Study of a North China Village

Kun SANG, Yuan GAO

2026, 46(4):  136-175. 

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Since the turn of the century, with the growing complexity of public health needs, the establishment of a rural hierarchical medical system has been progressively placed on the national agenda. Taking "medical order" as its analytical focus and employing the state-peasant relationship as its theoretical framework, this study conducts a longitudinal comparison of policy documents from 1949 to the present and ethnographic materials from Jian Village and its surrounding areas in North China, aiming to reveal the evolving logic of the state-peasant relationship in the healthcare domain and the generative mechanisms of medical order across different historical periods. The study finds that the state's role in rural healthcare governance has undergone a three-phase transformation—"mediated engagement, withdrawal and direct immersion". While its capacity to mobilize resources has gradually strengthened, the current medical order still faces the predicament of behavioral disorder. The root cause lies in the absence of a "concretized state" serving as a connecting link between the state and the peasants, that is, a personified embodiment of the state's will that is both perceptible and trustworthy at the grassroots level. As key actors, village doctors have seen their role evolve from being supported by the collective, to being shaped by market forces, and then to being constrained by the vertical tiered healthcare system. They are increasingly caught in a structural dilemma: neither integrated into the bureaucratic system nor embedded in local community relationships, resulting in a disconnect between the provision of bureaucratised healthcare services and the rural social fabric. This study argues that the key to the future rural public service delivery lies not in a simplistic division of responsibilities between the state and the collective, but in the construction of a connective mechanism that can simultaneously accommodate state resources and regulations while activating the endogenous forces of rural society-thereby revitalizing the traditional "state-family integration" in the process of modernization.

The Generational Shift and Social Implications of Childbirth Pain in China: Insights from Birth Memories

Jingwen FANG, Renye ZHANG

2026, 46(4):  176-210. 

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Public discussions often attribute declining fertility intentions and rising cesarean section rates to the claim that "mothers are becoming increasingly fearful of pain." Yet labor pain is not only an individual bodily experience but also a reflection of its historical and social context. Drawing on the birth memories of 24 women, this article examines intergenerational differences in labor pain across three periods characterized by home births, births in township health centers, and births in hospitals. It explores how women in each period connected the embodied experience of labor pain to a broader sociocultural landscape and how these connections reveal divergent social implications. The study finds that labor pain exhibits clear intergenerational differences. Specifically, prior to the 1970s, the home was the sole setting for childbirth, and family relationships-particularly those between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law-served as the primary narrative framework. Physical pain of labor was subsumed into endless sufferings from material scarcity, strenuous work, and inadequate care. In 1975, marked by the establishment of obstetric wards in township health centers, childbirth gradually shifted from home to these facilities. The initial introduction to modern medicine improved the safety of childbirth but also led to iatrogenic pain. In the absence of effective pain management techniques, the trust and interpersonal bonds within a rural community of acquaintances-nurtured in a semi-open environment-function as an implicit pain-relief mechanism. As the medicalization of childbirth has progressed, medical settings and doctor-patient relationships have become significant forces shaping the experience of labor pain, and the awakening of bodily consciousness has further rendered pain a central theme of childbirth memories. In terms of pain management, pain relief technologies such as epidural analgesia have failed to deliver anticipated efficacy. The root cause lies in the emotional alienation wrought by clinical environments and technical rationality, which amplified women's perceptions of agony and simultaneously creates room for non-technical interventions including social support. Accordingly, from childbirth spaces to medical technologies and maternal subjectivity, the intergenerational shifts in childbirth memories have been manifested in multiple dimensions but cannot be simplified as "mothers becoming more sensitive to pain"; rather, "every generation has its own specific labor pain." The research reveals that pain is never merely physiological sensations, but a bodily experience deeply rooted in social structures, intertwined with socio-cultural change, the medicalization of childbirth, and women's burgeoning self-awareness. Consequently, true pain relief depends not only on the innovation and popularization of analgesic technologies but also on an institutional design that restores the synergy between the family, the community, and the medical system. Addressing the psychological and social needs of mothers must be integrated into the construction of a childbirth-friendly society.

"Life for Art, Art for Life": Simmel on the Harmony between Art and Life

Jinyu CAO

2026, 46(4):  211-240. 

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This article seeks to reconstruct the inner logic of Georg Simmel's fragmented writings on art from the perspective of the sociology of art. Through his analysis of artistic form, Simmel identifies the structural tensions in modern society between the individual and the whole, life and form, subjective freedom and objective culture. "Life for art, art for life" constitutes the central proposition of his sociology of art: art must achieve autonomy through boundary, style, and form, thereby forming a self-sufficient wholeness of the work; yet it must also remain connected, through the "the detour of the whole, " to the larger totality of life, so as to avoid degenerating into a closed and impoverished formalism. Following this line of inquiry, the article further examines the different historical structures of subjectivity embodied by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin. Michelangelo represents the burden imposed upon individual life by supra-individual universal form in the Renaissance, revealing the tragic personality of an individuality whose formation remains incomplete. Rembrandt, through portraiture, light and shadow, facial expressions, and inner life, presents the rise of inwardness, the individuation of personality, and the formation of the modern subject in early modern society. Rodin, through movement, the laboring body, and fleeting gesture, inscribes into bodily form the speed, stimulation, rupture, and sensory unease of modern urban life, showing how the modern subject seeks to recover unity in a world of flux. In this sense, Simmel's writings on art do not reduce art to its social background; rather, they reveal how artistic form refracts social form, types of subjectivity, and the spirit of an age. The significance of art in modern society, therefore, lies not in offering an illusory escape from reality, but in giving new form to fragmented life, enabling individuals to reconstruct meaning, dignity, and a form of everyday heroism within the divided experience of modern existence.