Tribalizing the frontier: Barbarians, settlers, and the state in Ming South China.
详细信息
- 作者：Shin ; Leo Kwok-Yueh.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1999
- 导师：Yu, Ying-shih
- 毕业院校：Princeton University
- 专业：History, Asia, Australia and Oceania.;Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies.
- ISBN：0599275839
- CBH：9927831
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：13120143
- Pages：238
文摘
This study steps outside the conventional frontier narratives of confrontation, accommodation, and absorption and incorporates them into a more fundamental one. It tells how as China expanded to the south in the late imperial period, the political interests of the state, the economic needs of natives and settlers, and the imaginations of cultural elites all facilitated the demarcation and categorization of the borderland population. Not only did observers classify people into either subjects of the state (min) or barbarians beyond its control (man, i), they also increasingly distinguished among the “barbarian” population. China's historical expansion is no doubt a history of colonization, but more fundamentally it is a story of differentiation and objectification—a story, in other words, of what this work refers to as “tribalization.” This study focuses on the practice and process of tribalization in Kuang-hsi province during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a region which had long been claimed by the centralizing state but which had for the most part remained beyond its firm rule. It explains how as the Ming state sought to establish a greater degree of control over its southern frontier, it had to recognize and rely on an increasing number of native chief-tains (t'u-kuan, t'u-ssu) to maintain a semblance of order in the region. The story tells also how in areas where the state had sought to implement direct rule, it had to increasingly distinguish between settlements of registered, tax-paying min and those of unregistered, non-tax-paying man. Finally, this study explains how as more visitors traveled to the southern frontier in the late Ming period, many also came to differentiate in greater detail, for reasons both cultural and commercial, among the “barbarian” population.;This study traces the practice of tribalization through the Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1912) to the modern period and argues that China's frontier history—and frontier history in general—must fundamentally be recognized as a story of differentiation, categorization, and objectification.