About Chinese women: Ethnography, ethnology and anthropology in Julia Kristeva's semanalysis

Abstract

In this paper I examine the ethnographic, ethnological and anthropological aspect of Julia Kristeva’s semanalysis, signalling About Chinese women [1974] as a clear example of its application. Dialoguing with the French structuralist semiology of the second half of the 20th century, and influenced by Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, Kristeva introduces the issue of human sociocultural diversity in the very constitution of her semanalysis, thus questioning the ethnocentrism implicit in some of the elements of semiology. From this perspective, and taking into account Kristeva’s own explicit positioning, About Chinese women appears, not as a work of exclusively political motivations that responds to the political climate after May '68, marked by the debacle of the French Communist Party, but as the result of a sociocultural interest akin to the ethnographic, ethnological and anthropological approach.