Organizer: Dru C. Gladney, University of Hawai'i
Chair: Yongling Chen, Central Nationalities University, Beijing
Discussant: Caroline Humphrey, Cambridge University
This panel departs from the usual portrayal of ethnic identity in China as peripheral, marginal, or distant from the so-called "center" of Chinese society and culture. Rather, it suggests that all modern nation-states are multi-centered, composed of indigenous voices, local cultures, and historic traditions that often pre-date nation-state incorporation. Many peoples in China regard themselves as indigenous to their locality, and others have constructed local identities due to interaction with, or even resistance to, the Chinese nation-state. Arjun Appadurai has noted increasingly deliberate efforts to "construct the local" in the current context of national integration, rapid globalization, mass mobilization, and more permeable borders. Based on long-term field research, scholars from the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. examine how these peoples over time maintained and transformed local traditions, rituals, and histories in the face of nation-state incorporation, Han Chinese migration, and increasing globalization. Papers will address five peoples in three locales: The Jingbo in Yunnan, the Uygur and Hui in northwestern China, the Kazakhs and Xibo in Xinjiang, and the Tibetans in Tibet. Consideration will be given to each group's own views and representations of indigeneity as well as their interaction with Han Chinese in the region. Religious and ritual traditions will be examined as sites of indigenous expression, and venues for claims of authority and authenticity. The discussant will bring a comparative perspective on the transformation and re-construction of indigeneity among peoples in the pre- and post-Soviet Union.
Refiguring Tibetan Indigeneity: Self, Space, and Law
Rebecca R. French, East-West Center
The Tibetan Buddhist Cosmology has a pre-figured notion of space/place and landscape that replicates the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the universe. At the same time, this is replicated and refigured in social practices and social relations. These cosmological notions of place and landscape will be examined in light of the spatial arrangements of law courtrooms both prior to 1959 and in the 1990s. The work of Arjun Appadurai and LeGoff will be used to explicate this historical refiguring of indigenous cultural space and ritual. Transformations in Tibetan notions of indigeneity under Chinese rule will be examined in light of spatial and cosmological refiguring. The interactions of self identity, national identity, and legal status will call into question notions of indigeneity, locality, and spatiality.
The Role of Education in the Construction and Indigenization of the Kazakh and
Xibe in Xinjiang: A Comparative Perspective
Koichi Maruyama, Kyushu University
This paper will examine how educational practice is significant for the formation of national and ethnic identities among the Kazakh and Xibe in Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The Kazakh are members of the international Islamic umma (brotherhood), living in northwestern Xinjiang as well as interacting transnationally with their relatives across the border in Kazakhstan. Although Islamic practice is not as strict as in the Near East or Southeast Asian countries, two factors seem to be significant for the continuity of their religious belief: the initiation ceremony and the food taboo. The former is performed only once in one's whole lifetime and the latter is repeated daily. The Xibe are a Tunguistic people forced to move from northeastern China more than two centuries ago. Although they are now ensconced among Muslim peoples, they have maintained their language and belief in Lamaism and Shamanism as well as engaging in strict endogamous marriage. Native languages are used in instruction in the minority nationality schools for these peoples, but except for a few folk songs, the main curricula at elementary and secondary schools are translations from Han Chinese standard textbooks. These curricula stress national integration among all peoples of China. Contradictions between national education at school and indigenous ethnic-oriented education in the community will be examined, with comparisons made between Kazakh and Xibe responses. This paper will examine how it is that each group constructs and maintains local and indigenous identities through traditional and national educative practices.
The Business with the Jingpho Manau
Ts'ui-p'ing Ho, Academia Sinica
The Yunnan provincial government nowadays finds its "minority nationalities" good for business. Business propaganda/advertising with "minority nationality" festivals is used to attract international investment: examples include a quasi-annual "Nationality Arts Festival" and a "Nationality Athletics Festival." Such festivals always include both set pieces and parades: the former include the demonstration of special skills (a shaman climbing a knife ladder) and athletic performances (dancing, archery and swinging), while the latter take the form of each national minority lining up to march as a group to its own distinctive and representative dance step. The Jingpho are represented as one of Yunnan's national minorities in propaganda/advertising performances by its manau , and their traditional indigeneity is marked by manau dancing. Manau was conventionally "a great nat-feast and religious dance, supposed to be of supernatural origin" (Hanson 1954 [1906]). Scholars usually view it as a variant of the "feast of merit" complex common throughout highland Southeast Asia (Leach 1954, H.N.C. Steveson 1943). I, however, prefer to emphasize its rule in obtaining and retaining local chieftainship. In the early 1980s in the Dehong Jingpho and Dai autonomous prefecture, the Jingpho themselves revived the manau as a festival marking indigenous Jingpho identity. In the late 1980s in the provincial capital of Kunming, the propaganda/advertising manauwas represented by manau dancing. Comparing these various manau representations, this essay explores the continuities and differences between the various manau in the local construction of Jingpho indigeneity and ethnic identity.
Local and Muslim in China: The Making of Indigenous Identities Among the Uygur
and Hui
Qicheng Ma, Central Nationalities University, Beijing
Dru C. Gladney, East-West Center
This paper examines how it is that Muslim peoples in China, who have entered and been incorporated into Chinese society over the past 1,200 years from Central Asia and the Middle East, now see themselves as local, ethnic and indigenous peoples. The paper will examine how it is that Islam has adapted itself to the rather "foreign" Chinese context, and made itself uniquely Chinese in content. Through comparing the Uygur, who see themselves as native to Central Asia in the region now known as Xinjiang, with the Hui Muslim Chinese, who have always seen themselves as descended from a hybrid ancestry of Arab, Persian, and Turkic ancestors who had inter-married with the local Chinese population, this paper will examine how it is that both Uygur and Hui now see themselves as bona fide indigenous peoples. The paper will trace the contrasting histories of these two distinct Muslim peoples and show how each has adapted beliefs, tradition, literature, art and mythology to the Chinese context, and how Islam has helped to transform that context as well. The re-emergence in recent years of frequent contacts with Muslims in Central Asia and the Middle East through increasing cross-border trade and pilgrimage has also influenced how Hui and Uygur see themselves and engage in Islamic practice. This paper will examine how it is that one can continue to be both Muslim and Chinese, Turkic and non-Turkic Muslim, authentic and of "foreign" origin in Chinese society.