A Civilization, as distinct from a primitive society, is expressed and recorded in the written works of its reflective and highly creative minds. It develops what simpler forms of living have not: a “great tradition” of the literate and critical few. Beneath and within this high culture live the common people, whose “little tradition” is creator and then creature of the philosophy, science and fine art of the great tradition.

The present article will analyze some of the major currents in the study of Chinese culture in terms of functioning communities. We will turn, first, to works of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, showing why these accounts, no matter how well done, were not community studies. We shall then turn successively to the pioneer scientific work on Chinese communities, the social surveys, and to the several published community studies which are largely anthropological in their organization and execution. The second section of this paper deals with the methodology of modern community studies in China and discusses problems of field method and of topical organization and interpretation. In a third section the emphasis rests upon subdisciplinary specializations, e.g., economic, sociological, psychological and so on. In this case, the term “subdisciplinary” is used because, with certain notable exceptions, the specialist work has been carried on within a broader anthropological approach. In this section we will attempt to outline what has been done, and to point out the most significant gaps that remain.

Studies of Japan and the Japanese have tended to deal in large proportion with phenomena and problems of the nation as a whole rather than with its component parts. In contrast, community studies focus upon some of the smallest social units of a nation. Community studies have been attempted as an approach to understanding Japan and the Japanese only recently and by relatively few foreign scholars. Moreover, even though a recent survey of work done by the Japanese lists 126 localities from which data at the community level have been gathered, no fully rounded community study has yet been finished by Japanese social scientists. Western scholars, following beaten paths, simply have not ventured into communities for small scale studies, whereas in the case of the Japanese the partial intellectual isolation which delayed the arrival of some of the concepts basic to community studies seems largely responsible for the low returns from so much field research.

Spencer has been called the most widely read and possibly the most in fluential Western social and political thinker in Japan during the 1880's. Between 1877 and 1900, at least thirty-two translations and one critical study of Spencer's works were published, besides many articles in journals and magazines. The writings of John Stuart Mill ranked next in popularity. Other Western thinkers—such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Guizot, Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, Darwin, Bentham, and Bagehot—received much less public attention.