Organizer and Chair: Ann Maxwell Hill, Dickinson College
Discussant: Jane Richardson Hanks, North Bennington, Vermont
The general goal of this back-to-back panel is to promote dialogue, centered on issues of state and ethnic identity, between Southeast Asianists and China scholars whose research is on ethnic minorities. There are few venues for such a conversation, and historically in AAS the two groups have been separated by the artificial divide of area specialization, in spite of broad similarities between "nationalities" in China and "hill tribes" in SE Asia and the significance of the state in problematizing the study of ethnic groups in both areas. The back-to-back panel format is proposed in order to maximize opportunities for bringing together scholars with fresh research from both areas who do not ordinarily talk to one another, but, more importantly, to allow space for explicit comparative framing (of state traditions, ethnography and theory) in Part One as stimulus for dialogue and as a backdrop for specific case studies in Part Two.
In Part One the papers cast a broad net over multi-ethnic and inter-ethnic terrain. They set out parameters of contrast between state traditions (Atwill, a historian, on the "civilizing mission" of the Chinese state, Hill on Leach’s classic interpretation of the relationship of lowland Tai states to the Kachin), theoretical approaches (Lehman on the cognitive approach to ethnicity among SE Asianists contrasted with more conventional understandings of assimilation under the rubric of "sinicization" among China scholars) and ethnography. All are broadly comparative, crossing cultures and boundaries, and show how local or regional constructs of group identities and inter-relations are differentially impacted by the state, challenging the rhetoric of empire or nation-state about control of its multi-ethnic frontiers. Our discussant is Jane Hanks, whose work among "hill tribes" in Northern Thailand has been on-going since the 1950s. Her contributions to Southeast Asian anthropology are the focus of another panel proposed for these meetings, whose participants are a "natural" audience for our back-to-back panel.
David Atwill, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This study attempts to juxtapose the Qing Court and Chinese literati’s conception of ethnic groups in 19th century Yunnan with that of a more regionally-informed ethnic portrayal of the region. By exploring the imperial court’s efforts to impose their own cultural and political vision on southwest China during the late imperial period, it becomes evident how such idealized conceptions of the region overtly reified the diverse regional culture that was grounded in a wide array of ethnic and political complexities. Specifically, I demonstrate the intricacies of the Qing’s civilizing mission by breaking it down into three component parts: (1) the demonization of the non-Chinese Other; (2) the historicization of Yunnan ethnic groups as "primitive" or "ancient" though still with China’s own historical tradition; and finally (3) I reveal how the Qing sought to construct a geo-representation of Yunnan by conflating ethnicity and boundaries. While examining a variety of categories, such as the Dai, Naxi, and Yi, my paper will focus primarily on the Muslim Yunnanese (or Huizu). The Muslim Yunnanese through their trade and religious networks offer a highly effective prism through which to view the regional ideal of multilateral ethnic relations, thus offering an important corrective to imperial, and many modern, perspectives of the region which presuppose fixed boundaries and superimpose a Chinese unilinear version of history on the region.
Ann Maxwell Hill, Dickinson College
Among Southeast Asianists, Leach’s anthropological classic, Political Systems of Highland Burma, has long been a wellspring of analytical models for ethnic identity and inter-ethnic relations among groups in the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands. This paper examines how well, or whether, his specific insights into relations between upland groups and lowland states enlighten the ethnography of the Nuosu, a local group of the Yi nationality in Mao Liangshan, Yunnan Province, China. Like the Kachin, the Nuosu were an upland-dwelling Tibeto-Burman group with a long history of contact with state society and with adjacent ethnic groups. But one looks in vain among the Nuosu for social structures that "modeled" the lowland Han society or polity, or for intermarriage with Han. And wealth derived from contact with Han commodity markets, unlike similar sources of outside wealth among the Kachin, seldom translated into enhanced political status in Nuosu society. Changes in ethnic identity among individuals, when they occurred, were characteristically from Han to Nuosu, rather than in the other direction. So how to account for these differences between Kachin and Nuosu and their relations to state society? The local ecology of Nuosu livelihood, Nuosu socio-political structure and, most importantly, the border political institutions of the Chinese state were all sources of contrast with the Kachin case in upland Southeast Asia and significant in configuring Nuosu relations with the lowland Han Chinese.
F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
My paper will deal with Tai (Shan), Kachin and others: how their very perceptions of who they are and what it means, culturally, to be who they are seems to change, often dramatically, depending upon the local context of whom they address their identity to. I used to think, and I have even written (in the Thai-Yunnan Project Newsletter over a year ago) that these very sinicised descriptions of Shan customs the Chinese ethnographers give us came about because the work was done in Putonghua and because the Tai felt the Chinese wanted to hear such stuff. Now I find that, the farther North one goes in Yunnan (from Ruili towards Mangshih, say, the more Shan perceive themselves that way, even when talking to me in Shan; the same people change their descriptions of their customs as they move off towards the Burma border. Ho Ts’ui-P’ing describes similar phenomena for the Zaiwa (Atsi) vis-à-vis Jinghpo and others. I want to relate this phenomenon to the Cog Sci (Al) proposal that ‘belief’ is a very labile matter rather than a fixed mental state.