Tales From the Fields of Yunnan; Listening to Han Stories  

Oleh:

Blum, Susan D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Modern China vol. 26 no. 2 (Apr. 2000), page 148-165.
Topik: Han Stories
Fulltext: 148MC262.pdf (54.28KB)

Isi artikel

Ethnicity as a field of study has burgeoned in the social sciences during the past two decades, resulting in a plethora of theoretical and ethnographic works in many areas of the world. In Chinese studies too, the category of ethnicity has attracted increasing attention in recent years, as evidenced, among other things, by the number of panels on this subject at the Association for Asian Studies meetings or journal articles since the mid-1990s. It has moved from the province of anthropologists and political scientists to include material in literature, history, sociology, and religious studies. While I congratulate my colleagues on our noticing something previously overlooked in the field, where the tendency had been to speak as if China were a humanly homogeneous place, I would also like to caution that the category can mislead us as well. In some cases, along with official Chinese studies in China we tend to accept the particular categories of ethnic classification. Ethnonyms, the names used to refer to ethnic groups, are in- voked and repeated until they seem to have a hardness or certainty that they scarcely have in some actual cases. And the very term ethnicity—made extremely problematic when studied cross- culturally, where the term can stretch to include so many diverse phenomena that it is close to meaningless (see, e.g., DeVos and Romanucci-Ross, 1982; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Eriksen, 1993; Cohen, 1994)—is also bandied about as if it explained things by itself. It is fetishized by the Chinese state, as anthropologists such as Louisa Schein (1997) have shown. But Iwould like to suggest that it is often fetishized by anthropologists as well.1 If we can divide up a panel into “Han” and “non-Han” perspectives on ethnic others, I would suggest that we have already answered some questions about classification and categorization. I too have spent a lot of time using these categories. 2 Still, most of these categories deserve investigation, tracing their routes and observation of their usage. The category “Han” cries out for exploration, for instance (Yuan and Xu, 1989; Gladney, 1998).

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