Coming to Terms with the Nation

The anthropologists among them, caught up in the currents of the time, nonetheless saw it among their tasks to understand these minorities. That Yunnan should have been a favorite site for study is understandable in this context. Tibet was too cold and too difficult to reach and breathe in, and Xinjiang was too Muslim and too arid. Yunnan was fabulously beautiful, had a perfect climate, and best of all for the romanticism of early anthropology, was a sort of Eden, full of sensuous, bare-breasted, innocent women who were a special attraction for puritan Confucian Han.

The introduction presents in a clear and orderly fashion the existing literature (or absence of specific literature in China as well as in the West), primary and secondary sources, the methodology adopted, and the ordering of the chapters. The author follows a chronological sequence, beginning with the Republican period in the 1920s through the decades following the classification. A short passage is devoted to defining and translating the concept of minzu, which Mullaney chooses to adapt to each specific context. He believes the term’s ambiguity is fundamental to understanding the interaction between the modern state and scholars called upon to offer a vision that is not realistic in the strictest sense, but realisable and applicable to China’s non-Han populations. In this sense the minzu category and the national model of 56 minzu remains “a work in progress” (p.17) not amenable to objective or foolproof definition.

The first of the book’s five chapters nevertheless dwells on the uses and conceptualisation of the term minzu. Less a detailed analysis of the uses and implications of the concept than an overview of the state’s relationship with the population’s diversity, this narrative nevertheless has the merit of retracing the categorisation process in relation to the intellectual and political evolution of early twentieth century China. This chapter points above all to the failure in 1953 of the call for the population’s self-categorisation in minzu terms, the result of which was a confused and thus unmanageable taxonomy in Yunnan. Facing this “dire political crisis” (p.39), the government mobilised the social sciences community and put in place an ethnic classification project.

http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/5586?lang=en

Always predetermined P!

The objective of the team in 1954 was never strictly that of describing already existing, already stable "imagined communities", but rather that of outlining a set of plausible, or "imaginable" minzu categories that it would be feasible for the state to actualize in the post-Classification world—categories that would be "good enough for government use".

我黨的科學觀真是無不為我所用，嘖嘖⋯⋯