Quote from Professor Mette Hansen’s oral history

Question: Do you define yourself an expert on China or an anthropologist or something else?

Hansen: That’s always a problem for me when people ask me that. I never actually know what to answer, because I have also formally studied anthropology. I have a minor subject in anthropology, a minor subject in literary science and then I majored in China studies. My whole set of methodology is taken from the academic discipline of anthropology but at the same time I have really been primarily trained in China studies. So, I would probably say that I’m a China anthropologist. That’s my only way of solving this problem because for me the idea of having an academic identity, which is so important for many people, is not so important. I do what I do and I pursue the topics I’m interested in and those happen to be topics that somehow mainly fall within the field of anthropology.