Neo-colonial China and Multiple Primitives, 1927–45

This paper will address the Nationalist Institute of History and Philology's search for the primitive origins of the modern Han and minority cultures in China’s inner frontier during the Republican period.  Ling Chunsheng 凌純聲 (1902-1981), China’s first professional anthropologist and the founder of national ethnographic surveys, received his PhD in 1929 under the direction of Marcel Mauss’ at the Université de Paris, where he also worked with Marcel Granet and Paul Rivet. Ling’s studies, culminating in his dissertation on the Yao Ethnic group in Southern China, Recherches Ethnographiques sur les yao dans la Chine du Sud, Paris: Law Presse Universitaire de France, 1929, became the foundation for a national fieldwork agenda until the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1945.
The research efforts of Ling and Rei Yifu 芮逸夫(1898-1990) were part of a larger neo-colonial Chinese expansion into Eastern Tibet and southwest China.  Their photography and field diaries, brought to  Taiwan in 1949 but not available for research until ca. 2001, demonstrate how conceptions of primitive culture circulated internationally in cosmopolitan centers such as Paris, Nanjing, and Shanghai and how French conceptions of primitive culture in colonial Africa became a touchstone for Han Chinese research in the Inner Asian frontier.