This paper aims at analyzing Dr. Fei Xiao-tong`s <Peasant Life in China> in terms of methodology in anthropology. The monograph was based on his doctoral dissertation (1938) under Bronislaw Malinowski at London School of Economics. First of all, I like to point out his idea of the “indigenous anthropology” which seems not to be an appropriate terminology in contemporary sense. His motivation to write the book was initiated to solve social problems in reality in a Chinese community. This attitude can be termed as practical anthropology of which Malinowski tried to do that under the colonial situation. All most all of ethnographies done by social anthropologists were dealing with so-called “primitive” or “savage” societies while Fei did it a Chinese peasant community. This should be acknowledged as a complete new phase of doing anthropology by Fei since that time. Secondly, Fei`s contribution can be claimed as community studies which was another movement of new fashion in 1930s in anthropology. At that time, Chicago school in anthropology including Robert Redfield, Radcliffe-Brown, Lloyd Warner, and Robert Park (sociologist) initiated community studies. One of Radcliffe-Brown`s students at University of Chicago, John F. Embree (1908-1950), did the same style of research in a Japanese village named <Suye Mura> (1939) and published a monography at the same year of which Fei`s <Peasant Life in China> (1939) came out. In this sense, Fei`s ethnographic monograph should be considered as one of leading cases in terms of the community studies in the process of anthropological development. Thirdly, and last, there was a strong trend that social anthropologists mostly worked in the primitive societies characterized without the literate tradition. Anthropologists like Malinowski and Raymond Firth were almost naturally accustomed to this condition of nonliteracy and no one had ever raised the question of anthropological fieldwork based on the issue of time and history. Generally speaking, Chinese communities that Fei`s monograph was based on the long history of the literate tradition could not almost generically be understood without the sense of history. This is the problem of different kind of the pre-conditioned context in doing ethnography from the primitive societies. Fei followed the Malinowskian way of writing ethnography and the Trobriand model never thought about this issue of nonliteracy. Malinowski acknowledged this problem when he read Fei`s monograph and overtly and intentionally wrote this issue of dealing with time and history in his introduction for Fei`s ethnography. However, Fei has never paid attention to his mentor`s advice on. East Asian societies including China have long taken the history of the literate tradition. There could be a question: how could we deal with the literate legacy within anthropological ethnography in the future? This seems to be the problem for the East Asian anthropologists to struggle within the East Asian context to contribute and to remake the anthropological community in the world. Anthropology can be reinvented with this question in the future.