Abstract: This paper reports a history study based on an anthropologist as a case. Here, Tao Yuenkuei, an anthropologist after 1911, is examined to understand how the German concept of “culture” and theories entered the social sciences in China through the thinking and application by Chinese scholars. Since the reestablishment of the discipline in the 1950s, culture, a concept that meaningfully contains people’s internal spiritual world, has long been neglected in the Chinese social sciences; instead, great attention has been given to such concepts as “nationality”, “social forms”, “the state”, and “society”. Tao Yuenkuei is to be “rediscovered” because he was the first Chinese scholar to apply the cultural theory to his ethnographic research. In his empirical studies, he thought about how to treat the objectivity inherent in “culture” and to confirm the spiritual values of people. He discussed how cultures communicated and understood one another with excellent opinions. He did not just introduce Western concepts in order to explain the Chinese experiences; instead, he conducted field studies of minority groups in Yunnan, examining the cultural history, religion, mythology, and rituals to understand how patterns of cultural views took root in society and among individuals. His research in political science led to his dynamic ideas about the relationships between the state and culture. The current study has further discovered a mismatch predicament between his cultural theory and his ethnographic data. Its basic cause lies in the inability of his cultural theory in explaining why the core of culture, namely, volksgeist (the collective national spirit) had dual structures in the area of Xishuangbanna. To explain this predicament, this paper tries to take a historical angle to look at volksgeist to clarify the exaggerated consequence of the stateculture perspective on the one hand and to continue the exploration of the meaning of culture’s internal structure to the understanding of the history of civilization on the other hand. We can learn from Tao Yuenkuei’s cultural theory and ethnographic studies that open social sciences in pursuit of balance and tolerance can be established only on the recognition of the coexistence of “culture”, “the state”, and “society”.

Key words: culture ,  , history , the state ,  , Tao Yuenkuei , volksgeist