In the past two decades, a group of young Chinese anthropologists have gone to countries around the world to carry out long-term field research in the language of local people, delicately depicting the daily life of ordinary people in foreign countries. The cause they are engaged in is called "overseas ethnography" research. It was not until the 21st century that Chinese scholars had the historical conditions to go overseas in batches and conduct long-term field investigations in other regions or countries—— this not only meant the transformation of the research object of Chinese anthropology, but also could be seen as an academic action of developing countries to participate in world narratives, and it was also the beginning of China's transformation from the research object of Western academia to the narrative subject of world society.
The rise of overseas ethnography research has not only marked the new direction of Chinese anthropology discipline construction, expanded the empirical research foundation of Chinese social sciences, but also provided a new path for reshaping Chinese people's world outlook. This lecture will highlight the three time nodes of 2002, 2012 and 2022, and sort out the progress made in overseas ethnography research at different stages, including the formation of effective problem awareness, the establishment of disciplinary norms, methodological reflection and interdisciplinary dialogue. Overseas ethnography research also faces a general challenge, that is, how to re-understand the relationship between China and the world at the level of knowledge production, including how to deal with the relationship between Chinese anthropology and world anthropologies, how to promote reflective and generative Chinese consciousness in cross-cultural comparison, and how to promote the formation of the world society through multi-subject interactive anthropological research.
