文化、历史中的“民族精神”——陶云逵与中国人类学的德国因素

本文通过民国时期人类学家陶云逵这一个案，来梳理德国“文化”概念经过中国学者的思考和运用进入中国社会科学的历程。作为第一位运用“文化”理论进行实地经验研究的中国学者，陶云逵在实证研究中思考如何保存“文化”自身的神圣性，肯定人的精神价值，对各文化之间如何相互沟通和理解问题展开过深入的讨论。这些讨论不仅在人类学内部有意义，而且构成了人类学、社会学与哲学和历史学对话的可能。本文跟随陶云逵的理论和实证研究脚步，呈现他在文化理论和方法论上的探索，并试图指出，陶云逵对“文化”如何制约“国家”的政治经济权力提出有力的现实和历史证据。

“Volksgeist” in History and Culture: Tao Yuen kuei and the German Factor in Chinese Anthropology

This paper reports a history study based on an anthropologist as a case. Here, Tao Yuen kuei, an anthropologist after 1911, is examined to understand how the German concept of “culture” and theories entered the social sciences in China through the thinking and application by Chinese scholars. Since the reestablishment of the discipline in the 1950s, culture, a concept that meaningfully contains people’s internal spiritual world, has long been neglected in the Chinese social sciences; instead, great attention has been given to such concepts as “nationality”, “social forms”, “the state”, and “society”. Tao Yuen kuei is to be “re discovered” because he was the first Chinese scholar to apply the cultural theory to his ethnographic research. In his empirical studies, he thought about how to treat the objectivity inherent in “culture” and to confirm the spiritual values of people. He discussed how cultures communicated and understood one another with excellent opinions. He did not just introduce Western concepts in order to explain the Chinese experiences; instead, he conducted field studies of minority groups in Yunnan, examining the cultural history, religion, mythology, and rituals to understand how patterns of cultural views took root in society and among individuals. His research in political science led to his dynamic ideas about the relationships between the state and culture. The current study has further discovered a mismatch predicament between his cultural theory and his ethnographic data. Its basic cause lies in the inability of his cultural theory in explaining why the core of culture, namely, volksgeist (the collective national spirit) had dual structures in the area of Xishuangbanna. To explain this predicament, this paper tries to take a historical angle to look at volksgeist to clarify the exaggerated consequence of the state culture perspective on the one hand and to continue the exploration of the meaning of culture’s internal structure to the understanding of the history of civilization on the other hand. We can learn from Tao Yuen kuei’s cultural theory and ethnographic studies that open social sciences in pursuit of balance and tolerance can be established only on the recognition of the co existence of “culture”, “the state”, and “society”.