Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (review)

138 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 Stevan Harrell, editor. Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1995. 379 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 0-295-97380-3. Considerations ofChina's ethnic heterogeneity in the Western academy have a history ofbeing hampered by a Han-centered orientalist vision ofhigh culture. More recenüy, they have been conditioned by a globalizing human rights discourse that makes ofTibet a universal signifier ofethnic oppression—especially from putatively despotic communist regimes. This collection ofessays is a landmark break with these two discursive formations and definitively places the study ofcultural/ethnic difference on the map within the field ofcontemporary sinology. One ofits particular strengths is the unraveling of unilateral images of despotism by complicating notions ofconquest and domination with finely textured accounts ofnegotiation and difference. At the same time, while admirable in its scope, Harrell's synthesizing effort in the editor's introduction amounts to a quasi-structural portrait of asymmetry that claims to be predictive of so-called "civilizing" impulses even as the collection ofnuanced and variegated articles belies any such unitary model. The book consists of an introduction and ten articles. The contributors— nine anthropologists and one political scientist—cover several non-Han groups including the Yi, Naxi, Miao, Yao, Sani, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tai/Dai-Lue. Together the articles span several dynasties, but the emphasis is on the twentieth century. Most are based on secondary sources and archival materials though many are informed by fieldwork and/or personal experiences. In sum, the rich material offered in these diverse case studies far exceeds the subject of the title, asserting decisively that ethnicity in China is and has been about a great deal more than "cultural encounters." While the structure of the book divides the articles into the categories of "historiography" and "history" ofethnic identity, I might reclassify the central contributions of the respective pieces into the categories ofpolitics ofrepresentation and politics ofethnic identification—although this division is also not without its artifactuality. Indeed, the strength ofmany ofthe articles lies in their analysis of the relation between representation and identification. In the first category , however, I would think first ofDiamond's transhistorical sketch ofMing, Qing, Republican, and PRC views ofthe Miao. While neglecting to distinguish© 1996 by University between Maoist and reform-era representational regimes, Diamond masterfully ofHawai ? Presssynthesizes an uneven array ofsources to offer an overview ofthe ways in which the so-called Miao have figured as others to a Chinese center, and, in the process, she is able to open a window onto the general operations of stereotyping. Swain's Reviews 139 subject is a very close reading ofthe records left by a French missionary to Yunnan in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This allows her to thematize the dynamics ofmissionary orientalism in terms ofits paradoxical commitment both to cultural documentation and to transformation. Harrell's comparative review ofYi historiography complements both ofthese pieces with the argument that Westerners, pre-1949 Chinese, and post-1949 Chinese each had a respective agenda that predetermined what they would write well before they began their historical research. These articles are at their weakest when they come across as critiques of a putatively sinister impulse on the part of dominant peoples to misrepresent or distort the reality ofthose represented. They are strongest when they acknowledge the effects ofdiscursive regimes in creating subjects, an approach made more explicit in Litzinger's piece on Yao historiography. This article problematizes the role ofYao elites in the making oftheir histories, recounts struggles for legitimacy in the official historical record, and stresses that authoritative histories also "are lived and experienced and have become an important part ofthese people's sense ofwhat it means to be Yao" (p. 136). This leads to my second category, that of ethnic identification and die politics ofclassification. The articles deal with varying degrees of emphasis on dominant discourses versus the identity formation ofperipheral peoples themselves. A couple ofthe pieces concern the official practice of ethnic designation (minzu shibie) in the socialist and post-socialist periods and its consequences "on the ground." In keeping with Gladney's notion of the "social life...