In this collaborative effort by two leading scholars of modern Chinese history, Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik investigate how the short-lived National Labor University in Shanghai was both a reflection of the revolutionary concerns of its time and a catalyst for future radical experiments in education. Under the slogan “Turn schools into fields and factories, fields and factories into schools,” the university attempted to bridge the gap between intellectual and manual labor that its founders saw as a central problem of capitalism, and which remains a persistent theme in Chinese revolutionary thinking.
During its five years of existence, Labor University was the most impressive institutional embodiment in twentieth-century China of the labor-learning ideal, which was introduced by anarchists in the first decade of the century and came to be shared by a diverse group of revolutionaries in the 1920s. This detailed study places Labor University within the broad context of anarchist social ideals and educational experiments that inspired it directly, as well as comparable socialist experiments within labor education in Europe that Labor University’s founders used as models. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of institutional and intellectual history on their examination of the structure and operation of the University, presenting new material on its faculty, curriculum, physical plant, and history.

无政府主义人类学碎片是作者从人类学的角度对无政府主义做的一个新诠释。格雷伯从人类学的历史出发，尝试勾划出人类学和无政府主义的关系，特别通过探讨实行平均主义的“原始社会”的权力架构、莫斯（Marcel Mauss）的礼物经济，以及他在马达加斯加的田野研究，为我们打开一个走出国家—市场局限的视野。格雷伯书中还探讨了全球化所引发的问题，以尝试建立一种基于无政府主义的“共识主义”，作为民主的新方向，强调人类学关于权力制衡方面的研究如何帮助我们重新看待乌托邦的梦想，以及怎样实现一个更美好的社会。这本书也是对人类学的批判：为何百多年来人类学家掌握了这些田野资料和人文志技巧，却不能为我们指出另一个方向？而这本书便是第一个这样的尝试。