China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Beth Notar, University of Michigan
Chair and Discussant: Charles McKhann, Whitman College
Beth Notar, University of Michigan
Since 794 a.d., when the Tang envoy Yuan Si bestowed a calendar upon the Nanzhao ruler Yimouxun, the imperial center has attempted to bring the people of Dali in line with central time. In the most recent attempt, the Cultural Revolution the state banned all local almanacs, markets and rituals, effectively stalling local temporal practices. With the reform era, however, local temporal practices have started to recommence.
This paper suggests that in Dali, it is a four-month, 220 kilometer pilgrimage made by women and shamans which organizes local time. This pilgrimage incorporates layers of historical legend of Dali as imperial center, and its events provide the focus of the local ritual calendar. While local practitioners view this pilgrimage as evidence of the persistence of local culture and history, the state views this "superstitious practice" as luohou, literally "falling behind the times," evidence of resistance to modernization.
Erik Meuggler, University of Michigan
In the early 1990s, Yi (or Lolop’o) in the mountains of northern Yunnan rid themselves of the ghosts of people who had died of hunger or violence in the previous four decades by sending them down the Jinsha and Changjiang rivers to eastern cities such as Wuhan, Shanghai and, finally, Beijing. These rituals of exorcism effect a clear moral reversal of the central-place hierarchies with which official discourses organize the body of the nation. The geographical imagination they evince is fundamental to locals’ constitution as social persons and thus to their "identities" in relation to the lowland places from which political authority flows. I argue that understanding how people imagine their intimately inhabited landscapes to be positioned within the imagined geography of the nation can tell us far more about their "identities" than can the notions of "ethnicity" that have hitherto dominated discussions of "minority nationalities" in China.
Peng Wenbin, University of Washington
This paper examines the trend of regional culture construction in southwest China and its complex relationship to the discourse of the Chinese national imagination. It focuses particularly on the construction of the "Great Southwest" (da xinan)—a popular theme of regional development associated with local concern over the increasing marginality of the Southwest in the process of national modernization.
The post-Mao reform era has witnessed an upsurge in collective endeavors by the intellectual community in the Southwest to carve out a space for regional culture representation. The cultural construction of the "Great Southwest" has engendered a process of studying and assessing the uniquely important role of the Southwest in the discourse of Chinese civilization. Such undertakings do not remain at the level of academic discussions; they have been molded into the representational practices of museums and theme parks that have recently proliferated in southwest China.
The process of substantiating a cultural entity at a macro-regional level is, however, not a unitary one, as intellectuals with diverse provincial or ethnic backgrounds compete for the "core" meaning of Southwestern culture (xinan wenhua). This paper examines the discursive cultural practices involved in the construction of a grand vision of the Southwest. It seeks to elucidate how the process of regional culture construction has been linked to a critical reassessment of the relationships between "core" and "periphery," between "tradition" and "modernity," and how the intellectual discourse of the Southwest has provoked alternative ways of constructing Chinese cultural origins and the discourse of modernity.
Margaret Byrne Swain, University of California, Davis
Yunnan is often characterized as a culturally and geographically diverse frontier remote from the center, but it is also portrayed as a province of great strategic and resource value to the nation state of China. Contemporary tourism trades on these images, promoting a Yunnan that is accessible but exotic, comfortably Chinese and yet not very Chinese at all. Such images reflect a history of regional conflict and cooperation with the central state, periods of relative independence, and intense border activity. Movement of peoples and goods in and through Yunnan has shaped local identities over time. Yunnan at the end of the 1900s is again opening toward the borderlands, building relationships with neighboring countries. Transnational trade, migration, and infrastructure development are condoned by the central government, while also limiting state power and cultural influence. This paper begins with a discussion of Yunnan, then analyzes tourism development in Shilin as a microcosm of processes shaping the province as a whole. Tourism is the latest vehicle for travel to Shilin that has included migrations of Han and Sani Yi; missionizing by French Catholics; and multinational warfare. Shilin tourism is now shaped by transnational joint ventures (Singapore, Hong Kong), ethnic politics, nationalism, modernity and local identity issues. Relations between the local tourism bureau, community and individual entrepreneurs are examined stressing gender, class, and ethnic interaction. Tourism is part of the process and signifier of this frontier zone.