Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Luo Hongguang

Titel

Introduction

Ist Teil von

• Social sciences in China, 2022-08, Vol.43 (3), p.142-145

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Dialogue is an art of understanding. So, "What makes understanding possible?" This enduring proposition has always been part of the developmental process of the discipline of sociology. Is it the understanding of those being researched? Or is it an academic consensus among different knowledge systems? This is not an easy question to answer. We attempt through dialogue to gain an understanding, in the anthropological sense, that enables knowledge to produce community. At the design level, each dialogue is made up of a pair of a group of well-known experts and scholars from China and other countries, and each becomes a dialogue when it satisfies any one of the criteria of cross-discipline, cross-nationality and cross-culture. The dialogues center on issues of common concern to both parties and generally last about sixty minutes excluding translation time. The topic of each dialogue is determined through discussion between a third party-the moderator of the dialogue-and the dialogue partners. Because the dialogues are interdisciplinary, they avoid the implicit conversational habits of colleagues; reject the tacit acquiescence that arises from a common cultural background; or exclude, as much as possible, identity due to common nationality. For example, the simple concept of exchange presents the two parties to the dialogue with the implications the concept has for the economist, the sociologist, or the anthropologist. ... The dialogue partners' strangeness to each other basically satisfies the anthropological sense of the "other" or "stranger." A dialogue among "others" requires a platform for mutual understanding that is relatively independent of the values of individual or group sentiments and that employs a methodology that follows the rules of scholarly presentation of concepts and logical relationships. In the authors view, this does not affect the expression of the participants' unique approaches and grasp of ideas.In this special issue, we have selected the following anthropological dialogues from 33 scholarly dialogues.