Finding Wang Tonghui: The life and after‐life of a pioneer female Chinese anthropologist

Abstract

Our article recovers the obscured intellectual trajectories and contributions of Wang Tonghui (1912–1935AD), a pioneering female Chinese anthropologist, introducing her story for the first time to the Anglophone anthropological audience. By tracing her life, death, and after‐life, we critically examined how Wang's image as an ambitious and talented anthropologist was gradually erased and replaced by that of a supportive wife and a muse of a prominent male scholar. This shift highlights the challenges faced by female scholars within the entanglement of anthropology and China's political process since the early 20th century. Through interrogating the gendered power dynamics in the historical process of knowledge production in anthropology, we further seek to better understand our own condition as female anthropologists from the perspective of a non‐Anglophone context.