Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural PoliticsMinority 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. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Contested Histories Productive | 35 |
The State the Category and the Work | 68 |
Gender and the Popularization of Chinas | 100 |
Reconfiguring the Dominant | 132 |
Part II | 166 |
Calling Culture | 203 |
The Mobile Other | 229 |
Performances of Mingu Modernity | 255 |
Conclusion | 280 |
Notes | 289 |
321 | |
353 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Anthropology artist Beijing Bouyei chapter Chen China civil society consumption context costume cultural production Cultural Revolution dance difference discourse distinct dominant dragon dragon boat dress economic elites ethnic groups ethnographic ethnonyms festival fieldwork foreign gender global Guangxi guests Guiyang Hmong Hunan identity images internal Jiuli Kaili Kunming language Longchuan lusheng Mao Zedong Maoist Miao albums Miao cultural Miao Studies Miao villagers Miao women Miaozu mingu Minority Nationalities Minzu modernity mountains non-Han norms offered official peasants People's performances period political post-Mao practices province public sphere Qing Qing dynasty region relations representation rice ritual role rural San Miao scholars sense sexual Sichuan singing social order song Southeast Guizhou status structures struggle subalternity tion tourists tradition Troupe tural University Press urban urbanites Western woman Xiangxi Xijiang Yan'an Yanjiu young women Yunnan Zhang Zhao Long Zhou
References to this book
Chinese Women and Rural Development: Sixty Years of Change in Lu Village, Yunnan Laurel Bossen No preview available - 2002 |
Negotiating Ethnicity in China: Citizenship as a Response to the State Chih-yu Shih No preview available - 2004 |