Class7.ppt

East Asia

East Asia

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

East Asia

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Ethnic and Racial Identity

  • Ethnicity is a principle by which people are defined, differentiated, organized, and rewarded on the basis of commonly shared cultural characteristics.
  • From the Latin ethos – “my people.”
  • Awareness.
  • Common stock of knowledge.
  • In modern day usage ethnicity connotes identification of people on the basis of “cultural characteristics.”

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Race refers to a group that is "socially" defined but on the basis of real or imagined "physical" characteristics.
  • A particular people or stock/standard.
  • Is generally regarded as having no empirical validity or scientific merit.
  • It exists instead as a “social construction” that is manipulated to define and reinforce the unequal relations between dominant and subordinate groups.

The Social Category of Race

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

Ethno-Racial Process

  • One of the most difficult things for students to understand is that race and ethnicity are social realities not objective/biological/genetic realities == it is not just that they change over time and space == it is that people do not look at how they change == people tend to treat them as a "thing-in-itself”, not as "a way of organizing "meaning" and "status" in the world“
  • Race is not a “thing in itself” == but rather == “a social process.”

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity

By Allen Chun

Boundary 2, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 111-138

Published by: Duke University Press

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • It is said that China is the oldest extant civilization in the world and that its population constitutes one-quarter of humanity.
  • Something so well entrenched demographically, territorially, politically, and historically should be anything but an uncertain entity. It is easy, thus, to identify something called "Chinese culture and society.“
  • In short, there is much to suggest that the very idea of China is an unambiguous or unquestionable entity. But what is so unambiguous about China that makes it an unquestioned object of gazing? What is the nature of Chineseness, and who are the Chinese?

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • "China" unquestionably exists, but, more importantly, there is a multitude of expressions to denote different aspects of China and Chineseness.
  • The Western term for China appears to emphasize the unity of a civilization brought about by the Ch'in empire, Chinese terms for China and Chinese, on the other hand, suggest other kinds of associations, some of which are historically or regionally specific.
  • The term chung-kuo, China's interpretation of itself as "the middle kingdom," has existed since ancient times, and the term chung-kuo jen is commonly used nowadays to denote Chinese people who speak chung-kuo hua or some form of Chinese language..

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • When Chinese wish to talk about themselves as a unified people belonging to a unified culture, however, they refer to themselves as "people of the Han (dynasty)" (han-jen), as belonging to a Han culture that originated in the region of the Han River.
  • The process of purification is one of being Han-ized (han-hua), and the ethnic minorities within territorial China are likewise set apart as being non-Han.
  • Southern Chinese, in contrast, typically those from Fukien and Kwangtung who constitute the vast majority of "overseas Chinese" in places such as Southeast Asia, express their Chineseness by saying that they are "people of the T'ang (dynasty)" (t'ang-jen) who speak "T'ang language" (t'ang-hua) and have deep attachments toward a homeland called "the land of T'ang" (t'ang-shan).

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Perhaps not coincidentally, Chinatown is called "street of the T'ang people" (tang- jen chieh). Nonetheless, the historical image cannot be carried too far.
  • When speakers refer to t'ang-shan, it usually means the China of one's home village and not that of the imperial court; likewise, t'ang-hua simply means "Chinese," which, because it can refer to any Chinese, does not sit well with Mandarin speakers who claim to speak chung-wen.
  • The point of the matter is that terms are important, not only for what they mean semantically but for what they mean pragmatically, as well--that is to say, given the speaker's intended usage.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Moreover, meanings change in spite of the fixed character of the words themselves; thus, the authority of language can be understood not only as a function of a speaker's implicit interpretation but also as a purposive strategic act.

  • The Chinese may attribute their ethnic unity to the Han, but, in fact, the peoples consolidated by the Han empire were certainly not ethnically similar.
  • Likewise, the term chung-kuo (middle kingdom), as well as the coexisting notion of Chineseness as hua-hsia, predates the Chinese empire, but the centripetal unity originating from this civilizing center was something that in pre-dynastic times actually united different polities occupied by diverse peoples who had inherently different languages, beliefs, and practices - in short, different ethnic cultures.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • If we, on the other hand, view China as an unambiguous political entity and Chineseness as a feature shared by ethnic Chinese on the basis of separate characters and traditions, it is really because we are influenced by a homogeneous notion of culture that is essentially modern, if not national, in origin.
  • The state of mind characteristic of Chinese ethnicity and civilization in the past often transcended the hard and fast boundaries that we usually associate with the standardized dominion and sovereign totality of the nation-state.
  • This explains the persistent imagination of an unbroken historical continuity despite repeated barbarian invasions, the rise and fall of dynasties, and the absorption of alien religions.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Prior to the Nationalist Revolution of 1911, there was no cognate notion in Chinese of society or nation as a polity whose boundary was synonymous with that of an ethnic group.
  • Many terms were transplanted directly from Japanese. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was unnatural for Chinese to call other ethnic groups by any name other than "barbarians”.
  • Only in the early years of the Republic did intellectuals begin to associate chung-hua min-tsu (Chinese as an ethnic category) with chung-kuo jen (citizens of China). This association was meant to consolidate the diverse gathering of people within territorial China into a single nation.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Moreover, Chineseness in terms of material culture, ethnicity, or residence was never clearly defined.
  • Thus, the Chinese rendition of nationalism as the "principle of a common people" (min-tsu chu-i) implicitly underscored the novelty of a bounded citizenry as the distinctive feature of nationhood (in contrast, for example, to the purely institutional features of the nation-state).
  • This point was repeated early on by Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary hero and father of the Republic, who, in a famous phrase, criticized the traditional Chinese polity as being "a dish of loose sand" (i p'an san-sha).

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

Introduction

  • Since the very idea of (a national) identity is new, any notions of culture invoked in this regard, no matter how faithfully they are grounded in the past, have to be constructions by nature.
  • In the end, they conform to a new kind of roundedness in order to create bonds of horizontal solidarity between equal, autonomous individuals constitutive of the empty, homogeneous social space of the nation in ways that could not have existed in a hierarchical, cosmological past.
  • Because it is constructed, culture is not just imagined but authorized and institutionalized as well.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Discourse through explicit acts of writing is one of the prime vehicles for conveying the imaginative nature of cultural constructions, and, in the final analysis, it is important to understand how cultural discourse serves to rationalize a particular perfect vision of the polity.
  • The factual substance of culture is, in this regard, less important than the verbal forms it takes. That is to say, behind the message itself, it is more important to know who is really speaking, how statements are produced and distributed, how they relate to other discourses, and, finally, how they become systematized and institutionalized, if at all.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • In the Chinese world, cultural discourse constitutes an appropriate "space of dispersion," in Michel Foucault's terms, for understanding how ethnicity (as nationality) is constructed.
  • Cultural discourse in this regard includes not only symbols of national identity, icons of patriotic fervor and other things; more importantly, it involves the authority of statements about shared values embodied in language, ethnicity, and custom, as well as shared myths encoded as types of knowledge, such as history, ideology, and beliefs.
  • In the context of the state, such discourses rarely emanate directly from the people themselves but are articulated by the state, intellectuals, and other vested interests, all of whom claim naturally to speak on behalf of "society as a whole.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • The self-effacing character of cultural discourse, in spite of its obvious authorial nature, is precisely what makes identity appear to be a value-free construct, when in actuality it is quite the opposite.
  • As Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer have wisely noted, the production of discourse is an integral part of the state's exercise in legitimation; or, as they put it, "the state never stops talking.”
  • Bernard S. Cohn has argued also that the rise of the state brought about forms of knowledge that required continuous documentation in the kind of reports, investigations, commissions, and statistics relating to the accountability of its citizens in various domains, such as finance, industry, trade, health, demography, crime, education, transportation, and agriculture.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • The need of the state to know and document forms the basis of its capacity to govern. The will of knowledge to power ultimately provides the state a basis on which to define and classify spaces, make separations between public and private spheres, demarcate frontiers, standardize language and personal identity, and license the legitimacy of certain activities over others.
  • Culture's institutional link to power then makes all forms of knowledge that contribute to the construction of identity potential hegemonic tools within the state's regime of "dis-interested domination.“
  • The fact that cultural narratives differ in different Chinese political contexts is a testament to the possibility of different interpretations and political uses of Chineseness.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • At the core of this traditional Chinese identity is the concept of hua-hsia. By invoking a sense of Chineseness (hua) that is rooted in the shared civilization of the first (mythical) dynasty (hsia), hua-hsia is, in essence, a code word for both political legitimacy and historical destiny. Specifically in opposition to the People's Republic of China (PRC), hua-hsia represents a symbolic defense of a traditional past that contrasts with the extreme radicalism of a communist worldview.
  • Within the setting of a modern world system, hua-hsia becomes an icon of cultural uniqueness and resistance to Western imperialism.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

Introduction

  • On the mainland, one can find essentially the same degree of passion with the promotion of a national consciousness constructed on a synonymity between the same kinds of cultural ingredients, namely ethnicity, language, and history, but with significant shades.
  • While icons such as the panda and the Great Wall serve to characterize in superficial terms China's uniqueness and the existence of potentially strong rallying points for collective solidarity, the continual politicization of culture reflects, more importantly, the relevance of abstract formulations of identity to state formation and national survival as a whole.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • In the broader intellectual debates over national identity during the post-Cultural Revolution era, ideological positions often hesitated between attempts to revive societal consciousness through metaphorical appeals to historical-cultural roots and counter campaigns to ground nationalist sentiment within the context of a renewed socialist humanism.
  • The government's campaign against spiritual pollution in the mid-1980s sparked intellectual debates over the nature of culture, usually referred to in the literature as "culture fever."

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • These discourses brought forth diverse viewpoints concerning the relevance of various aspects of Chinese and Western culture to the construction of a Chinese socialist state that became polarized in 1988 with the airing of the controversial TV documentary River Elegy (he- shang).
  • By criticizing the backwardness of Chinese civilization based on the Yellow River valley, River Elegy was a call for the construction of a new identity based on the progressive values of an emerging Pacific region and the rejection of a traditionally based modernity. From the rhetoric, it would appear that culture's inherent substance has been less important than its extrinsic political relevance.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Just as one has been led to believe that multiculturalism has been invented by the advent of postmodern theory, one has also been led to believe that postcolonial theory had finally liberated the multiple identities in us all.
  • Most human societies from ancient times have been multicultural or multiethnic, only to be subjected to temporary removal by the imagined homogeneity of the nation-state. Similarly, the need to recognize multiple identities is, in the first instance, the recognition of an empire of mind that subordinates and negates difference.
  • Thus, the substance of any particular identity matters less than the problematic nature of identity as a conceptual entity.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • In other words, it might be possible for one to identify as Cantonese, Chinese, or Asian, depending on whether the frame of reference is meant to accent feelings of intimacy among a small circle of kinsmen, to distinguish oneself in terms of presumed cultural origins, or to mark one's solidarity in contrast with non-Asians.
  • In no case is facticity a relevant issue. Identification with the first may be relevant in consideration of personal lifestyle; the second, in consideration of intellectual orientation; and the third, in consideration of political interest.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity

  • Finally, there will, no doubt, be cases in which one wishes simply to be taken for what one "really" is (i.e., simply as a person, in which the ethnic factor is deemed irrelevant), as well as cases in which an explicit claim of identity is not deemed necessary (in which case, ethnicity is simply seen as matter-of-fact).
  • In effect, identification is a function both of how the context is defined and of how one might perceive the strategic nature of available choices.
  • Although identity is not exclusively a national concept, the heated rhetoric surrounding current debates regarding the politics of identity have largely been prompted by assumptions of boundedness and totality essential to the nation-state.

Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture, as Identity