Collections overlooked: The Chinese ethnic minority collections in an Asian Cold War context at the Department of Anthropology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

This article examines the geopolitical influences on the making of the Chinese ethnic minority ethnographic collections at the Department of Anthropology (DOA), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) during the Cold War period. These overlooked collections originated from two Taiwanese department founders, Chiao Chien, and Hsieh Jiann, who used Hong Kong as a node to conduct Chinese ethnic minority studies in the 1980s. After analyzing the DOA's Chinese ethnic minority collections, archives, and virtual museum data, and conducting semi-structured interviews with DOA members, the study postulates why the collections have been overlooked and discloses the collections' association with the Cold War. This article contributes to understanding the origin of an East Asian anthropology department with its understudied collections in an Asian Cold War context and offers a paradigm of “anthropology of anthropology departments” to examine the departmental history from a collections-based perspective.