Fei Xiaotong [Hsiao‐tung Fei] (1910–2005)

Abstract

Fei Xiaotong, who died on April 24, 2005, at the age of 94, was China's most important anthropologist and sociologist. An early Native ethnologist and a pioneer of advo? cacy for the interests of studied peoples, he is best known in the West for his field studies of Chinese villages. A cheerful, talkative, energetic?as well as competitive and ambitious? person, Fei in his thirties became a major intellectual figure in China with an outpouring of books and articles on social and political topics. He welcomed the new Chinese Com? munist Party (CCP) regime, which then in the mid-1950s silenced him for over 20 years. Finally, in the reform era of the 1980s and 1990s, in his old age, Fei unexpectedly leapt into an active new life?traveling, writing, talking, advising the government, and playing a key role in the revival of Chinese sociology and anthropology. Fei Xiaotong was born November 2, 1910, near Suzhou in the lower Yangzi region to a cultivated family. His fa? ther had studied in Japan, and his mother, the educated Christian daughter of a government official, founded one of China's first kindergarten schools. Fei had an excellent education. He attended secondary and university institu? tions founded by U.S. missionaries in which English was emphasized. At the elite Yenching University in Beijing, which had China's best sociology program, he was nurtured by Wu Wenzao (a Columbia Ph.D.) and stimulated by the semester visit of Robert E. Park, who was at the time advocat? ing firsthand anthropological studies of small communities. For an M.A. in anthropology, Fei went to nearby Tsinghua (Qinghua) University and studied with one of the few an? thropologists in China, S. M. Shirokogoroff, a White Russian of rigorous European training and encyclopedic knowledge, who after important studies on the culture of Tungus peo? ples in Siberia and Manchuria had turned to physical an? thropology. He taught Fei, in English, practical fieldwork methods and scientific empiricism, as well as techniques for collecting human body measurements. From 1936 to 1938, Fei attended the London School of Economies, studying with Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth. For years afterward, Fei called himself a functionalist, wrote about Malinowski's ideas, and used illustrations from Trobriand Islanders. His 1938 Ph.D. the-