ENTERPRISE ANTHROPOLOGY: THE FOURTH EVOLUTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

Enterprise Anthropology is very different from other sub-disciplines of anthropology (such as Urban Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and so on), which use theories and methodologies of anthropology to research other fields (for example, urban, medicine and so on), but do not develop a new paradigm. Enterprise Anthropology has been integrated into an international discipline, which has formed its own new paradigm. It takes “Social-economic Transformation” theory as its new fundamental theory, and changes its paradigm from an old one into a new one. It has broken through the anthropological academic tradition of small-society and community studies, and attempts to analyze economic-social phenomena from the view of a macro-social-structure; it has broken through the fossilized “traditional-modern” dichotomy, and uses a continuous spectrum; and it has made a breakthrough in the anthropological tradition of grassroots, and tries to combine both “bottom-up” and “top-down” approaches together. As a result, it was called the fourth evolution of anthropology: a new research paradigm has been formed, its research category has been extended and deepened, its subject name has been unified, its academic activities and achievements have become international, and systematically established the innovative knowledge of anthropology. Enterprise anthropology has not only set up a bridge between China and the West, but has also brought about a discipline transformation of anthropology or broken through partly in anthropology both in China and in the world. In recent years, China and some regions of Asia have become the new engine of world anthropology because of their fast economic growth.