Organizer: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
Chair: James L. Watson, Harvard University
Opium Suppression and Ethnic Minorities in Southwest China: 1950s and 1990s
Yongming Zhou, Duke University
This paper examines anti-opium campaigns in Sichuan Yi and Tibetan areas in the 1950s, and a large scale drug crackdown in a Yunnan Muslim community in 1992. In the 1950s, the Chinese authorities differentiated Yi and Tibetan from the Han Chinese and adopted different policies of opium suppression in their respective "autonomous" areas. This paper focuses on how the authorities succeeded in conducting opium suppression by incorporating it into the process of transforming Yi and Tibetan societies to direct control of the Chinese state. This paper also points out that the new social-economic conditions in minority communities in the 1990s have forced the authorities to change their anti-drug policies, as illustrated in the siege of a Hui community in Yunnan in 1992.
The Yi of Liangshan: From "Independent Lolos" to "Liberated Slaves"
Peng Wenbin, University of Washington
This paper examines the cultural-intellectual discourses of "the primitive" in Southwest China. It focuses on textual and visual representations of Yi slavery in Liangshan, a topic that has not yet received adequate attention in recent scholarly work on the Yi.
The frontier region of Liangshan historically marked the outer limits of Chinese state power and cultural influence. The Yi—known as "independent Lolos" in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western literature—had resisted Han Chinese assimilation for over two millennia. Images of Yi plundering and slave-hunting in adjacent Han areas until 1950, penetrated so deeply into the Chinese psyche that the Yi "primitiveness" probably constituted one of the most pervasive themes in imperial historiography and contemporary ethnography.
This paper analyses the construction of the Yi as the paradigmatic case of "slave society"—a category once debated in Chinese ethnological circles in the 1950s, and recently challenged by Yi scholars themselves. This paper highlights how the "liberated slaves" of Liangshan evolved into a dominant theme in Chinese ethnological, literary, and visual practices in the 1950s, which sought to create the subject-position of the Yi as the "new socialist people" (shehuizhuyi xinren). An inquiry into the discourse of Yi slavery in this period illuminates how visions of modernity and a unified national body were constructed at a given moment in modern Chinese history. Additionally, it will contribute to the understanding of the role of the "marginal," "local," or "ethnic" in constituting national imagination, a subject that has become increasingly salient in current academic research.
Nushü: An Endangered System of Women’s Writing in Hunan, China
Orie Endo, Bunkyo University
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to report some of the findings of my six-year ethnographic fieldwork on Nushü, a writing system indigenous to the Jiang Yong area in Hunan, China, which has been used exclusively by women for over three hundred years. I have visited the Jiang Yong area annually since 1993 and have been collecting data by working directly with women who read and write the Nushü script. This paper will: (1) describe the Nushü script as a unique writing system; (2) present a hypothesis about its origins; (3) discuss the transmitters of the writing system; and (4) describe the life of farm women in the area as expressed in Nushü. Only two transmitters are currently known to be living, and consequently, knowledge of the Nushü script is seriously endangered.
The second purpose of this paper is to urge more attention and investigation into the writing system and its users. Although I have contacted national and provincial institutes as well as the Women’s Federation in China, very little action has been taken toward investigating and maintaining this dying script. By demonstrating how the script provides insight into the lives of women in the area, and especially into their relationships with other women (such as the practice of "sworn sisters"), I suggest that Nushü is worthy of greater attention not only for linguistic but also for cultural reasons.
"Rely on the Meaning!" Localized Conceptions of Knowledge and Authority in the PRC’s Tibetan Language Textbooks
Janet L. Upton, University of Washington
In recent years, Tibetan intellectuals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have developed and begun to implement a comprehensive Tibetan-language curriculum for use in primary- and secondary-level Tibetan schools. While adhering to state-mandated educational guidelines, this curriculum also seeks to provide a balance between traditional Tibetan knowledge and values and more modern concerns. One of the most visible ways in which traditional knowledge and values have been incorporated into the curriculum has been through the strategic use of traditional aphoristic sayings in the textbooks for the course on Tibetan Language and Literature.
In this paper, I will explore the role that these aphoristic sayings play in the Tibetan-language curriculum in particular and Tibetan schooling in general. I first trace the origin of these sayings, which are drawn selectively from the classical Tibetan Buddhist literary canon, and discuss the ways in which they represent traditional Buddhist understandings of the nature of knowledge and authority. I then discuss the ways in which they fit within the generalized practice of moral education in the PRC. Drawing on both the connections and dissonances between the PRC moral education project and the goals of Tibetan educators, I argue that these texts form a bridge between state-sanctioned modes of education and cultural production and more localized notions of the nature of knowledge and authority. I conclude with a discussion of the implications these sayings have for the development of a critical literacy among young Tibetans.
Sacred Turf: Temples, Transcendence, and Territoriality in Trans-Urban Taiwan
Avron A. Boretz, University of Texas, Austin
In Taiwan’s rural villages and towns, the boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion, identity and otherness are described through the idiom of "supernatural power" (ling) embodied in the incense fires and sacred images housed in local temples. Collectivities that identify themselves vis-à-vis a common object of sacrifice often evolve into extended networks. The structuring role of these networks in the historically deep, relatively homogeneous communities of northern, central, and southern Taiwan is well documented.
This paper aims in part to complement earlier studies by examining a plague-deity cult network centered in Taidong, the most recently settled and ethnically diverse county in Taiwan. In recent years, outmigrants from Taidong have established subsidiary temples in suburban neighborhoods of other regional cities. These neighborhoods, like Taidong itself only three or four generations back, are largely populated by recently-arrived small-town migrants. This produces a social environment marked by competition and negotiation among migrants from different native places, as well as between newcomers and more stable local groups. The temple networks that extend from Taidong to these urban neighborhoods are non-contiguous and widely dispersed. Nevertheless, these migrants from Taidong consider themselves first and foremost "Taidongers."
I argue that the local identities of urban migrants are prefigured in transcendental notions of "territory" and "locale," both pivotal structuring components of popular cosmology. This cosmology links the collectivity, the incense fire of its temple, and its land with a "supernatural" metaworld, ideologically underpinning a local identity that resists geographical, social, and economic dislocation.