Asian Ethnicity, Volume 3, Number 1, March 2002
In Defence of the Archaic: A
Reconsideration of the 1950s Ethnic
ClassiŽ cation Project in China*
NICHOLAS TAPP
(Australian National University, Australia)
This paper argues for a new understanding of the Chinese ethnic classiŽ cation project of
the 1950s, which is too easily read as merely an exercise in colonising representations.
Claiming that there may yet be cultural spaces uncolonised by ‘modernity’, the paper
argues that recent research, through over-emphasising the transformation of local identities
by the state and concentrating on minority elite views, may have missed something of the
facticity with which culture is experienced at the local level. The paper examines the main
effects of classiŽ cation, drawing on the author’s Sichuan research to show that it may
sometimes be necessary to indulge in a kind of essentialism in order to understand the
complexity of the changes which have taken place. It is suggested that minority policy
together with other social changes has in some cases paradoxically strengthened traditional
expressions of identity at the expense of both the ofŽ cial minority categories often stressed,
and more local cultural sub-distinctions. However, the problems of isolating the effects of
these changes in the absence of detailed local accounts of the 1949–89 period are drawn
attention to, and the paper calls for a new ethnography of the classiŽ cation project itself.
In conclusion, the shortcomings of an extreme constructivist approach in accounting for the
strength of local ‘indigenisms’ are examined, and the classiŽ cation project is shown to have
had important aims in common with those of anthropology in elucidating vital local senses
of difference.
Introduction
A general questioning of, and scepticism about, notions of cultural authenticity and tradition
has become characteristic of post-colonial and post-modern critical theory. Thus Chambers
warned that ‘In the idea of roots and cultural authenticity there lies a fundamental, even
fundamentalist, form of identity that invariably entwines with nationalist myths in the
creation of an “imagined community” ’.1 From the outset of the emphasis upon the
inventiveness of culture,2 and of traditions,3 there has, however, also been a sharp
concern with the status of the indigenous cultural essentialisms so blithely dismissed in
*
1
2
3
This paper was originally delivered at the Conference on Human Existence and Developmen t in the 21st Century
and 6th Annual Meeting of the Chinese Anthropologica l Association in Xiamen, 18–22 July 2000.
Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (Routledge, London and New York, 1994), p. 73.
Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975; Prentice Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, revised edition 1981).
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1983).
ISSN 1463-1369 print; 1469-295 3 online/02/010063-22 Ó
DOI: 10.1080/1463136012009587 4
2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
64
Nicholas Tapp
this way. 4 As Hastrup and Olwig put it, ‘while anthropologists are preoccupied with
de-essentialising the concept of culture and deconstructing the notion of bounded, localised
cultural wholes, many of the very people we study are deeply involved in constructing
cultural contexts which bear many resemblances to such cultural entities’.5 Weiner notes
that our own comparative project is ‘paralleled by an indigenous comparativism’ and that
the current dilemma for indigenous people themselves is how to convey a sense of the
creativity of their traditions without their seeming either contrived or in exible. He goes on
to remark that there have been times when cultural alterity was not problematic, but
‘essential to internal continuity and distinctiveness’.6 It is this notion of the unproblematic
nature of cultural alterity which I should like to take up here, and its importance to internal
identity, in the context of modern Chinese ethnology and some of my own research on the
Hmong minority people of China.
In an essay titled ‘Disrupting Authenticity’, which begins by citing Spivak’s remark that
it is the ‘longing for a centre’ which ‘spawns hierarchalised oppositions’,7 Iain Chambers
draws attention to how the critical tradition of the West, which Ž ghts an endless rearguard
action against modernity, has constantly sought radical alternatives to it in the ‘assumed
continuities of folk cultures, “authentic” habits, “genuine” communities’.8 One thinks here
of other work in this vein, such as de Certau’s remarks on the production of ‘popular
culture’ by French folklore in the nineteenth century.9 Chambers criticises the ‘Western
demand for the “mythical uncontained space” of an authentic “native” culture as perpetuating the imperial gesture’, involving a ‘defence of the archaic as a pure anti-Western value
precisely because it aspires in Occidental fashion to an irredeemable absolute’.10 But are
there no cultural spaces as yet uncolonised by modernity, no defence of the archaic which
may be mounted in other than Eurocentric terms?
Pratt raised the question of the extent to which Europe’s constructions of subordinated
others had been shaped by those others,11 and a certain amount of energy has been
expended in deconstructing colonialism as a homogeneous social force, showing that
‘colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent’,12 emphasising ‘colonialisms
rather than colonialism’,13 but also arguing that ‘modernity itself can be understood as a
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
See, for example, the discussion which followed Allan Hanson, ‘The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention
and its Logic’, American Anthropologist, vol. 91 (1989), pp. 890–902, where H.B. Levine, ‘Comment on Hanson’s
“The Making of the Maori” ’, American Anthropologis t, vol. 93 (1991), pp. 444–9 glosses cultural invention as
‘political ideology’. Also see Jean Jackson, ‘Is There a Way to Talk about Making Culture without Making
Enemies?’ Dialectical Anthropolog y, vol. 14 (1989), pp. 127–43, for discussion of the emergence of indigenisms
and how to present our perception of culture as continually created and improvised.
Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Olwig, ‘Introduction’, in Karen Olwig and Kirsten Hastrup (eds), Siting Culture: the
Shifting Anthropologica l Object (Routledge, London and New York, 1997), p. 11. See also Nicholas Thomas,
‘Becoming Undisciplined: Anthropology and Cultural Studies’, Henrietta Moore (ed.), Anthropologica l Theory
Today (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999).
James Weiner, ‘Afterword’, in Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and
Papua New Guinea (University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2001), pp. 240–2.
From her Preface to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore,
1976).
Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, p. 71.
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, Chapter 8, ‘The Beauty of the Dead: Nisal’, written
in collaboration with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986),
pp. 119–37.
Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, pp. 71–3. If one were to analyse this rhetoric critically it would be
interesting to focus on just what words like ‘precisely’ and ‘entwines’ are doing here.
Mary L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, London and New York, 1992),
p. 6.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, ‘Introduction, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule’,
American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 4 (November 1989) (Special Section: ‘Tensions of Empire’), p. 609.
Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology , Travel and Government (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994),
p. 9.
In Defence of the Archaic
65
colonialist project’ since colonised (like internal) societies were seen as objects to be
regulated and surveyed;14 colonies were ‘laboratories of modernity’.15
As colonialism and more recently capitalism16 have been deconstructed as monolithic
global processes, so too questions of alternative modernities have been raised,17 in a way
which sometimes echoes earlier debates about unilinear and multilinear evolution, universalist and relativist approaches.18 Charles Taylor, for example, ascribes the view of
modernity as ‘convergence’ (p. 162) to an ‘acultural’ understanding of modernity which is
universalist in its implications, arguing for a ‘cultural’ understanding of modernity in
relativist terms, and warns against an ‘ethnocentrism of the modern’.19 On the other hand,
the claims of the self-orientalising, essentialising tendencies associated with cultural
nationalism to alternative modernities (like ‘Confucian capitalism’) have been well discussed by Dirlik.20
With all this in mind, I should like to argue here that there may be a strong need,
particularly in the context of the Chinese study of ethnic minorities, to continue in some
contexts to speak the language of ‘inauthenticity’ criticised by Jolly,21 who argues against
any distinctions between ‘authentic’ and inauthentic’ customs. The ‘traditional’ may indeed
be a ‘complex discursive Ž gure present in struggles over how to deŽ ne local ethnic places
and the subjects residing there’ as Litzinger puts it,22 but it may also exist in the absence
of those struggles. Considering the revival of ethnography and of the interest in local
cultures which took place in China in the mid-1980s, Louisa Schein brilliantly shows how
notions of ‘accurateness’ (zhunjie) as the criterion for publications were determined by
ideas of ‘authenticity’, which were in turn based on what had been identiŽ ed by ‘key
experts’ as ‘typical’ (dianxing) or having had ‘ancient historical origins’ (gulao)’.23 But this
surely should not be taken to imply that the entire enterprise of seeking authenticity through
typicality or historical continuity is thereby invalidated! The dangers of an extreme
constructivist position is that it leaves one utterly powerless to criticise propaganda, which
is indeed rather sympathetically treated by Schein, for China, as based on a different theory
of agency to that of dominant Western aesthetics.24
The Search for Authenticity
China’s ethnic classiŽ cation (minzu shibie) project of the 1950s looks in retrospect like one
of the great colonising missions of the twentieth century, a huge internal ‘self-Orientalising’
mission designed to homogenise and reify internal cultural differences in the service of a
particular kind of (gendered) cultural nationalism. Since Fei Xiaotong’s early article drew
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 4.
Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
(Duke University Press, Durham, 1995), p. 15.
Julie K. Gibson-Graham , The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Westview Press,
Boulder, CO, 1997); Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1999); Dilip Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no.
1 (1999), pp. 1–18.
See for example Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (eds), Evolution and Culture (University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, 1960).
Charles Taylor, ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1 (1999), pp. 162 and 171.
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, pp. 119–21.
Margaret Jolly, ‘Specters of Inauthenticity’, The Contemporar y PaciŽ c, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 49–72.
Ralph Litzinger, Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, Durham
and London, 2000), p. 258.
Louisa Schein, Minority Rules: the Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke University Press,
Durham and London, 2000), p. 205.
Ibid., pp. 176–8.
66
Nicholas Tapp
attention to some of the difŽ culties, and some of the peculiarities, of this mammoth
classiŽ cation project,25 the main outlines of this gargantuan task of investigation and
classiŽ cation of ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, social and economic differences have
been well described by Western ethnographers. Harrell describes it as integral to the
‘civilising project’ of Communism, which he compares to those of Confucianism and
Christianity, drawing attention to the way ‘an ideology of ethnicity or ethnic consciousness’
develops in reaction to the ‘ideology of deŽ nition and scaling’ propagated by a civilising
centre.26 Guldin deals with the various stages of this project, and of the later minority
nationality social history (shehui lishi) surveys, in terms of the general historical development of ethnology and anthropology in China, pointing out the pride Chinese ethnologists
have taken in their participation in a project they saw as eminently ‘scientiŽ c’.27 Lin
Yaohua’s description of these ethnological projects as essential contributions to the
development of Marxist–Leninist nationality theory bears out this self-perception by
Chinese participants as being engaged in a scientiŽ c project of investigation and
classiŽ cation which would further the well-being and material progress of the country
through democratic reforms carried out on the basis of the understandings gained through
the research.28 Gladney describes the project as a Stalinist one,29 and emphasises the
interaction in it, and throughout Chinese minority policy, between modern theories of
nationalist discourse and ‘traditional Chinese ideas of identity and ethnicity’.30 In a
path-breaking later essay, which has tended to focus the attention of subsequent researchers
on the formal Chinese categories of minority identity and the collusion of minority elites
themselves in this image-making, Gladney drew attention to the way Sinocentric discourses
have feminised and infantilised images of the minorities (an exoticisation of the minority
for the sake of a homogeneous Han Self).31 Mackerras draws attention to some of the
practical difŽ culties there have been in rigidly applying Stalin’s fourfold criteria for a
‘nationality’, and the discussions which have taken place about this.32 I myself, without
treating the project in detail, tried to draw attention to the processes of ‘greater-group
formation’ which widescale classiŽ cations of nationalities encouraged.33 Schein treats the
process as one which was generally about ‘making minzu’, or ‘creating state subjects’,34 and
notes that it resulted in a ‘considerable amount of disjuncture’ between peoples’ ‘experiences of ethnic difference on the ground and the formal categories into which they were
being Ž tted’ which resulted in ‘two distinct trajectories’—Ž rst, the continuing demands for
‘reclassiŽ cation’ (see this section, below), and secondly, the ‘routinization’ of these ‘state
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Fei Xiaotong, ‘Ethnic IdentiŽ cation in China’, Social Sciences in China, vol. 1, no. 1 (1980), pp. 94–107.
Stevan Harrell, ‘Introduction’ in Stevan Harrell (ed.), Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (University
of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1995).
Gregory Guldin, The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao (M.E. Sharpe, New
York and London, 1994), p. 107.
Lin Yaohua, ‘New China’s Ethnology: Research and Prospects’, in Gregory Guldin (ed.), Anthropolog y in China:
DeŽ ning the Discipline (M.E. Sharpe, New York, 1990).
Dru Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 66.
Cf. Dru Gladney, ‘Salman Rushdie in China: Religion, Ethnicity, and State DeŽ nition in the People’s Republic’,
in Charles Keyes, Laurel Kendall and Helen Hardacre (eds), Asian Visions of Authority (University of Hawaii
Press, Honolulu, 1994).
Dru Gladney, ‘Representing Nationality in China: ReŽ guring Majority/Minority Identities’, The Journal of Asian
Studies, vol. 53, no. 1 (1994), pp. 92–123.
Colin Mackerras, China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University
Press, Hong Kong, 1994), pp. 141–2.
Nicholas Tapp, ‘The Minorities of China: A General Overview’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society, vol. 26 (1986); Nicholas Tapp, ‘Minority Nationality in China: Policy and Practice’, in R. Barnes,
A. Gray and B. Kingsbury (eds), Indigenous Peoples of Asia (Association for Asian Studies Monographs ,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995).
Schein, Minority Rules, pp. 68, 69.
In Defence of the Archaic
67
categories’ in such a way that they are today accepted and even favoured categories of
identity.35 Recently the project has been considered in Chinese accounts of the development
of the academic discipline of ethnology in China.36
From such formulations (and most people who have written on the minorities in China
have had something to say about this initial post-revolutionary exercise of naming power),
it may indeed seem persuasive to view this vast project of state-sponsored ethnic
classiŽ cation, undertaken through an ethnographic inquiry into the minutiae of everyday life
and local custom which was resuscitated in the cultural revivals which followed economic
reforms in 1979, as a prime example of that colonising discourse on ‘otherness’ which so
many have seen to be associated with nation-state-building; an attempt to Ž x and deŽ ne,
locate and regulate,  uid and malleable populations and local identities; an Orientalist
discourse, then, to use Said’s original term,37 if one of the Orientalised themselves turned
on their own internal others, which sought to represent subordinate others in an essentialising way which would deny them agency, a conspiracy of power with knowledge, and one
which here was to a large extent indeed inspired by paradigms of otherness taken straight
from the age of high European imperialism, the Herderian, Romanticist notions of bounded,
individual, isolated, unique cultures (via Stalin out of Marx), coupled with the evolutionary
social models of Morgan and Engels. Based on this view of the ethnic classiŽ cation project,
research on Chinese minorities has also contrasted state ‘discourses of hierarchy’ with those
of ‘authenticity’,38 or emphasised the importance of other forms of public Chinese
representation, such as those of Ž lm, in depicting minorities through images of the
feminine, childlike and natural.39
There may, however, be some qualiŽ cations we should make to the largely accepted
portrayal of this particular ethnographic and political endeavour in terms of colonising
discourses which were originally speciŽ cally associated with European imperialism. For
one thing, the Chinese ethnic classiŽ cation project of the 1950s marked an important
departure from Stalin’s fourfold criteria of ‘nationality’, in that it placed a particular
emphasis on the self-consciousness of the group. Identities were not located purely
according to the so-called objective, scientiŽ c criteria on which the classiŽ cations project
was explicitly based, but peoples’ statements about their identities, their desired
identiŽ cations and their actual ones, were listened to, taken into account, recorded and
considered together with other factors such as economic type and stage of social development, history, language and religious afŽ liation.40
One should probably see this attempt, which in my view was initially a genuine attempt
to inquire into and recognise the minutiae of cultural difference, as part of a general
emphasis, under Mao Zedong, on the importance of human consciousness and revolutionary
35
36
37
38
39
40
Ibid., pp. 85–6. Cf. Stevan Harrell, ‘Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi’, in Chien Chiao and
Nicholas Tapp (eds), Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China (New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong, 1989).
Wang Jianmin, Zhang Heiyang and Hu Hongbao, Zhongguo minzuxue shi. The History of Ethnology in China
(Vol. II) (Yunnan jiaoyu chubanshe, Kunming, 1998).
E. Said, Orientalism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978).
Sydney White, ‘Fame and SacriŽ ce: The Gendered Construction of Naxi Identities’, Modern China, vol. 23, no.
3 (July 1997), pp. 298–327.
Louisa Schein, ‘Popular Culture and the Production of Differences: The Miao and China (unpublishe d Ph.D. thesis,
University of California, Berkeley, 1993); Schein, Minority Rules; Gladney, ‘Salman Rushdie in China’.
Jiang Yongxing, ‘Cong Guizhou minzu shibie gongzuo tanqi’ (‘Discussion on the Basis of Guizhou’s Ethnic
IdentiŽ cation Work’), Minzu yanjiu jikan (Nationalities Research Quarterly), Guangxi , no. 2 (1985), pp. 303–16
argued that this did not go far enough, but the principle was certainly there. See Stevan Harrell, ‘The History of
the History of the Yi’, in Stevan Harrell (ed.), Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (University of
Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1995), p. 83.
68
Nicholas Tapp
will in social transformation.41 While certainly not remarkable in terms of the development
of anthropological theory elsewhere, within the framework of conventional Marxist–Leninist thought, it was a remarkable innovation. This emphasis on the consciousness of subjects
is certainly one aspect of the project which would seem to contradict any too-simple
analytic reduction of it to a mere case of colonising representations. Moreover, we may also
need to remind ourselves that this was not merely a national, and nationalist, project, but
also a socialist one. Its avowed aim was the liberation of ‘nationalities’, however these
should be located, from feudal and semi-colonial forms of oppression. It was also, of
course, part of a state-building enterprise, and here it may justly be compared to the ways
in which other states have approached the location, classiŽ cation, identiŽ cation and
treatment of internal cultural diversity. 42 But we should bear these important differences in
mind.
There is evidence that the project was not prepared for the sheer amount of cultural
differences which its own research revealed (260 ethnonyms were originally submitted for
Yunnan), and that major efforts were subsequently made to reduce this complexity to the
more manageable proportions of the 55 (now 56) ethnic categories which were Ž nally
approved as forming the constituent elements of the ‘Chinese nationality’ (Zhonghua
Minzu). These efforts involved an equally vast effort of comparison, based largely on
historical and linguistic, but also cultural and social evidence, and taking into account not
only the self-consciousness of local groups but also, plainly, administrative and strategic
concerns. I shall examine some of the implications of this in greater detail below. However,
it may be argued that in its inception and origins, and in the motivations of many if not most
of its participants, the project represented a genuine attempt, on the part of a newly founded
state, to undertake an ethnographic inquiry, of what was thought to be a scientiŽ c type, into
the nature and extent of cultural variety and difference.
Inevitably, any vast ethnographic project of this kind, at that time, whether or not we
see it as a colonising one on a Euro-American model or one which may have been qualiŽ ed
by its socialist ideals, had to have been predicated upon a cultural essentialism of the kind
which post-modern theories have taught us to mistrust. Without an initial faith in the
possibility of scientiŽ cally isolating bounded and discrete cultures, the project could never
have been undertaken. Yet the nature of that presumed essentialism may repay further
re ection, since indigenism is not always constructed in response to an overwhelming
external cultural rhetoric, while some kind of essentialising is surely necessary to every
form of identity.
The  aws in the scientiŽ c enterprise of applying Linnaean modes of classiŽ cation to
social groups quickly became apparent in the form of the many ‘anomalies’ of classiŽ cation
which most ethnographers of minorities in China have remarked. Fei Xiaotong gave some
early examples of this, drawing attention to the problems of classifying members of the
same group who had lived apart for so long that they had lost touch with each other and
no longer recognised any afŽ nities, or the descendants of Han Chinese groups who had
settled among minority groups and become practically assimilated by them.43 Many distinct
cultural groups have ended up resenting and actively protesting their formal classiŽ cations,
like the Ge of Guizhou described by Simon Cheung,44 or have been variously classiŽ ed
41
42
43
44
Pace Paul Healy: ‘A Paragon of Marxist Orthodoxy: Mao Zedong on the Social Formation and Social Change’,
in Arif Dirlik et al. (eds), Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1997).
See for example Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988); John
Pemberton, On the Subject of ‘Java’ (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994).
Fei Xiaotong, ‘Ethnic IdentiŽ cation in China’.
Simon Siu-woo Cheung, ‘Subject and Representation: Identity Politics in Southeast Guizhou’, unpublishe d Ph.D.
thesis. University of Washington, 1996.
In Defence of the Archaic
69
under several different ethnonyms, like the Prmi of Yunnan and Sichuan.45 The case of the
speakers of Yao languages who identify as Yao on Hainan Island, but were classiŽ ed as
Miao, is well known among Chinese ethnographers and often pointed to as an example of
‘mistakes’ which were made in the original classiŽ cation; the problems of identifying as
‘Yao’ a large group of people many of whom speak Han or Dong or Miao languages and
do not identify themselves as Yao have been well described.46 Many small cultural groups
remain unclassiŽ ed (either ofŽ cially awaiting a correct allocation or more commonly
classiŽ ed under a much more general term related to a group with whom they recognise no
afŽ nities). Lemoine noted the cases of the Khmu, Mang, Waxiang, and Kucong, in
Yunnan. 47 Heberer lists seven others, including Jews,48 and Lin adds to this list.49 These
examples could probably be multiplied many times from every minority locality and region
in China.
Any ethnographic enterprise of this kind, to the extent that it is based on what was seen
as a scientiŽ c methodology inspired by outmoded evolutionary typologies—but not necessarily, I would argue, because it represents a ‘colonising’ discourse or a form of intellectual
imperialism—must be deeply  awed in the sense that its own original aims, of objectively
analysing and classifying  uid and complex social phenomena, must inevitably be outstripped by the sheer dynamism of social and cultural change. But this may be a problem
inherent to all modes of social analysis, and indeed to all discourse which attempts to assign
deŽ nite meaning. Anthropology still struggles in its attempts to represent cultural diversity,
and is painfully aware of its own inadequacies to theorise the force of cultural difference.
In this context Jonathan Friedman contrasts the ‘ladder’ and ‘mosaic’ approaches to cultural
diversity; he sees the ‘ladder’ approach of evolutionary theory as counterposed to the
‘mosaics’ preferred by cultural relativists, and warns of the dangers, in a post-modern
world, of ending up with a ‘leaky mosaics’ view. But it may be that ‘leaky mosaics’ are
precisely what we are confronted by.50
In the following section, I shall attempt to turn the ethnographic focus on the Chinese
ethnic classiŽ cation project of the 1950s itself, by examining some of the effects we know
it to have had, before turning to a consideration of some problems arising out of my own
Ž eldwork with a minority group in Sichuan. I shall show that there are some phenomena
which cannot unambiguously be attributed to the effects of the 1950s classiŽ cation project
or the minority policies which were based on it, but may be seen as resulting, for example,
from the renewed mobility and some overseas contacts in recent years. I shall argue the
need for a more detailed ethnography of the classiŽ cation project itself, and for a slightly
modiŽ ed understanding of its main aims, implications and effects, based on a closer
practical and theoretical engagement with those local senses of essentialised identities with
which the ethnic classiŽ cation project was indeed so importantly concerned.
45
46
47
48
49
50
Stevan Harrell, Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (University of Washington Press, Seattle and London),
in press.
Chiao Chien and Jacques Lemoine (eds), The Yao of South China: Recent International Studies (Pangu, Editions
de l’A.F.E.Y, Paris, 1991).
Jacques Lemoine, ‘Ethnicity, Culture and Developmen t among some minorities of the People’s Republic of China’,
in Chien Chiao and Nicholas Tapp (eds), Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups in China (New Asia College, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1989), pp. 1–9.
Thomas Heberer, China and its National Minorities: Autonomy or Assimilation? (M.E. Sharpe, New York and
London, 1989), p. 39.
Lin, ‘New China’s Ethnology’; Cf. Lin Yaohua, ‘Guanyu “minzu” yici de shiyong he yuming de wenti’ (‘On the
Problems of the Use and Synonyms of the Term minzu’), Minzu yanjiu lunwen ji (Treatises on Nationalities
Research), no. 3 (1984), pp. 1–19.
Jonathan Friedman, ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott
Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (Thousand Oaks, London, Sage Publications, New Delhi,
1995).
70
Nicholas Tapp
The Effects of ClassiŽ cation
However we evaluate the moral and historical status of this originary grand project, is it
possible to inquire into what the main effects of this ethnic classiŽ cation project have been,
Ž fty years on? It is easy to speculate here; harder to ground what one has to say in concrete
case studies in particular localities of the impact of the initial classiŽ cation process and the
various transformations through which identities located and Ž xed in this way have evolved,
adapted or been maintained through such enormous cultural and historical events as Land
Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and economic liberalisation, the
opening of the doors to the ‘outside’ world and the welcoming ‘inside’ of visitors from
overseas. However, the broad outlines of what has taken place seem to be clear enough, and
it will serve a useful purpose to sketch them here.
The Privileging of Minority Elites
What has sometimes been said is that very large-scale ethnic classiŽ cations covering
internally diverse populations, such as Hui, Yi or Miao, although originally merely of an
ofŽ cial and formal character, have taken on a social life of their own throughout the decades
of positive discrimination towards minorities deŽ ned in this way, have become vital social
categories shaping and articulating local forms of identity in new ways and directions as
identities change and transform. ‘The minzu as categories have taken on a life of their own’,
says Harrell;51 ‘these categories … became signiŽ cant dimensions of ethnic agency’, says
Schein.52 Of course this must be true, yet all too often the importance of those local forms
of identity, expressed in indigenous languages mainly to insiders, is lost sight of through
the excessive concentration on state-authorised categories and the interest there has been in
explicating minority relations with the state.53 This cannot, surely, be the whole of the story.
Indeed it would be odd if the same kinds of resistances and upsurges of local identity as
have occurred in world-wide responses to ‘globalising’ imperatives, had not occurred with
regard to these over-arching ethnonyms and categories of social identity and the implementation of particular policies towards them deŽ ned in this way.54 The large ‘problem areas’
where ethnic unrest is endemic, such as Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, are well
known, and there have been many smaller isolated cases.
We can probably say with some certainty that the Ž rst effect of the initial classiŽ cation,
contrary to the aims of the whole scientiŽ c mission on which that classiŽ cation was based,
must have been to give voice to some at the expense of others. Indeed, even liberal models
of democracy entail the lack of representation of large sectors of the population. It must,
in most cases, have been the members of local elites who were questioned and listened to
by the linguists, anthropologists and sociologists who carried out the project, people who
51
52
53
54
Harrell, ‘Ethnicity and Kin Terms among Two Kinds of Yi’, p. 181.
Schein, Minority Rules, p. 69. See also Tapp, ‘The Minorities of Southern China’ (p. 107) on the ‘tendency towards
greater-group formation and the fusion … of smaller ethnic and cultural groups’ which ‘resulted partly from
ofŽ cial policies of … classifying … minority groups.’.
This is also true of Litzinger, Other Chinas, although his concern with local historians shifts us much nearer than
previous research towards a consideration of the particular contexts of social actors in which, as he argues, wider
consideration s of ethnicity and gender should be situated. See Ralph Litzinger, ‘Questions of Gender: Ethnic
Minority Representation in Post-Mao China’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 32, no. 4 (2000),
pp. 3–14.
See Cheung (‘Subject and Representation’) for one account which does directly consider the resistance to these
formal categories; the Ge in Guizhou, who resent being classiŽ ed with other groups as ‘Miao’, in the same way
as the Mosuo and Naxi, of Yunnan, dispute their common classiŽ cation together as Naxi. See Jonathan Unger,
‘Not Quite Han: the Ethnic Minorities of China’s Southwest’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 29, no.
3 (1997), pp. 67–78.
In Defence of the Archaic
71
could speak Chinese or otherwise make their voices heard, despite the efforts (which we
know there were) to target under-privileged sectors of the population, such as former slaves
and the landless. Anyone with experience of Ž eldwork or rapid rural appraisal knows how
difŽ cult it is to get women, or other under-represented people, to speak out at public
meetings or even in private interviews, especially where translators who may occupy a
particular position in the society themselves are used. It was therefore almost inevitable that
the most clamorous voices should be heard, the voices that insisted on their rights to deŽ ne
local identity, historical origins, cultural afŽ liations and the boundaries of ethnic exclusion
and inclusion. To a large extent, then, we should take seriously the implications of the
realisation that these initial classiŽ cations must have re ected and privileged local elite
views in our later approaches to these same societies. For example, it was probably the
views of Yi (Nuo/No) noblemen on the multi-ethnic composition of their slave classes
which have informed virtually all subsequent discussions of the historical nature of Yi
society. Did Lin Yaohua talk much to the Miao, Tibetans and others who were said to be
members of a slave class among the Yi known as the ‘White Yi’, and did the members of
this ‘class’ see themselves as forming members of a class within Yi society as has been
described? 55
Greater-group and Lesser-group Formation
The second main effect of the classiŽ cation, as much subsequent research has shown for
particular cases, was to alter and impact the formation and size of existing groups and
identities. In some cases, the effects of ethnographic classiŽ cation, when combined with the
policies on regional autonomy and the Ž xing of provincial and other boundaries, was to
break up far larger groups who might otherwise have been expected to develop sentiments
of nationalist unity, such as the Zhuang, Dai, Buyi, Dong and other speakers of Tai
languages, or the Tibetan groups, or the Turkic groups of Xinjiang. Here, perhaps, the
tendency was to emphasise the local expressions of identity revealed by ethnographic
inquiry at the expense of larger, over-reaching ones. We do not know how much of this can
be attributed to the effects of ethnographic research itself, how much to the effects of
subsequent administrative arrangements and their interactions with the ethnonyms which
were authorised.
In other cases (as perhaps researchers from outside China have rather over-emphasised),
more emphasis was placed on remote and distant cultural, historical or linguistic relationships, particularly those which could be found between the more internally diverse and
more widely dispersed populations such as those classiŽ ed as Yao and Miao. Here local and
signiŽ cant forms of exclusivist identity (Hmong, Hmu, Kho Xiong and A Hmao among the
Miao, for example, who speak mutually unintelligible languages)56 were de-emphasised by
the formal classiŽ cation in favour of wider and more distant geographical and historical
origins. 57 It is in these cases that ethnic classiŽ cation has corresponded most clearly to the
project of the ‘culturalist’ homogenisation of ethnic essences characteristic of (internal)
self-Orientalising discourses.58 Yet this was precisely the opposite of what occurred with
55
56
57
58
See Lin Yaohua, The Yi of Liangshan (Human Area Relations Files, New Haven, 1961).
Immediately one is in the realm of cultural politics in discussing these very distinct Miao (now known as Hmongic)
languages, since Chinese linguistics classiŽ es them as dialects in keeping with the desire to de-emphasise cultural
differences at a level beneath that of the formal minzu categories.
The Yi, like the Miao, are a good example of this. See Harrell, ‘The History of the History of the Yi’, Unger,
‘Not Quite Han’.
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p. 106.
72
Nicholas Tapp
some of the more numerically dominant and more potentially powerful groups, where
local cultural differences were sanctioned in such a way that large and powerful groups
were broken up into smaller ones (such as the Bouyei and Zhuang noted by Unger)59.
For heuristic purposes, I would suggest that we refer to the distinctions between such
groups as the Hmong and the Hmu, among the ‘Miao’, as ethnic distinctions, since the
groups who refer to themselves in this way have traditionally had no conscious afŽ nities
with the others now classiŽ ed with them, even though these ethnic distinctions are
unrecognised by the formal categories of Chinese minority identity which sought to
subsume them.
I am particularly concerned with this problem, since my own research in Sichuan
revealed the existence of no less than three distinct cultural traditions within and among the
Hmong farmers of one xiang (township), which were in the process of hybridisation,
creolisation and disappearance. They were only referred to (in a local Chengdu dialect term
adopted into normal Hmong speech), as daban or styles of clothing.60 In a neighbouring
xiang in Yunnan, there were four distinct cultural divisions, still known by indigenous
Hmong terms—the Hmong Dau, Hmong Xi, Hmong Pa (or Pua) and Hmong Leng (besides
two more distant groups referred to as Hmong taus dli and ‘Guizhou li Hmong’ or ‘Hmong
from Guizhou’). In Wenshan Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan, on the Vietnam border,
there are the Hmong Si, Hmong Xau, Hmong Pe, Hmong Pua and Hmong Sua (‘Chinese
Hmong’) besides the Hmong Daw (‘White Hmong’) and Hmong Ntsua (‘Green Hmong’)
who are familiar in Southeast Asia.61
The presence of these ‘cultural divisions’ among the Hmong has never been very
adequately explained,62 but they refer to very real differences of architecture, costume, ritual
and dialect. In the past (at least until Ž fty years ago) members of different cultural divisions
neither lived in the same villages nor inter-married, despite the presence of a common
surname system. Today in Southeast Asia, while some intermarriages occur and there are
some mixed settlements, in general the distinctions between the two main cultural divisions
represented outside China (the White and Green Hmong) still remain very strong and
palpable.
Now all this wealth of local cultural diversity (see also Unger 1997),63 which I shall refer
to here as ‘sub-ethnic’ since Hmong from these different Hmong sub-group s all recognise that
they are Hmong and can mostly understand each others’ dialects, occurred solely within the
Hmong, whose own ethnonym appears nowhere in Chinese historical records nor in modern
ofŽ cial categories. Moreover, Hmong language and culture, legends and history, ritual and
social practices, are radically different from those of the other ethnic groups classiŽ ed with
them as ‘Miao’, who are respectively the Hmu people of Southeast Guizhou,64 the Kho Xiong
59
60
61
62
63
64
According to Unger, ‘Not Quite Han’, p. 76, the classiŽ cation of this local group under two different formal
categories was a self-admitted ‘mistake’ by Fei Xiaotong who was in charge of the investigation. But clearly the
‘mistake’ can in retrospect be seen to have had a strategic value, and this makes my point; that we simply do not
know enough about the intersection of administrative concerns with ethnographi c classiŽ cation at the time.
There is no indigenous Hmong term for the differences between kinds of Hmong. Other Hmong groups are simply
referred to descriptively, as ‘Green Hmong’ (Hmong Ntsua’) for example.
See Zhang Yuan Qi, Yves Bertrais (ed.), Hmoob Nyob Paj Tawg Teb (Les Hmong de Wenshan) (Association
Communauté Hmong, Javouhey , 1988). I am following the RPA transcription system developed for White Hmong
by Bertrais, Barney and Heimbach, see Ernest Heimbach, White Hmong-English Dictionary (Southeast Asia
Program Data Paper 75, Cornell University, Ithaca, 1979). However, I am dropping the Ž nal consonant s used to
indicate tone values since tones differ between the dialects, and adding ‘ng’ to indicate Ž nal nasalisation.
Robert Cooper, Resource Scarcity and the Hmong Response: Patterns of Settlement and Economy in Transition
(National University of Singapore, Singapore, 1984), pp. 28–31.
See also Unger, ‘Not Quite Han’.
Studied by Schein in Minority Rules.
In Defence of the Archaic
73
of West Hunan,65 and the A Hmao who live in similar locations to the Hmong and speak
a ‘language’ which is closer to theirs than that of the other ‘Miao’ ethnic groups but which
is nevertheless still mutually unintelligible (as I have several times witnessed).66
There is, therefore, as this example may make clear, an enormous extent of cultural
variety and diversity—not only at the ethnic level, but also at the sub-ethnic level—which
is simply blanketed out by the ofŽ cial social categories, vital although these also have now
become; and one should beware, then, of paying undue attention to the formalised
categories of minority identity which function to articulate identities in relation to the state.
The example given here can easily be extended to the Yao, or the Lisu, or the Dai, or the
Nuo, or the Na,67 and generally for many other of the southwestern Chinese minority
groups. I shall return to a more detailed consideration of the Hmong example in the
following section.
ReiŽ cation and Immobilisation of Cultural Differences
The third effect of the 1950s classiŽ cation I would emphasise—it is often mentioned, but
deserves emphasis with the above two points here—is its ‘freezing’ of social processes
which may have been far more  uid, mobile and ambiguous in the pre-modern past. Like
the privileging of elite views and the restructuring of local groups and identities, here the
socialist effort to give genuine voice to minorities, to recognise and respect cultural
diversity and script that recognition into the drafting of the constitution of the state itself,
again shows some similarities to the endeavours of a colonialist ethnography and colonialist
discourse. We can with near-certainty surmise, from our knowledge of comparable
endeavours in Africa, India and elsewhere, that the formalised classiŽ cation intervened
dramatically in local processes of cultural afŽ liation and separation which had historically
been more  uid and mobile. This affected both Han-minority relations and local intraminority relations. For example, minority groups who were either in the process of
identifying as Han rather than minorities (like the Bai of today who often passed as Han
in the past), or who were becoming culturally Han-like without losing their sense of a
separate identity (as the Sichuan Hmong were described as doing in the 1930s),68 or whose
elites were doing so, have had to rethink and even reverse these process of assimilation or
acculturation. 69 In these cases, we can see the effects of the initial classiŽ cation, and
subsequent policies based upon it, as acting to halt longer-term sinicising processes and
processes of cultural domination (which were later to be forcibly accelerated at times of
radical campaigns and leftward policy swings). Certainly, there were many Han individuals
65
66
67
68
69
These were described by Mary Rack Mary Rack in ’ Images of Minorities, Memories of Bandits: Negotiating
Local Identities in Lowland West Hunan’ (unpublishe d Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1999); and earlier
by Ling Shun-sheng and Ruey Yih-Fu in Xiangxi Miaozu diaocha baogao (A Report on an Investigation of the
Miao of Western Hunan (Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica Monograph Series A, No. 18,
Shanghai , 1947; transl. Human Relations Area Files, New Haven 1963), as well as Shen Congwen, Recollections
of West Hunan (Panda Books, Beijing, 1992).
A Hmao (the Flowery or Da Hua Miao) is classed together with the Hmong dialects as belonging to one of the
three main branches of the Miao languages; Chuanqiandian . No real ethnography of the A Hmao exists, but there
are good missionary accounts, such as Samuel Pollard, The Story of the Miao (Henry Hooks, London, 1919), and
recently the endeavour s of missionaries have led to the most extraordinary collection of their songs and stories
on the Web: www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ , str/miao/
Cai Hua, Une société sans père ni mère: les Na de Chine (Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1997).
See David Crockett Graham, Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 123,
The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1954) and Ruey Yih-Fu and Kuan Tung-kuei, Chuannan Yaque
Miao de hun sang lisu (Marriage and Mortuary Customs of the Magpie Miao, Southern Szechuan, (Monograph
Series A, No. 23, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 1962). I consider this in more detail
below.
See also Unger, ‘Not Quite Han’.
74
Nicholas Tapp
and whole groups living in close association with minority groups who had, like those in
the Sichuan village of my study, adopted some local minority practices yet still clung to
their identity as Han, who have adopted minority category labels as a direct result of the
policy of positive discrimination towards the members of groups classiŽ ed as minorities.
Their absorption into minority groups may therefore have been hastened by the effects of
classiŽ cation, and their identities become more ‘Ž xed’ and static through this absorption,
although the adoption of a minority category label by itself by no means necessarily
signiŽ es a change of cultural afŽ liation and in these cases. Therefore, the minzu category
remains a merely formal one, with little social signiŽ cance other than the beneŽ ts it may
convey. Relations between minorities themselves, particularly where a dominant minority
had speciŽ cally historically instituted relations with smaller cultural groups such as in the
Tibetan areas or in the Dai relations with the Hani, were severed and disrupted by this
process of the according of separable identities. We can, therefore, accept that a general
process of immobilisation of historical processes of both assimilation and acculturation has
followed from the ethnographic classiŽ cation project of the 1950s.
Without necessarily confusing the movement of ‘individuals’ across ‘boundaries’, with
the movement of those boundaries themselves,70 whatever mobility local pre-revolutionary
cultural essentialisms permitted will have been, to some extent, arrested and inhibited by
this project of formal classiŽ cation and the differential beneŽ ts which  owed from it.
Problems in Accounting for Effects
My problem in Sichuan, which I cannot claim to have resolved on the basis of a brief
Ž eldwork residence there, was how to account for what I have referred to above as an
almost post-modern hybridisation of what had originally been three quite distinct Hmong
cultural ‘styles’ or ‘traditions’ in the area, into the more common sense of a ‘Hmong’
identity, which was only glossed as ‘Miao’ when conversing with strangers and outsiders
to the community.71 Girls from village X would freely borrow head-dresses and styles of
embroidery from girls of village Y or wear old Chinese peasant tunics to signify their
‘minority’ status; women from village Z claimed to be able to do the styles of village X
better than the villagers of village X could (and sometimes could produce old photographs
to prove it!). There were some subtle distinctions of dialect between the three traditions (a
few tonal changes, a few different words). Yet they all saw themselves as Hmong, described
themselves as Hmong, and in ordinary conversation would refer to other people as either
Hmong or not.72 And I should like to emphasise that I am only talking about the Hmong
here, who are only one of the three main and quite different populations classiŽ ed under the
‘Miao’.
It is worth stressing that these ‘sub-ethnic’ local cultural divisions and distinctions,
while seemingly not very important to the economic historian of China or to the ofŽ cial
Chinese ethnology of the 1950s, are of enormous importance to the Hmong people
themselves outside this particular region at the borders of Sichuan with Guizhou and
Yunnan, and of some fascination and interest even to many of those within the region.
Within the region, however, there was more of a sense of general puzzlement about them,
70
71
72
Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Little, Brown,
Boston, 1969).
Fieldwork in Sichuan was conducted for 6 months in 1989 with assistance from the British Academy, with a further
two months in neighbourin g areas of Guizhou and Yunnan in 1990 and 1991.
I consider these problems in greater detail in The Hmong of China: Context, Agency, and the Imaginary (Brill,
Leiden, 2001).
In Defence of the Archaic
75
a sense of not being completely au fait with the niceties of their own folk culture,73 a real
sense that was what most important was being Hmong (never Miao!), rather than being a
Hmong of a particular cultural division or ethnic sub-group of the kind which is still
fundamental to local senses of Hmong identity in Southeast Asia, and in China nearer the
borders of Vietnam and Burma.
It is beyond dispute there were very distinct Hmong ethnic sub-groups in this region in
the past, of the order of those which persist today in Southeast Asia and some other parts
of China, since Graham74 and Ruey and Kuan75 clearly described these sub-groups in the
1930s and even at that time they were in the process of merging into each other through
intermarriages and common settlements which had been unknown before then. Ling and
Ruey consider these different Hmong cultural divisions sufŽ ciently signiŽ cant to have
resulted from entirely different historical migration trajectories.76 These cultural divisions or
sub-ethnic groups, as mentioned above, involved different dialects, costumes, social
practices and housing structures; intermarriage did not take place between them and lineage
hospitality between members of the same patrilineal surname was neither expected nor
demanded.
We do need, here, to resort to what might be seen as a kind of cultural ‘essentialism’,
in order to explicate the way in which formerly strong cultural distinctions between
different sub-groups of Hmong, which were signiŽ cant and vital social categories of
existence at the local level, have been gradually eroded in this particular region until they
have disappeared into a more generalised ethnic sense of identity as ‘Hmong’. I shall
consider what kind of essentialism this may be in the Conclusion. It does appear from the
processes described above that one additional effect of the 1950s ethnic classiŽ cation
project and the minority policies based on it, may have been to minimise the level of
sub-ethnic group divisions (‘Hmong Dau’, ‘Hmong Xi’) while actually reinforcing the
taxonomically upper-levels of ethnic identity (‘Hmong’)—in a way which runs paradoxically counter to the state attempt to sanction formal categories (‘Miao’) over and above the
level of the ethnic group as lived and vital social categories. This is of course only true
where several ethnic groups (like the Hmong, Hmu, Kho Xiong and A Hmao) were grouped
together under the one formal category (‘Miao’), and we should probably exempt from this
process of ethnicisation not only the largest groups which were broken up by classiŽ cation,
but also the smallest populations like the ‘Ewenki’ who were separated from larger
populations with whom they might have been united. I elaborate on this effect of ‘ethnic
homogenisation’ (reinforcement of the ethnic category at the expense of sub-group levels)
in the following section.
But the problem here, and the reason I cite this case in this context, is how to isolate
the precise factors which caused this process of ethnic homogenisation, separate them
where necessary from the effects of the ethnic classiŽ cation project, and evaluate their
relative importance.
As early as the 1920s, Graham had lamented the increasing disappearance of embroidery and weaving techniques among Hmong groups in Sichuan and their purchase of cloth
73
74
75
76
This is an important point, the sense of cultural incompetence , or incapability, which most people have within
their own societies. How many people can distinguish Haydn’s forty-eighth symphony from his forty-Ž fth? Cf.
also James Weiner, ‘Strangelove’s Dilemma: Or, What Kind of Secrecy do the Ngarrindjeri Practise?’, in
Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea (University
of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2001) on avowals of ‘nescience’, or the (strategic) ignorance of important cultural
information (Alan Rumsey’s ‘Introduction’ to the same book, p. 16).
David Crockett Graham, ‘The Customs of the Ch’uan Miao’, Journal of the West China Border Research Society,
no. 9, Chengdu (1937).
Ruey and Kuan, Chuannan Yaque Miao de hun sang lisu.
Ling and Ruey, Xiangxi Miaozu diaocha baogao, p. 18.
76
Nicholas Tapp
from the market.77 He describes their growing ‘Sinicisation’ and adoption of Chinese
language, dress and manners, and says they were called the ‘Hmong Swa’ or ‘Chinese
Hmong’ (although it is not clear if this was their own term for themselves or a term used
by other Hmong sub-groups for them or a term which may have been used by local Chinese
for them and which was then translated back into Hmong). This sort of ‘sinicisation’
process, together with the amalgamation of smaller Hmong sub-ethnic groups, may have
been going on for a considerable length of time, since the original settlement of the area
by Hmong prior to 1573 and the partial abandonment of shifting agriculture which occurred
at that time, and may well have contributed to the contemporary disappearance of ethnic
sub-groups among them.
In considering the apparent amalgamation of different Hmong sub-ethnic groups which
has taken place, into the greatly reinforced sense of a more general and unqualiŽ ed
‘Hmong’ identity, how much of this can we unequivocally attribute to the effects of the
1950s classiŽ cation of them as ‘Miao’ in silencing sub-ethnic groups among the Hmong?
I would argue, a great deal—but there are other social processes also to be considered. How
much of this absorption into a greater-Hmong identity should we attribute to the effects of
much longer-term processes78 stretching over several centuries but immeasurably accelerated in the twentieth century, which saw the continued settlement of ‘wasteland’ areas and
an increasing engagement in local markets, the commercialisation of agriculture and the
Ž nal abandonment of all forms of shifting cultivation in the area? How much of the
disappearance of ethnic sub-groups in favour of more inclusive forms of ethnic
identiŽ cation should one attribute to the civil wars and banditry of the pre-revolutionary
decades, which involved great movements of individuals and whole communities across the
whole region? How, in the absence of detailed and trustworthy historical ethnographies of
particular counties and townships, do we measure the effects of land redistribution and
large-scale collectivisation on local identity formations, and how can we distinguish the
effects of these from those of the civil wars and general processes of colonising Chinese
modernity or indeed distinguish the effects of the 1950s classiŽ cation itself from the
policies on regional autonomy with which it was closely intertwined? How much of the
present-day formation of a generalised Hmong identity in the region can be attributed to
recent historical processes, such as the new mobility and freedom of communications which
have accompanied economic reform, the relaxations of the hukou 79 system and new
freedoms to travel to other places? How much of the erosion of cultural divisions should
be traced to the Cultural Revolution and other periodic onslaughts on traditional cultural
identities and forms such as costume, ritual and language?
It might be thought that, if I had been able to do better research or remain longer in the
Ž eld, I might have been able to solve some of these questions. And it is true that
longer-term research of a more historical nature might have gone some way towards
clarifying certain issues which even my informants were not very clear about. But what we
really need, as the above examples are intended to demonstrate, is an ethnography of the
1950s classiŽ cation project itself, done in particular locations, with reference to those
people who asked questions and those who answered them, and of the period which
77
78
79
Graham, ‘The Customs of the Ch’uan Miao’, p. 20, and Graham, Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao, p. 3.
On these longer historical processes of cultural assimilation, which may have contributed to the disappearance
of local cultural divisions among the Hmong, see C.P. Fitzgerald, The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People
(Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972); also George Moseley, The Consolidation of the South
China Frontier (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1973), and Harold Wiens, China’s March into the
Tropics: Han Chinese Expansion into Southern China (Shoe-string Press, New York, 1954, 1970).
The household registration system which has prevented large-scale rural urban migration until very recently.
In Defence of the Archaic
77
followed it up until 1978. Thomas called for an ‘ethnography of colonialist projects’,80 and
certainly a more detailed ethnography of the 1950s ethnic classiŽ cation project than the few
accounts we have would help to reveal the ways in which it did conform to other
ethnographic projects associated with colonising and orientalising missions, as well as the
ways in which, as I feel, it may have differed signiŽ cantly from them. In a sense, then, I
am arguing, like Litzinger,81 for the need to determine just how much dominant representations have ‘structured minority understandings of their identities, histories, and social
realities’, but not from the viewpoint of those minority scholars examined by Litzinger, who
may be seen as inhabiting a ‘contact zone’82 which is the very location of ‘Orientalism’.83
A New Hypothesis
My argument here has been that the ofŽ cial disapproval of sub-ethnic Hmong cultural
differentiations and variations of local custom and practice associated with them, which
were potentially even more subversive of ofŽ cial ethnonyms than their actual ethnic
identiŽ cation as ‘Hmong’, led to a strengthening of a mid-level category—midway between
the formal category of ‘Miao’ and Hmong sub-groups such as the Hmong Ntsua or Hmong
Dau—the Hmong, and to a renewed sense of Hmong-ness rather than afŽ liation to any
particular sub-group of Hmong. By no means, then, has this been simply an erasure of
cultural differences in favour of a homogeneous national essence. Surely the effects of the
ethnic classiŽ cation and minority policy since 1949 need also to be considered together with
the effects of other more long-term processes, such as the effects of permanent settlement
since 1573 and the various population mobilities which took place in the century prior to
1960. Yet it does seem probable, from what perhaps may be seen as a hierarchical,
essentialising point of view (see Conclusion), that ethnic classiŽ cation has been a contributing factor to this strengthening of the ‘Hmong’ category of ethnic identiŽ cation at the
expense of the acceptance, at a local level, by the non-elite, of the formal category ‘Miao’
as a valid or vital social category.
Of course there was now a recognition by the Hmong villagers in Sichuan that they
were ofŽ cially classed as ‘Miao’ and a clear sense of the beneŽ ts and particular subject
position this implied. There was also a sense, particularly among local Hmong cadres and
educated members of the rural entrepreneurial elite, of having had some ancestral historic,
linguistic and cultural ties with other cultural groups whom they did not know and had
never met, such as the ‘Miao’ of West Hunan and of Southeast Guizhou. And as local
histories, stories and songs were published and circulated in the new atmosphere of cultural
revival which followed the introduction of the household responsibility system, some great
confusion was caused as the heritage of other groups was sometimes assumed to be their
own, which they did not know or had forgotten about—like the butter y-origin myth of the
Hmu in Southeast Guizhou or the Bamboo King stories peculiar to the Xiangxi Miao,84 or
the tale about a lost form of writing or historical journeys, being secretly inscribed in the
embroidery of women’s skirts which also emanated from Miao groups in Southeast
Guizhou. A similar process occurred with the Pan Gu story speciŽ c to the Mien sub-group
of the Yao, and great scholarly confusions were caused when this Ž gure was mistakenly
80
81
82
83
84
Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 60.
Litzinger, ‘Questions of Gender’.
Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
Dirlik et al. (eds), Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, p. 119.
See Ling Shun-sheng and Ruey Yih-Fu, Xiangxi Miaozu diaocha baogao, pp 12–13.
78
Nicholas Tapp
identiŽ ed with the Chinese Ž gure of Pan Hu!85 Although, then, there is a certain sense of
a pan-Miao identity of the type which, presumably, the ofŽ cial classiŽ cation of diverse
ethnic groups as ‘Miao’ must have expected to evoke, I would see this as conŽ ned to the
local elites and the educated rather than representative of most of the Hmong.
Effects not Traceable to the 1950s ClassiŽ cation
It may be easier to look back retrospectively at the Deng Xiaoping era from the standpoint
of 2001, to see what changes have taken place which need not be accounted for by the
in uence, or partial in uence, of the ethnic classiŽ cation project and the policies which
were based on it. Commentators have remarked on the rigidity of the old hukou system of
household registration, which Ž xed identities to places of birth, and for decades separated
urban from rural residents. This long-term localisation of identities in particular places must
have acted for several decades as a counter-weight to a nationalities policy which, where
it grouped more than one ethnic group together under a single formal category, might have
been expected to lead to widening notions of upper-level identity between the separate
ethnic groups who were now grouped together in this way under a single common label.
Relaxations of the hukou system after 1979, and of restrictions on travel, have led over the
past twenty years or so to a far greater mobility and  uidity of ethnic minority populations
than would ever have been possible under the thirty years of socialist rule before that time.
We know of the pulls to the major cities and even overseas there have been across rural
southwestern and southeast China, and something of the returns of some of these migrants
to their local places of origin.86
This new measure of mobility, regarding both marriages and employment, has surely led
to greatly accelerated encounters with otherness of a kind which could not have taken place
in the past. It therefore probably requires new rethinkings both of those local identities that
were articulated through state-sanctioned formulations and those not so articulated. It is
what we know of these effects which I would like to consider further in the Ž nal part of
this paper.
Shifts and Continuities of Social Identity
It is in this context, and against this background, that I should like to draw attention to some
of the new encounters there have been between the Chinese ‘Miao’ (including some Hmong
but mostly members of non-Hmong groups) and the Hmong from overseas. Both Louisa
Schein and I have drawn attention to the academic meetings, trading exchanges and private
visits which have occurred between the Hmong overseas, and the Hmong and non-Hmong
Miao of China, and Schein in particular has stressed the radical ‘exchanges’ of identity
which she sees as taking place as a result of these encounters.87 I would sound a slightly
85
86
87
See Zhongyan minzu xueyuan xuebao (Journal of the Central Institute for Nationalities), no. 2 (1989), pp. 1–33
(proceeding s of the International Workshop on Pan Hu and Pan Gu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 10–12
December 1987).
See forthcoming Ph.D. in Anthropolog y by Louise Beynon, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Louisa Schein, ‘Importing Miao Brethren to Hmong America: A Not-So-Stateless Transformation’, in Pheng
Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis and London, 1998); Louisa Schein, ‘Forged Transnationalit y and Oppositional Cosmopolitanism’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnico (eds), Transnationalism from Below (Transaction
Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 1998); Nicholas Tapp, ‘The Consuming or Consumed? Virtual Hmong
in China’, paper presented at the London China Seminar, School of Oriental and African Studies, 19 February
1999, to appear in Stuart Thompson and Kevin Latham, Consumption with Chinese Characteristics (Routledge,
London and New York, forthcoming).
In Defence of the Archaic
79
more hesitant note here, since most of these encounters have involved only a very small
proportion, and a privileged portion, of the Chinese Miao (an even smaller number of the
Chinese Hmong among them) and of the overseas Hmong. I believe we should be wary of
concluding, on this evidence, that changes in social identity of a particularly wide or
far-reaching nature have occurred as a result of these new exchanges, rather than as the
result of some of the longer-term processes, including those of the 1950s classiŽ cation
project, outlined above.
I would stress that these ‘return’ encounters have involved Hmong on both sides very
little, and that where any locally signiŽ cant encounters between overseas and Chinese
Hmong have taken place, it has not been reported (although there are Hmong-made videos
of these emotive village-level encounters).88 However, where these return encounters have
signiŽ cantly involved local Hmong in China, changes of identity and perception have
probably been remarkable and dramatic, as one might have expected on the basis of similar
encounters which have taken place between the overseas Hmong and Hmong in the
countries of Southeast Asia, described below. It is at this point that it is absolutely
necessary for us to differentiate strongly between the more cosmopolitan forms of identity
which have emerged among refugee Hmong and their families overseas, and whatever local
shifts in views of identity may have taken place as a result of these encounters among
indigenous communities in Asia. This distinction will be the focus of this section. I shall
give one example of the kinds of shifts of local perception in Southeast Asia which have
taken place as a result of the encounter with overseas Hmong to make my point here.
Research on social ethics among Hmong in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand (1993–96)
showed that the return visits of their rich cousins from Minnesota had resulted in both an
extraordinary expansion, and a local contraction, of the boundaries of the Hmong moral
universe.89 On the one hand, there had been the universalisation of a morality which was
formerly closely connected to the kinship system and relativised according to kinship and
ethnic proximity. Murder and rape, for example, which were formerly treated as serious
crimes only where they affected members of the same descent group (where they affected
Hmong of a different patrilineal surname group, Ž nes were demanded or feuds took place),
were now increasingly felt to be crimes which might be committed even beyond the
boundaries of the kinship system and the Hmong community itself, so that the killing of
other peoples such as Thais or Americans was now also felt to be criminal. There had, that
is, been an extension of the notion of humanity to cover people besides the Hmong. At the
same time, the behaviour demonstrated by some of these returning Hmong visitors, who
‘played with’ local women at the New Year and then left without marrying them, lied and
cheated, was felt to be deeply ‘un-Hmong’ by local Hmong, and there was, therefore, an
increasing awareness of differences between themselves and the overseas Hmong which we
may see as illustrating globalised class inequalities. There was a subsequent rethinking of
what it meant to be ‘Hmong’ and the growing sense of an afŽ nity with other local people
who applied the same moral standards, although they might not be Hmong; a contraction,
88
89
Encounters in China with overseas Hmong are not ‘return encounters’ in the sense that the ‘returning’ overseas
Hmong were not born in China and have never lived there, although their grandparent s or great-grandparent s may
have done. These are then returns to an imaginary homeland, unlike most of the returns to Southeast Asia where
reunions take place between members of the same families parted by war and resettlement. Some encounters of
the latter nature have also taken place in China, however, along the Vietnam border where families were parted
by the Indochina Wars; these are of course quite different from overseas Hmong meeting unknown , non-Hmong
Miao, who cannot speak Hmong, at academic conference s or performance events.
This research project was funded by the Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. Formal interviews were conducted by
myself and collaborators with a number of rural and urban Hmong men, women and children on notions of morality
which revealed results of considerable interest. A preliminary version of these results was presented at the
International Conference on Thai Studies in Chiangmai, 14–17 October 1996.
80
Nicholas Tapp
therefore, of the sense of Hmong identity, a tendency to deŽ ne ‘being Hmong’ more in
terms of a locally determined identity.90
It is these kinds of changes and revisions of customary social identity—an expansion of
the sense of social identity through the realisation that there are other Hmong across a globe
inhabited by many different kinds of ‘people’, together with a denial of their behaviour as
‘properly’ Hmong, and a consequent agonising about what counted as ‘properly’ or
traditionally Hmong—which might be expected to take place where there are real locallevel encounters between groups of Chinese Hmong and Hmong from overseas. However,
there have been very few encounters of this kind, and most of the ‘changes of identity’
which have occurred have largely concerned the use of ethnonyms and been conŽ ned to a
small proportion of elite Chinese Miao who have not, themselves, generally been Hmong.
But a great deal of academic and popular confusion has resulted from these latter
encounters between high-level elite leaders from different ethnic groups. I shall give some
examples of this.
Since the 1970s, researchers from Southeast Asia argued so long and so hard against
what is in Southeast Asia the very derogatory term, ‘Meo’ (or ‘Miao’) for the Hmong, that
almost always now the Hmong outside China are (quite properly) referred to by their own
name for themselves: ‘Hmong’. This was precisely the contrary process to what occurred
in China, where the category ‘Miao’ became the formal term to refer to the Hmong together
with other groups and therefore gained a certain social acceptability (although Miaozi is still
used as a swearword in Chinese schools). It was perhaps unfortunate, in terms of current
predicaments, that no Hmu or Kho Xiong people or any other ‘Miao’ groups besides the
Hmong left China for the mountains of Southeast Asia, and subsequently the First World,
as the Hmong did.91 For as a result of this (correct) reluctance to use the term Miao/Meo
for the Hmong, and a general ignorance that there might be other groups in China besides
the Hmong classiŽ ed as ‘Miao’, blanket translations of the Chinese term ‘Miao’ are
becoming almost acceptable. And this has led to some real anomalies, and potential clashes
between informed researchers and indigenous constructionists, as there are now young
Hmong in France, Australia and the United States, who have been convinced by their
readings of misinformed literature that there are over nine million Hmong in China, while
this Ž gure of course includes all the Miao groups—of whom the Hmong are perhaps a third.
Linguistics has not helped by referring to what used to be called the ‘Miao-Yao languages’
as ‘Hmong-Mien’ ones, according to the strange linguistic principle of picking the language
of the most dominant or well-known group to represent all the others (as in ‘Sino-Tibetan’).
Strecker92 and other linguists93 now talk of the ‘Hmong-Mien’ languages in a way which
will very probably lead lay readers to assume that this language family includes no other
Miao or Yao languages besides those of the Hmong and Mien!94
90
91
92
93
94
See Tapp, ‘Confucian Ethics and Constructions of the Past: An Enquiry into Comparative Morality’, Proceedings
of the International Thai Studies Conference on Thai Studies, Chiangmai University, 14–17 October, 1996.
Some A Hmao did migrate to the northern parts of Laos and Vietnam, but their identity has generally not been
remarked and there is some assimilation there to the Hmong.
D. Strecker, ‘Some Comments on Benedict’s “Miao-Yao Enigma”: Addendum ’, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman
Area, vol. 10, no. 2 (1987).
For example Ratliff, Martha, ‘Vocabulary of Environment and Subsistence in the Hmong-Mien Protolanguage ’,
paper presented at the International Conference on the Hmong/Miao in Asia, Aix-en-Provence , 11–13 September
1998, to appear in Gary Lee, Nicholas Tapp, Jean Michaud and Christian Culas (eds), Hmong Studies (Volume
II) (Silkworm Press, Chiangmai, forthcoming) and Barbara Niederer, ‘Pa-hng and the ClassiŽ cation of the
Hmong-Mien languages ’, paper presented at the International Conference on the Hmong/Miao in Asia,
Aix-en-Provence , 11–13 September 1998, to appear in Gary Lee, Nicholas Tapp, Jean Michaud and Christian
Culas (eds), Hmong Studies (Volume II) (Silkworm Press, Chiangmai, forthcoming).
I have also raised this point in a paper presented at the Conference on Ethnicity, Politics and Cross-Border Cultures
in Southwest China: Past and Present, at Lund University, 25–28 May 2000.
In Defence of the Archaic
81
This situation of confusion has become compounded by prominent Chinese Miao
politely or politically referring to themselves as ‘Hmong’ in conversation with Hmong from
outside China, when in fact they do not come from Hmong groups and can speak no Hmong
at all! Schein (separately) records both Hu Laohua (a Xiangxi Miao), and Li Ting Gui (a
Hmu from Southeast Guizhou), as referring to themselves and their groups as ‘Hmong’ in
public speeches.95 Now this might amount to a general shift in perceptions of identity, of
the type which has been argued, and one might visualise the ethnonym ‘Hmong’ slowly
creeping up the genealogical ladder of distant historical and linguistic relations to colonise
all the other members of the Miao–Yao group until even in China it became an accepted
term, and it became common to refer to all the non-Hmong ‘Miao’ as Hmong and all the
non-Mien ‘Yao’ as Mien. However, I would see this process as conŽ ned to a very small
group of elite leaders who are perhaps not so much in touch with their own languages and
geographical roots. The vast majority of Hmong in China will surely, as they do today when
speaking their own language, continue to refer to themselves as ‘Hmong’ rather than using
the Chinese term ‘Miao’, and I would imagine most members of the other ‘Miao’ groups
will continue to use their own ethnonyms to refer to themselves, particularly when speaking
their own languages. Moreover, as we have seen, one of the effects of the 1950s
classiŽ cation project was, through discouraging the existence of sub-ethnic groups (which
were in any case in the process of amalgamation and disappearance as the result of other
causes), precisely to strengthen this local sense of Hmong-ness as an ethnic and social
identity! This may now have been either reinforced or weakened by the new encounters
which have taken place as a result of post-1979 liberalisation within China with the
members of other groups, Hmong or otherwise, in other provinces. We do not as yet have
materials on the effects of recent Hmong mobility within China, but I would suggest that
these encounters with other groups within China may have been more important, in altering
local notions of Hmong social identity, than the meetings of high-level Miao ofŽ cials with
groups of Hmong tourists from overseas.
Can we see a kind of cultural nationalism, of an essentialising type, being expressed by
the willingness of non-Hmong Miao elites from China to refer to themselves as ‘Hmong’?
This may well be so, but it only operates at the level of ofŽ cial and written ethnonyms and
has not involved any adoption of Hmong social practices, language or other customs. There
is no doubt that there have been calls for a nationalistic kind of identity made throughout
the past several decades by many of the Miao elite in China. Enwall describes how the
repeated calls for a uniŽ ed ‘Miao’ system of writing at academic meetings and in
publications through the 1950s and 1960s by Miao elites from various ethnic groups (in
particular Hmu and Kho Xiong) always foundered on the complete incompatibility between
the three main languages classiŽ ed as Miao (Hmong, Hmu and Kho Xiong), and Hmao (the
latter classiŽ ed as a ‘sub-dialect’ together with Hmong as a member of the Chuanqiandian
branch yet quite unintelligible with it).96 This represents an attempt by elite scholars and
cadres to project, onto the formal category of over-arching ‘Miao’ identity sanctioned by
the state classiŽ cation project, sentiments which may also be found separately among the
ethnic groups classiŽ ed under that rubric. These locally essentalised senses of identity and
indigenisms, however, I would argue, are at a very far remove from those sentiments of
national unity which have sometimes been voiced at high-level meetings between the elite
members of a number of different ethnic groups. Throughout the twentieth century a desire
95
96
Schein, ‘Importing Miao Brethren to Hmong America’; Schein, ‘Popular Culture and the Production of
Differences’.
Joakim Enwall, A Myth becomes Reality: History and Development of the Miao Written Language (Stockholm
East Asia Monographs No. 5. Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University, Stockholm, 1995).
82
Nicholas Tapp
for ethnic consolidation and unity, associated with a common system of writing, has been
frequently voiced by groups of Hmong.97 Much of this very commonly expressed desire for
ethnic unity can be attributed to historical experiences of dislocation and marginalisation at
the hands of more powerful majority populations associated with traditional or colonial
states—the Han Chinese, the Tai, French, Vietnamese, Lao and Thai of northern Indochina
and Thailand, and much to the ravages of the wars in Indochina, which divided Hmong and
led to the break-up of whole families and communities. We may see this call for a Hmong
unity as in part a response to modernity, a kind of ‘reactive objectiŽ cation’.98 Yet the forms
this sentiment takes have more often been a generalised regret for the divisions of the
patrilineal clan system which have divided Hmong society than the messianic uprisings
which have attracted considerable attention. It is not, in general, these generalised wishes
for a greater Hmong unity and solidarity which have fed within China into the kind of
cultural nationalism occasionally voiced by senior Miao cadres in China, and which we can
see as informing the demands for a uniŽ ed ‘Miao’ script there.
However, among the overseas Hmong, there is one group of political activists with an
explicitly nationalist and right-wing agenda for the Hmong. It is members of this group who
have particularly visited China in an ofŽ cial capacity and whose behaviour there, as in
Thailand, has provoked alarm and dismay among local Hmong at its un-Hmongness and
immorality. I would emphasise that the great majority of Hmong overseas see this
politically active minority group as unrealistic, impractical dreamers, while the majority of
Hmong in China have never heard of them and are not likely to. But it is the voices of this
group—and certainly they may be said to articulate a cultural nationalism of a particularly
essentialising if not fundamentalist kind, arising directly out of the experience of refugee
migration and diaspora—which have tended to dominate, and predominate over, other more
local-level representations of the Hmong. This is why we do need to distinguish clearly
between cosmopolitan and local forms of identity.
It is perhaps signiŽ cant that just as it was the Hmong and the Mien, among all the other
groups of Miao and Yao, who Ž rst ventured to migrate out of China into the mountains of
South East Asia and have now emigrated to countries overseas, and just as it has been these
overseas refugees who have succeeded in making their ethnonym of ‘Hmong’ heard, at the
expense for example of those of the ‘Hmu’ or ‘Kho Xiong’, so it is also this group of
Americanised, educated, literate, largely male and well-off Hmong in the United States who
have particularly been able to make their voices heard on the World Wide Web, which is
now beginning to act as a bridge between elite Hmong communities across the world (and
a major resource for researchers on the Hmong and young Hmong seeking to learn more
about their own society). This example demonstrates Friedman’s point about hybridity and
transnationalism being the preserve of a new cosmopolitan elite opposed to the muted
voices of local identity,99 to which I shall turn in Conclusion. However, despite this general
dominance of cosmopolitan voices (untypical of most Hmong indigeneities in China or
overseas) expressing a particular kind of essentialised cultural nationalism, studies of
cyberspace show that the battle for contested space and control over representations on the
Internet and World Wide Web has barely begun. In the context of the United States, spaces
which were in the past dominated by the voices of white middle-class males have already
increasingly been challenged by the voices of women and ethnic minorities. We may, then,
hope to see more liberal Hmong voices represented on the Hmong Web in the future, of
97
98
99
Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignt y and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Oxford University Press,
Singapore, New York, London, 1989).
Nicholas Thomas, ‘The Inversion of Tradition’, American Ethnologist vol. 20, no. 3 (1992), pp. 839–59.
Jonathan Friedman, ‘The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush’, in Mike Featherstone and Scott
Lash (eds), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (Thousand Oaks, London, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1999).
In Defence of the Archaic
83
a kind which do not necessarily seek to colonise all the other Miao groups in China as
‘Hmong’!
Conclusion
To return, from here, to the beginnings of this paper and to the questions of local cultural
essentialisms raised there, I would like to stress that in this Hmong diaspora, now leading
as we have seen to ‘impossible homecomings’ even in local areas of China, very strong
distinctions have emerged between a cosmopolitan elite—which is what the Hmong from
overseas who return to China are—and the local Hmong, and other Miao, communities they
visit. Jonathan Friedman (and others) has criticised the blithe view of ‘happy happy
transnationals’, and it is probable that Hmong from overseas are beginning to devour both
the images and bodies of Asian Hmong in ways which further their marginalisation and
impoverishment. 100 It has been often pointed out that, while these kinds of ‘diaspora’ may
helpfully contribute to the development of more liberal multiculturalist policies in the new
countries of settlement, they often result in nationalistic or ethnically fundamentalist
movements ‘back home’.101 We simply do not at the moment have data of sufŽ cient
richness and depth from China to resolve these issues. What is really needed, I believe, and
which it is the main practical purpose of this paper to point to, are studies of these overseas
encounters at the local level, and a careful assessment of their impact on local consciousnesses of difference, of otherness, of identity, in a way that might ultimately be able to
distinguish what shifts or alterations of identity are taking place as the result of these
encounters with visitors from overseas, from the effects of other historical factors such as
relaxations on travel and migration, changing minorities policy, or even the famous
ethnographic classiŽ cation project of the 1950s and 1960s, which Ž rst Ž xed these categories
in the forms we now know.
Friedman points to an absolute opposition between cosmopolitanism as a modern
ideology, and ‘national and ethnic identities’, warning of the dangers of applying ‘the
post-colonial discourse on hybridity’, which is speciŽ c to the emergence of a new
cosmopolitan elite, to local situations where this discourse may not be appropriate. As he
sees it, there is ‘an absolute contradiction between cosmopolitan identity and this upsurge
of strong local or territorial identities’ which latter he sees as part of a ‘more general’
post-modern ‘shift towards roots, identity that is somehow culturally Ž xed and a value in
itself’.102 Others have seen the ‘post-modern’ as a repudiation of modernist meta-narratives
leading precisely to the emergence of tradition, the native and the local.103 I would say it
is the nostalgia of cosmopolitans, however we analyse this, which leads to homecomings
which can importantly transform localities in ways which anthropologists should be aware
of and should be able to model and encapsulate, but would also stress that there are
localities which may not have been transformed in this way.104
This paper has throughout raised the issue of ‘essentialisms’ in ethnographic
discourses and in state ethnic classiŽ cation projects. And here also I think we should take
some of Friedman’s remarks into account. In discussing racism, he points out that
100
101
102
103
104
Based on similar materials I consider these points in ‘The Consuming or the Consumed? Virtual Hmong in China’,
The Asia PaciŽ c Journal of Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 2 (2000), pp. 73–101.
John Docker, ‘On the Dilemmas of the Diaspora’, in Diaspora Newsletter, no. 3 (December 1999) (Centre for
the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University).
Friedman, ‘The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush’, p. 237.
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p. 87.
That is, localities and ‘neighbourhoods ’ not produced as the result of transnational shifts. See Arjun Appadurai ,
‘The Production of Locality’, in Richard Fardon (ed.), Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge
(Routledge, London, 1995).
84
Nicholas Tapp
‘Essentialism … need not be biological. But neither need it be wrong. Otherwise there are
no such things as group-speciŽ c life-forms which have temporal continuity, no such thing
as habitus’. And as he then remarks, the problem of essentialism is not really one of
attributing ‘a Ž xed set of properties to a given population’, but rather ‘the assumption that
this set of properties is somehow not the result of practice but an inherent property of the
members of that population’.105
Dirlik has called for attention to the problem of the ‘disjuncture between cultural
criticism and cultural politics’, and criticised the way in which ‘the repudiation of
essentialised identities and authentic pasts seems to culminate in a libertarianism which
asserts the possibility of constructing identities and histories almost at will’, and I share a
similar concern here, with the ‘relationship of indigenous self-assertion to its context in a
colonial structure of power’.106 Yet it is not just with this that I am concerned, but also with
the possibility of indigenisms which have not been constructed in any sense in response to
what might be seen as colonial structures, and can therefore hardly be bracketed under the
all-encompassing heading of ‘cultural politics’; that there may be spaces where ‘the
discourse may not have impinged upon indigenous consciousness at all’.107 It may be too
generally accepted that ‘there are no longer any local societies which have not been worked
over already by capital and modernity’.108
We do not want to paint everybody as ‘happy happy transnationals’, and should perhaps
retain our faith in the possibility of cultural spaces as yet uncolonised by modernity, where
what Hobsbawm was careful to distinguish from ‘invented tradition’ as ‘custom’ acts as a
precedent,109 and where embodied local identities such as Hmong are at least experienced
as inherent and given, rather than as a kind of cosmetic make-up which can be taken off
or applied at will. It was partly with the aim of elucidating these local senses of essential
identities that the 1950s nationalities classiŽ cation project was undertaken; given the depth
of feeling still associated with them, demonstrated for example by the Hmong of Sichuan,
that aim is, I think, still an important ethnographic endeavour, and one which we should not
leave entirely behind in our concern to stress the ease with which identities can sometimes
be shifted or have historically been constructed.
105
106
107
108
109
Friedman, ‘The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush’, p. 235.
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p. 221.
Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 57. Similarly, Thomas criticised the presumption that ‘colonial representations
were pervasivel y salient’ and complains of the (general) ‘lack of interest in engagemen t with cultural expressions
that lie beyond the imperial net’. See Nicholas Thomas, ‘Becoming Undisciplined: Anthropolog y and Cultural
Studies’, in Henrietta Moore (ed.), Anthropologica l Theory Today (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999), p. 272. The
full article is found pp. 262–80.
Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, p. 98.
Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Although the distinction between custom and tradition was criticised at the time,
it still remains a valid one.