Anthropological Turn: An Interdisciplinary Leader of New Liberal Arts

Since the beginning of the new era, there are four pioneer works in China’s new probing of liberal arts, i.e., Tradition in History of Telling Sorcery by Li Zehou, Light of Jade in Sorcery by Yang Boda, Sorcery Culture in Chinese Anthropology by Wang Zhenfu, and Voice of Black Bird: Theory in History of Artistic Embryology by Xiao Bing. These examples reveal that cultural anthropology as a new discipline takes an important leading function in academic turn for the existing liberal arts, as well as the conception of “culture” re-organizes the existing disciplinary horizon of literature, historiography, philosophy and arts, which can be included in the issue of cultural anthropology’s vernacular construction of the theory of “cultural texts”. From “text”, the concrete object of a single discipline, to conformal and virtual “cultural texts” , the propose of the concept may represent a constructional direction for a vernacular discourse in liberal arts theories in the past forty years and more since the reform and opening-up. As for the transformation of anthropology itself and the advancement of gene theory, the task of big turn in liberal arts is yet to be completed, and the era of a larger scope interdisciplinary and liberal-arts-and-sciences cross connection is coming up.