China's Muslim frontier: Empire, nation, and transformation in Yunnan.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation project on China's Muslim Yunnan frontier has approached imperial history, national transformation, and the processes of culture in the Chinese ecumene. Ethnography from two Hui villages in Yunnan shows how the population has existed at the edge of the Chinese "pale," living in a situation where they could be pushed beyond it by the state. That this could be more of a "water changing around the fish" than it was a translocation is seen when they were so pushed in the nineteenth century, and their subsequent history of negotiation and transformation laid the foundation that helped sketch the limits of the Chinese nation-state with imperial pedigree. Investigating the often violent and visceral history of antagonism between Hui and Han in Yunnan sees a tumultuous history of transformation from barbarian to Chinese, and then into preemptively categorized, criminal, drug-trafficking, Muslim minority. Hui in Yunnan prove to be a moving target, with a history of people-state interaction the workings of which illuminate both Chinese and Hui categories. The investigation of the stereotypes involved in this criminalization and preemptive categorization are examined in the parsimonious placement of anti-heroin trafficking propaganda signs, or "large character posters," the exclusive placement logic of which goes far towards uncovering the exact nature of Huiness, Chineseness, and social categorization.;This examination of the socio-political categories led to a position where the Hui are Chinese first and foremost. Any notion of "ethnic" Muslimness apart from Chineseness is revealed as useful anachronism of the present as the complex ecumene of imperial past comes into view. By the Ming, Zheng He---Yunnanese Hui, imperial admiral, and maritime colonialist---had become the most famous Chinese person in the world. His official position within the politico-moral universe of the Chinese literatus is exemplary of Huiness in that it was not in conflict with his Muslimness. Similarly, the great Yunnan "Muslim" rebellion of the nineteenth century was explicitly not a Muslim challenge to the state; being rather a Chinese challenge to a Chinese empire. Continuing until today, the Hui refuse to narrate themselves as Chinese converts to Islam; instead deploying Chinese social mechanisms for establishing difference, and in their present-day revitalization projects they situate themselves as separate minzu in keeping with Chinese convention.