Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Body, Commodity, Text) - Softcover

Schein, Louisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082232444X ISBN 13: 9780822324447

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Minority Rules is an ethnography of a Chinese people known as the Miao, a group long consigned to the remote highlands and considered backward by other Chinese. Now the nation's fifth largest minority, the Miao number nearly eight million people speaking various dialects and spread out over seven provinces. In a theoretically innovative work that combines methods from both anthropology and cultural studies, Louisa Schein examines the ways Miao ethnicity is constructed and reworked by the state, by non-state elites, and by the Miao themselves, all in the context of China's postsocialist reforms and its increasing exchange and fascination with the West. She offers eloquently argued interventions into debates over nationalism, ethnic subjectivity, and the ethnography of the state. Posing questions about gender, cultural politics, and identity, Schein examines how non-Miao people help to create Miao ethnicity by depicting them as both feminized keepers of Chinese tradition and as exotic others against which dominant groups can assert their own modernity. In representing and consuming aspects of their own culture, Miao distance themselves from the idea that they are less than modern. Thus, Schein explains, everyday practices, village rituals, journalistic encounters, and tourism events are not just moments of cultural production but also performances of modernity through which others are made primitive. Schein finds that these moments frequently highlight internal differences among the Miao and demonstrates how not only minorities but more generally peasants and women offer a valuable key to understanding China as it renegotiates its place in the global order.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Louisa Schein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.

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"A highly readable exploration of the cultural politics of reform-era China that deserves a broad readership among anthropologists, historians, and those in cultural studies."--Ann Anagnost, author of "National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China"

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Minority Rules

The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural Politics

By Louisa Schein

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2444-7

Contents

Illustrations, 
Preface and Acknowledgments, 
1 Introduction, 
Part I Nation/Representation, 
2 Of Origins and Ethnonyms: Contested Histories, Productive Ethnologies, 
3 Making Minzu: The State, the Category, and the Work, 
4 Internal Orientalism: Gender and the Popularization of China's Others, 
5 Reconfiguring the Dominant, 
Part II Identity and Cultural Struggle, 
6 Songs for Sale: Spectacle from Mao to Market, 
7 Scribes, Sartorial Acts, and the State: Calling Culture Back, 
8 Displacing Subalternity: The Mobile Other, 
9 Performances of Minzu Modernity, 
10 Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In one area, I visited every family. On leaving, I put needle and thread into my hostess' hand, and she would invariably rush to find a piece of embroidery and ask us to take it to Chairman Mao, "for he loves our embroidery." At one enjoyable gathering, Miao women surrounded our girl comrades who were singing and playing, and tied pieces of embroidery on them, practically covering them. These are the women's dearest tokens, usually given only to their lovers.... — Fei Hsiao-t'ung, Account of the Central Greeting Delegation, 1951

When I first read this vignette, penned by China's premier anthropologist after he visited the Miao minority in Guizhou province on behalf of the Communist Party, it took some time for me to understand why I was so captivated by it. As I have pondered its import, I have come to see that it condenses, in a few sentences, many of the themes of this book. It was written at the moment of the inception of minzu, the official units that came to designate non-Han peoples and granted them their social existence. How, I wondered, did the encounter play out? Had Communist Party cadres actually given needles and thread to Miao women? And had the women routinely offered up their embroidered handiwork in return, believing it would be put into Chairman Mao's admiring hands? Did Mao Zedong cherish Miao handicraft, and what was the nature of his pleasure in it? Can the offering of needle and thread be seen as an interpellating call toward which Miao women turned by presenting their quintessential cultural selves? How can we understand this highly gendered interchange in which Miao peasant women lavished their embroidered attentions on China's highest leader, substituting him for their lovers? And what of the assailing of the female cadres with handworked gifts: was it Miao women solicitously enjoining the Communist delgatesto go native? What is the rhetorical effect of a Han Chinese expert telling this story of almost cloyingly affectionate gifting at the historical juncture of Communist Liberation?

Minority Rules is about cultural politics in a complex, multiethnic state. It is about the production of discourses—of Ethnicity, of gender, and of Modernity—and the maneuverings of people within and around these axes of difference. Through an ethnographic account, I show the ways that culture matters in the establishment and maintenance of hierarchized orders that entail forms of exclusion andMinoritization. The very presence of exclusions and margins generated a complex field of practice in which variously situated cultural actors negotiated their positionings. In the process, the social order, with its intricate structures of inequality, was not only reproduced, but also sometimes destabilized.

This book is about China as much as it is about the Miao minority people upon whom the ethnography is focused. It spans the 1980s and 1990s, when China embarked on a program of social reforms that can be called postsocialist. As China poised itself to take a new role in the global economy, it transformed its internal social and economic life with sharp ramifications even for those who were little involved with its burgeoning transnationality. The intersection of ethnic and gender politics was a site where the less-reported effects of post-Maoism were being energetically worked out. A society organized around notions of modernity and backwardness, of openness, connectedness, and remoteness, was being elaborated, and there were high material stakes. One way that exclusions from new prosperities and modernities were ratified was through the conjoining in discourse and practice of the ethnic with the Feminine, the interior, and the agricultural.

The period of my fieldwork was the 1980s and early 1990s when the so-called new prosperities and modernities were to have emerged like a huge watershed after Maoism. But the processes that I chart have deeper histories in the socialist era (1949 to 1979), in the first half of the twentieth century, and even much earlier. Continuities were drawn upon and sustained in the Cultural production of the post-Mao period. It is crucial, with the reworking of cold war scholarship entailed by the postsocialist transition, that China's recent cultural politics be understood with reference to a longer history than that of the era shaped by Communist leadership.

In the West, China is still largely thought of as homogeneous, a singular, ancient, and continuous civilization. Indeed, this characterization has been a leitmotif in Western representations of China's Difference. My account undermines this image by suggesting that China's Identity has had to be continually crafted out of heterogeneity and that cultural others have played a variety of parts in this productive endeavor. Furthermore, the Chinese people have been pictured as homogeneous in their relation to Power. Images of Oriental despotism and Maoist totalitarianism have predominated, even into the post-Mao era, fueling a vision of undifferentiated masses in a uniform dyadic relation with a political center. I question this paradigm, not by offering straightforward accounts of resistance, but by presenting cross-cutting instances of power that only sometimes coincide with official structures. An understanding of domination and hierarchy in China must go well beyond a critique of the state and must venture into the murky and shifting currents of popular practice.

Even as I propound heterogeneity to counter stereotypes of China's uniformity, I also interrogate the foundations of just this difference. Much of the heterogeneity that one encounters on the ground and that constitutes the basis of hierarchy is itself produced. This is not to negate difference, or to say that it is not there. Rather, it is to focus attention on the mechanisms by which the limitless raw material of heterogeneity comes to be socially marked, or politically charged, creating the conditions for the stabilization of particular differences —of ethnicity, gender, class, status —in the constitution of the social order. Instead of asking how the mass cultures of either capitalism or socialism create sameness, my emphasis is on the modes by which such systems also foster and organize distinctions.

An Elusive Object

The people that were placed in the Miao category after 1949 were counted as members of China's fifth-largest minority group. This aggregate has significant numbers—7.39 million in 1990—measurable political recognition, and high visibility in popular culture. But who are these Miao who appear as a fixed entity in public representation? Attempts to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 082232444X
• ISBN 13: 9780822324447
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland