Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract: On March 29th, 2017, WANG Mingming, Professor of Anthropology at Peking University, delivered a speech titled Some turns in a ‘journey to the West’: Cosmological proliferation in an anthropology of Eurasia, as part of the series of the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture in Social Anthropology at the British Academy. This was the first time that a non-Western anthropologist was invited as a speaker. In his speech, professor WANG Mingming discussed the research achievements of anthropology in different core ethnographic regions, suggesting the need to connect the anthropological theory of civilisation with the study of the interactions between Eurasian civilisations starting from the interactive relationships between cosmologies, as well as the need to borrow again from the relationship theory developed in the past in the studies on the so-called primitive ethnic groups of the “Southern Hemisphere”, in order to get a better grasp on the dynamic features of the interactions between Eurasian civilisations, and to understand the significance of “cultural complexity”, creating an anthropology “of considering others in one’s place”.

This exclusive interview with WANG Mingming after the speech was originally conducted in Chinese. The transcript presented here has been translated here into English, along with an abstract of WANG Mingming’s speech.