The academic enculturation of Chinese archaeologists : a study of disciplinary texts, practices and identities

Abstract

In the context of Mainland China, even with the exponential growth of national research productivity in recent years, scholarly attention given to the disciplinary writing of professional academics has been scarce. In previous writing research, when academics in “periphery” countries/regions like Mainland China were studied, the focus has often been on their English writing and publishing as a whole, with little empirical work on their non-English and/or discipline-specific writing being reported. This study aims to address these gaps by closely examining the disciplinary writing of Chinese archaeologists.

Drawing upon the notion of “academic enculturation”, where the (re)formation of academic disciplines is understood at the levels of texts, practices, identities and social formations, and adopting as a tool the New Rhetorical genre theory, where genre is viewed as social action, this study was formulated as a textography to explore how academic enculturation manifests itself in the professional lives of Chinese archaeologists through their disciplinary writing. Being conducted at a top-tier research institute of archaeology in Mainland China, this study consists of two main stages: A situated analysis of the two primary genres in the discipline – preliminary field report and research article – at Stage One; and a multi-case study of the writing practices of six individual archaeologists at Stage Two.

Stage One of the study discloses the complexity of the disciplinarity of Chinese archaeology in the sense that archaeologists have to meet different requirements, participate in different practices, and assume different roles when producing the two primary genres. Stage Two of the study identifies three types of literate practices archaeologists engage in more or less regularly: The writing of research articles, which is infused with disciplinary norms and individual values, and embedded in institutional structure; knowledge construction using popular and academic genres, which is carried out flexibly to serve different purposes; and knowledge transformation between Chinese and English, for which difficulties at different levels have to be conquered.

Accordingly, academic enculturation was found to manifest itself in (1) the disciplinary genres written by archaeologists, as products of their strategic use of various resources to address the situations perceived by them as important; (2) the practices and identities of individual archaeologists, where younger academics tend to focus more on traditional practices and senior academics participate in more diversified practices more actively; and (3) the intertextually-related disciplinary genres which constitute the genre sets that define archaeologists’ professional roles and interact as multimodal genre systems that define the discipline, both are being constantly (re)formed through the mediation of genres.

Theoretically, this study enriched the connotation of “academic enculturation”, extended the application of New Rhetorical genre theory, and added to the knowledge base of EAL (English as an Additional Language) scholars’ writing and publishing. Methodologically, it attested to the usefulness of textography in bridging texts and contexts in writing research. Practically, implications were generated for archaeologists/professional academics, policy-makers, writing teacher-researchers and the general public. This textographic study, being exploratory in nature, also points at a number of directions for future research.