Abstract:

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.

Key words: culture contact, internationalism, community study, cultural boundary