The Great Han

Kevin Carrico

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780520295506
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520967687
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Great Han is an ethnographic study of the Han Clothing Movement, a neotraditionalist and racial nationalist movement that has emerged in China since 2001. Participants come together both online and in person in cities across China to revitalize their utopian vision of the authentic "Great Han" and corresponding "real China" through pseudotraditional ethnic dress, reinvented Confucian ritual, and anti-foreign sentiment. Analyzing the movement's ideas and practices, this book argues that the vision of a pure, perfectly ordered, ethnically homogeneous, and secure society is in fact a fantasy constructed in response to the challenging realities of the present. Yet this national imaginary is reproduced precisely through its own perpetual elusiveness. The Great Han is a pioneering analysis of Han identity, nationalism, and social movements in a rapidly changing China.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Eternal Apparel
• 1 Imaginary Communities: Fantasy and Failure in Nationalist Identification
• 2 Han Trouble and the Ethnic Cure
• 3 The Personal Origins of Collective Identity
• 4 Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette: Between the Virtual and the Material
• 5 The Manchu in the Mirror
• 6 Producing Purity
• Conclusion: Neotraditionalism in China Today
• Notes
• Character Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index