Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The relations between China’s dominant Han majority and the numerous smaller peoples who inhabit the broad periphery of China’s territory have often been disputatious. This absolutely first-rate collection of scholarly essays by nine anthropologists and one political scientist focuses on the problem of ethnic definition and self-definition among China’s peripheral peoples, including the Naxi, Yi, Miao, Mongols, and Manchus. . . . Rejecting the usual catalog of static characteristics as the way to define a people, the authors see national definition as a contentious and negotiated process resulting in a fluid and evolving set of behaviors, customs, linguistic usage, etc. At the core of this process lie Han attempts to impose their values on others in the name of civilization and the struggle of peripheral peoples to resist, adapt, and survive. An important book for students of Chinese society."
* Library Journal *
"Excellent essays . . . on the cultural and social impact of Han colonialism, . . . focusing on the heightened sense of ethnic difference that has emerged in the process and on the invention of ethnic identities that involve the distortion of the past."
* Far Eastern Economic Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to them
Part One | The Historiography of Ethnic Identity: Scholarly & Official Discourses
1. The Naxi and the Nationalities Question
2. The History of the History of the Yi
3. Defining the Miao
4. Making Histories
5. Pere Vial and the Gni-P'a: Orientalist Scholarship and the Christian Project
6. Voices of Manchu Identity, 1635-1935
Part Two | The History of Ethnic Identity: The Process of Peoples
1. Millenarianism, Christian Movements, & Ethnic Change Among the Miao in Southwest China
2. Chinggis Khan: From Imperial Ancestor to Ethnic Hero
3. The Impact of Urban Ethnic Education on Modern Mognolian Ethnicity, 1940-1966
4. On the Dynamics of Tai/Dai-Lue Ethnicity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis
Glossary
References
Contributors
Index
