Bulletin No. 1, 2010

30  Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2010  The Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society L ed by Prof. David Faure, director of the Centre for Comparative and Public History, this project is the first humanities project ever to be made an AoE. Following the approach of combining field and documentary research, the research team attempts another explanation for variations in Chinese local society. The project will study 15 geographic areas in China to recover the history of both how local society acquired and identified with its own characteristics, and incorporated into and accepted the broad expanse of a unified culture. Researchers will document objectively observable indications of local ritual traditions and reconstruct the history of the local institutions in which they were employed. These indications include architectural features and literate traditions closely related to local religion or ancestral sacrifice, the hagiography of local deities, and village ceremonies performed by villagers themselves or by Buddhist and Daoist specialists. By comparing the time frame of separate local histories, the project will construct a history of China from the bottom up. It will demonstrate the very significance of historical anthropology as an approach to understanding China’s history. Professor Faure explained that he is primarily interested in the gradual changes in social structure and regional identity that have taken place in China over the past millennium. His team will attempt to relate these regional discourses to the overall history of China, so as to better understand the country’s complexity. He aims to construct a history of China from the perspective of ordinary people, as this bottom-up approach can deliver important perspectives that might be missed by more traditional approaches. ‘Villagers often know more about the history of their own district than the scholars do,’ he said. Fourteen scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China and the US will work together on this project. Professor Faure said, ‘The AoE funding will allow us to widen our focus. We used to concentrate on the history of southern China, but we can now extend our research to the rest of China.’