I visited China for a conference and found a very interesting Chinese academic book titled "From Malinowski to Fei Xiaotong: Another type of Functionalism" by Lizhong Xie of Peking University. Within the book are articles written by Xiaotong Fei about his advisor, Bronislaw Malinowski, in the 1930s.

Fei was an eminent anthropologist in China. And Malinowski was one of the founders of modern anthropology. Malinowski is instrumental in establishing anthropology's field-based research methodology. In China, anthropology developed mostly independently from the Western counterparts since 1940s.

Some of the interesting snippets I gathered from Fei's articles include:

(1) Anthropologists often suggest that Malinowski treated culture as static and unchanging. But Malinowski did discuss culture change; although Fei pointed out that these papers were ignored by European academics. Fei suggested that one possible reason was that Malinowski left the London School of Economics for Harvard in the U.S. European scholars may have ignored Malinowski's later works at Harvard.

(2) Anthropologists sometimes criticize Malinowski for suggesting that anthropologists cannot study their own cultures. In fact, Fei suggested that Malinowski often advocated that locals, including Europeans, should study themselves. A classic case was Xiaotong Fei, who as a Chinese, studied the Chinese culture under the guidance of Malinowski.

(3) Anthropologists often criticize Malinowski for treating the "natives" as primitive forms of "advanced civilizations," e.g., European countries. Fei suggested the contrary, that Malinowski himself, through his acclaimed book "Argonauts Of The Western Pacific," was trying to point out how socially complex are the "natives." In addition, he advised Fei to explore China in its own development trajectory, and in the light of the country's own 5000 years of history.

It is interesting how much more you can learn about a subject when it is seen from another culture's perspective.