Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers

Stevan Harrell

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295804088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804088

China's exploitation by Western imperialism is well known, but the imperialist treatment within China of ethnic minorities has been little explored. Around the geographic periphery of China, as well as some of the less accessible parts of the interior, and even in its cities, live a variety of peoples of different origins, languages, ecological adaptations, and cultures. These people have interacted for centuries with the Han Chinese majority, with other minority ethnic groups (minzu), and with non-Chinese, but identification of distinct groups and analysis of their history and relationship to others still are problematic.

Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers provides rich material for the comparative study of colonialism and imperialism and for the study of Chinese nation-building. It represents some of the first scholarship on ethnic minorities in China based on direct research since before World War II. This, combined with increasing awareness in the West of the importance of ethnic relations, makes it an especially timely book. It will be of interest to anthopologists, historians, and political scientists, as well as to sinologists.

PART I

The Historiography of Ethnic Identity

Scholarly and Official Discourses

The Naxi and the Nationalities Question

Charles F. McKhann

The fact of such a variety of families all existing at the same time is most spectacular both in Chinese and foreign society, contemporary or historical. [The Yongning Naxi] are like a colorful historical museum of the evolution of families in which one finds living fossils of ancient marriage formations and family structures.—Yan Ruxian, “A Living Fossil of the Family”

[Lewis Henry] Morgan used contemporary primitive tribal systems as a basis for inferences about the nature of ancient tribal systems. . . . This method is tantamount to making contemporary primitives into “living fossils.”—Tong Enzheng, “Morgan’s Model and the Study of Ancient Chinese Society”

Time was when ethnologists in the People’s Republic of China had only two and a half theories of society and culture to work with: Stalin’s theory of national identity, Morgan’s theory of social evolution, and Engels’ reworking of Morgan in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Since the mid-1980s, however, Chinese ethnologists have shown signs of increasing dissatisfaction with the limits imposed on their work by this narrow theoretical framework. Two of the sharpest critiques have appeared in the English and Chinese versions of the journal Social Sciences in China early in 1989. In “Ethnic Identification and Its Theoretical Significance,” Huang Shupin (1989), a member of one of China’s two fledgling anthropology departments, offers a critical reassessment of Stalin’s criteria for determining national identity. Tong Enzheng’s (1989) criticisms of Morgan-Engelsian evolutionist theory may seem old hat to Western readers, but although he does not directly address the issue of so-called “contemporary primitives” in China, the publication of his forthright critique reflects a significant shift away from state-sponsored dogmatism in Chinese social science theory. It is in the Hundred Flowers spirit present in the writings of these and other contemporary Chinese critical theorists that I make the following observations on the general theory and practice of ethnology in post-Liberation China, and on the particular case of the Naxi nationality of northwestern Yunnan Province.¹

THE NATIONALITIES QUESTION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF ETHNOLOGY IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Ethnology in contemporary China is generally regarded as an applied science, and its products to a large degree reflect the government’s interest in resolving what it calls the “nationalities question” (minzu wenti). With a population that is 92 percent Han, the “nationalities question” in essence concerns problems with the economic, political, and social integration of the several dozen ethnic minorities that make up the remaining 8 percent of China’s people. The government has correctly identified relative poverty as one of the principal features distinguishing the members of most minority ethnic groups from the average Han farmer. In an effort to redress this imbalance, laws and policies—especially in the area of education—have been designed to afford selective advantage to the members of China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu). At the same time, the government promotes a model of national culture that derives largely from the (Confucian) traditions of the Han majority, and in this respect minorities policy has been broadly assimilationist (see Borchigud, this volume).²

Although the “nationalities question” in principle concerns the mutual integration of all nationalities, the discipline of “ethnology” (minzuxue)—translated alternatively as “nationalities studies”—has been charged exclusively with the study of China’s minority nationalities. Before Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the study of contemporary Han society and culture was largely under the purview of political studies, economics, history, philosophy, and demography. In 1979, after nearly three decades in exile as “bourgeois sciences,” sociology (shehuixue) and anthropology (renleixue) were rehabilitated—the former to extend the research being done on Han society, and the latter, in its sociocultural aspect, again focusing primarily on China’s minority nationalities.³

The separation of majority and minority nationality studies into different academic disciplines is rooted in Marxist theory. Following Marx and Engels, Chinese Communist theorists consider different societies to be characterized by one of several broad types of “social formations,” each representing a different stage in a more or less universal history of social evolution. In the study of China’s nationalities the number of these stages has often been effectively reduced to two: modern or modernizing societies (as typically represented by the Han majority) and culturally and economically “backward” (luohou) or premodern societies (including almost all of China’s minority nationalities).⁴ While the work of Marx and Engels centers on a critique of capitalism and includes analyses of societies characterized by slavery and feudalism (the stages thought to be the immediate predecessors of capitalism on the evolutionary scale), on the relatively rare occasions that they turned their attention to more “primitive” societies Marx and Engels drew heavily on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan.

Morgan’s (1985 [1877]) theory of social evolution, outlining three main stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—has been the cornerstone of Chinese ethnology for forty years. Apart from the study of contemporary minority nationalities, the chief application of Morgan’s theory in China has been in the archaeology of the Chinese neolithic period. This dual usage serves to identify living peoples with cultures that existed four millennia ago and to distinguish them categorically from some of their more “advanced” contemporary neighbors (particularly the Han). As Stevan Harrell notes in his introduction to this volume, the hierarchy implicit in this constructed order is spatial as well as temporal: the Han represent the advanced core, whereas the backward minority nationalities exist at the geographical, social, and cultural periphery.

The view of non-Han peoples as “barbarians” (man, yi, or fan) which we usually associate with the bygone Imperial Chinese world system—what is today officially called “great Han chauvinism”—is not dead in China. Like Confucian moralism, Morganian evolutionism primitivizes and exoticizes peoples who would be reckoned at the “backward” end of the cultural evolutionary scale, and simultaneously absolves its proponents of moral culpability by proposing a natural order of culture.⁵ In some of its historical forms the Confucian view has even dehumanized peoples belonging to other cultural traditions. Dating to the Han dynasty, policies for governing barbarians—such as the “loose rein” and the “bone and stick”—called forth images of domestic animals in reference to peoples whose Chinese names were often rendered in characters using the dog or insect radical (Lien-sheng Yang 1968). In 1743, the first Han magistrate to govern the Naxi territory explained the Naxi request for naturalization by supposing that “they [were] attracted by the Imperial Benevolence as animals are attracted by sweet grass” (in Rock 1947:46).⁶ Contemporary statements exhorting minority peoples to follow directives from the center often appear to be underlain by similar presuppositions regarding the self-evident value of such programs as the Four Modernizations.

The contemporary Chinese ethnological literature contains numerous examples illustrating researchers’ confidence in their ability to assess the general level of sociocultural development of the different minority nationalities and to identify factors that may be inhibiting evolutionary progress. In a 1987 article in Minzu yanjiu (Nationalities research), for example, Long Yuanwei suggests that “an inability to administer production,” “closed-mindedness,” and “objectionable customs” have retarded the development of a commodity economy in minority areas (1987:20–21).⁷ The institutionalized sexual relationship called zouhun (walking marriage) practiced by the so-called Yongning Naxi (whom I will call Mosuo, following self-identification practices) is an example of a custom that was for many years judged “objectionable.”⁸ Residence in zouhun relationships is duolocal: the man visits the woman and may spend the night, but they maintain separate residences in their natal households, and any children born of the relationship are raised in their mother’s house. In the post-Liberation ethnographic literature on the Mosuo, zouhun relationships are held to represent an evolutionary stage only slightly more advanced than that characterized by Morgan’s hypothesized “consanguine family”—what Chinese authors call “group marriage.” According to Cai Junsheng (1983) group marriage involves the collective marriage of the men belonging to one “gens” to the women of another. Because individual marriages are not recognized, the argument goes, paternity is always in question and descent is necessarily reckoned in the matriline. The model implies widespread, continuous, and nearly indiscriminate sexual promiscuity, and assumes that women are unaware of the significance of their menstrual cycles and that exclusive sexual relations between couples do not exist even for short periods of time.

During the 1960s and 1970s Mosuo couples maintaining zouhun relationships were pressed to enter into “formal marriage” relations and to establish joint households.⁹ While the ethnologists studying the Mosuo were not responsible for this unfortunate situation, clearly their work was used to validate a policy that derived primarily from an incensed Confucian moral sensibility.¹⁰

It is this same moral sensibility that lies behind the feminization of peripheral peoples and the sexual exoticization of non-Han women in Chinese popular culture. Stevan Harrell (this volume) and Norma Diamond (1988) discuss these issues at some length, so I will confine myself to two examples, each with its own implications. In the early 1980s I attended a performance of the Yunnan Province Nationalities Dance Troupe as a guest of the provincial governor. As anyone with knowledge of nationality dance forms who has attended one of these events will attest, the so-called “ethnic dances” performed by such groups usually bear little resemblance to the genuine dance traditions on which they are based: clothes become “costumes,” and steps become slick “moves.” This and countless similar examples illustrate two points. First, the government is highly selective in what aspects of nationality culture it chooses to promote. Clothes, dance, song, and “festivals” (i.e., annual rituals with the religious content largely extracted) are the principal subjects of government presentations of minority cultures. Second, even these relatively superficial markers of cultural difference are transformed (read: civilized) to appeal to Han aesthetic standards, including standards of barbarianness. What made this particular performance even more interesting, however, was the inclusion of an “Afro-Caribbean” dance, in which the solitary female dancer wore a lurid polka-dot dress, a rag kerchief, and blackface. Perhaps because the signs were so much closer to home, I found it particularly appalling. And indeed, while the erotic gyrations of this stylized Aunt Jemima were loudly applauded by most of the audience, they had the only person of African descent present, an American sitting next to me, in tears.

Among China’s minorities, Dai women especially are often depicted as sexual exotics. One example is the printed curtain fabric, very popular in Kunming, that bears images of particularly large-breasted Dai women traipsing through the lush jungles of southern Yunnan. In recent years the popular image of Dai women’s sexuality has even led some Han men to make a sport of covertly photographing the women as they bathe in the Lancang River outside the popular Dai tourist town of Jinghong in southern Yunnan. Even this obnoxious behavior sometimes has its funnier moments. Several years ago, an American anthropologist doing fieldwork in Xishuangbanna spotted a man with a telephoto lens photographing a Dai woman bather from the bushes by the river’s edge. At first she simply watched the scene from a distance, but when the man kept creeping closer, she finally rushed over and yelled at him to go away. Looks of surprise were exchanged all around, and after some initial embarassment, both he and the woman bather began to laugh. Ultimately it emerged that they were a married Bai couple visiting from another part of the province. Wanting some sexy pictures, they had purchased a set of Dai women’s clothes and staged the whole thing.¹¹ The story illustrates both the pervasiveness of the image, and its power of appeal—as part of the culture of the modern multinational state—even to those whom it deprecates.

In an odd reversal of the evolutionist paradigm, customs deemed “primitive” are sometimes touted as having positive value. The idea expressed in certain sectors of contemporary American society that some non-Western peoples—otherwise reckoned as “primitives”—are more spiritually in tune with the “natural” world than are Westerners is a familiar example. Two similar examples from post-Liberation Chinese ethnology concern the Wa, whose relatively egalitarian social structure has earned them the bittersweet label of “primitive communists,” and the Naxi, whose traditional custom of burning the dead (which is rarely practiced nowadays due to increasing sinicization) has been opportunistically raised as a positive example in the national push to maximize the land available for cultivation by promoting cremation in place of traditional Han burial practices.

By virtue of their structural position as advisors to government policymakers, Chinese ethnologists can play a central role in framing the discourse on the “nationalities question.” For most of the post-Liberation period, however, their freedom to do so has been sharply circumscribed by the theoretical framework within which they are required to work. Especially as it reverberates with traditional Han concepts of ethnicity, the use of Morganian theory largely precludes the development of an appreciation of minority nationalities’ history, culture, society, and politics in their own terms. The diverse ethnographic features of minority nationalities’ cultures have generally been shoehorned into the Morgan-Engelsian framework, with facts at odds with preconceived images of particular social formations either ignored completely or explained away as the aberrant “survivals” of a hypothetical earlier stage. In a recent critique of post-Liberation ethnology, Meng Xianfan writes: “. . . people mistakenly thought that the aim of their research work was to prove the correctness of Morgan’s theory . . .” (1989:206). But Meng misses the point. Insofar as that aim was largely defined for them by the state, it was precisely to prove the correctness of Morgan’s theory.

ETHNIC IDENTIFICATION: THE NAXI CASE

After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the first task set to Chinese ethnologists was to help the government identify China’s minority nationalities. Large-scale but somewhat superficial “investigations” (involving hundreds of ethnologists) extended through the 1950s, and the findings were published—first as “internal” (neibu) reports, and later publicly in revised editions—in more than three hundred volumes, divided into five main categories (ibid.:213).¹² A notable feature of books belonging to the “brief histories” (jianshi) category is that one rarely finds reference in them to either the dates when particular ethnic groups were granted nationality status, or the procedures followed and the persons involved in the decision-making process (but see Lin Yaohua 1987). Insofar as other significant dates and players in a nationality’s past are generally noted and incorporated into these official histories, the omission of this material serves to mystify the concrete process of ethnic identification, giving the impression that the established ethnic categories are timeless, scientifically unimpeachable, and agreed upon by all (see Litzinger, this volume).

The official criteria used to classify nationalities in China are those outlined in Stalin’s definition of a nation.¹³ To wit:

A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of people, based upon the common possession of four principal attributes, namely: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common psychological make-up manifesting itself in common special features of national culture. (Stalin 1950:8, my emphases)

In his essay on Yi history (this volume), Stevan Harrell argues that in fact Stalin’s four criteria have “not [been] employed in any strict manner, but rather to confirm or legitimate distinctions for the most part already there in Chinese folk categories and in the work of scholars who wrote before Liberation.” Harrell goes on to suggest that the ultimate basis for distinguishin...