When all disciplines in the Chinese academia have coincidentally begun to discuss fieldwork, fieldwork has become an academic ecology in the transdisciplinary perspective. The formation of fieldwork ecology is closely related to the prevalence of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity in the academia. The popularity of the transdisciplinary concept in the global academia implies the deconstruction of the existing university system rooted in disciplinary classifications and the emphasis on a positivist methodology based on case studies. In the field of area studies, which is an emerging interdisciplinary discipline, fieldwork has become an important methodology because of its characteristics of dividing research objects by geographical location. Fieldwork is both a scientific integration of a series of research methods and a disciplinary synthesis covering several disciplines. The commonalities of fieldwork in the interdisciplinary perspective are problem-oriented, grasping the complexity of the research problem; pursuing a holistic perspective of a certain social field, considering the diversity of the problem; attaching importance to first-hand materials, and emphasizing the dynamics of grasping reality. Fieldwork in transdisciplinary discipline is bottom-up, generative, and original in thinking about research questions from a holistic perspective. As a new interdisciplinary discipline in China, area studies are constantly exploring their knowledge system, the core of the discipline and the boundaries of the discipline. By maintaining a certain degree of boundary ambiguity, area studies will embrace more flexible and dynamic researches.

In a long period of time, researches on the urban history or urbanization mostly follow the logic of linear evolution, that is, the history of urban development with increasing population and spatial expansion, emphasizing the descriptive statistical analysis and underestimating the important role of actors and their actions. The study of urban changes viewing from the urban anthropology perspective enables the deconstruction of the city’s space and time, by analyzing the symbolic power and cultural significance of urban places or components such as streets, buildings, monuments, and infrastructures, to deeply understand the complexity and heterogeneity of a city through a dynamic and practice approach. Based on this, this paper focuses on Mexico City, the largest city in Latin America with a population of 20 million, and presents the changes in road planning, urban construction, space segmentation, landscape design, cultural leisure, and commercial development in the “historical center” of Mexico City and its surrounding areas since the late 19th century, to reveal tension between the conceived space under the official discourse and the bottom-up resistance of the local residents, thus providing a new perspective for understanding the two-way construction of “actors” and “city” in urban history.

Some consensus has been reached in China's area studies but has less touched upon the methodology of this discipline. Since the knowledge production process of area studies is embedded in the interaction between knowledge and fieldwork, and is characterized by the pursuit of comprehensive expertise, academic questions-oriented, with its multidisciplinary properties, and requires a long practical process. So that it is possible to discuss the issue of methodological orientation, in this regard, based on the universality of pluralistic approaches often applied in human societies to solve daily problems, e.g., diseases and health issues, the author tries to propose the possibility of method-pluralism in developing country' s studies based on author' s fieldwork practice of conducting area studies in East Africa.

Because of the limited conditions of the times, overseas research of Chinese anthropology which appeared in the 1930s, has not formed research conventions. Nowadays, with the introduction of the concept of overseas ethnography and the overseas fieldwork promoted by Chinese universities, overseas ethnography has gradually become a large-scale, and an important aspect of Chinese anthropology. Due to the problems of historical accumulation, researchers training and language learning, overseas ethnography is still in the exploratory stage. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, this paper demonstrates the researcher' s anxieties to choose the research topic and confusion to clarify the question, and discusses strategies for selecting field sites, determining research methods and avoiding risks, to provide a case study for overseas ethnography.