(Draft)
This study is significantly different from most of Yao literature, as the primary materials it draws on art not historical source but field work data and observations. Moreover, this study refers to ongoing identity processes from the respective of individuals….
Diachronic representations have been suggested, most prominently by Fei Xiaotong in his work……
Take a look at What Yao people think Yao people are like, or at what they think they all have in common as a group.
There is the relationship between being Yao and being Chinese. How Chinese as a national category and Yao as an ethnic category relate to each other. ..While contrasting with Han and other nationalities is essential to the negotiation of Yao identity at the scale of minzu interactions……. My research demonstrates that Yao identity means more to Yao individuals than “being a minority”. Being a Chinese does not make Yao identity less meaningful to Yao individuals. In Guangdong’s multiethnic borderlands, Yao is and identity that clearly matters in daily inter-nationality interactions.
Although Yao identity loses some of its strength and becomes fragmented by other identification at the scale of Han-to-Yao interactions, particularly under the contemporary nationalism policy and market-directed economic growth, individual Yao in their identity negotiations perpetuate the collective identity by investing it with locally significant meanings. As demonstrated by my observation, these Yao individuals are agents who intentionally create and manipulate numerous identity options. On the other hand, however, their lives are simultaneously influenced by greater agents, such as the province’s government and the state. As my research reveals, these dynamics significantly shape identity options and choices.
China today is no longer a totalitarian state where resistance was bloodily repressed, but state-mandated categories are authoritarian ones, it is important to know to what degree people accept the state’s idea of how they ought to think of themselves.
The imperial period, which ended in 1912, and the modern, nationalist period created different forms and different meanings of “the nationality” of Yao. These tow historical eras differ significantly with regard to how the Yao was imagined and how the Yao people was treated on local and statewide level.
The contemporary category of “nationality” minzu is not a product of an evolutionary development but an invention of the nationalization processes initiated in the nineteenth century.
描述民族史和政策
My argument is that Chinese government has produced different understandings of “the Yao” and the Yao identity, in different eras, and with different purposes. Premodern and modern governance have produced different Yao-ness that have reflected the need of area development. Under current policies, Yao has been discussed as a tradition, with invented and modified characters, represented as colorful, backward and exotic, existing as an “other” to Han.
My argument is that the premodern Yao was framed in terms of differentiation between culture and barbarism, and the premodern Yao was enacted with certain rituals and customs. The modern mode of Yao narration has increased as a site of state intervention, with the Yao imagined as a national minority that has developed with the help of the state. During the twentieth century, the Yao became an institutionalized category, which boundaries guarded not noly by members of category itself but also by the state, an entity that depends on the Han for the maintenance of social and territorial integrity.
Current representations, which are heavily tourism-driven, tend to reify “the Yao” as a coherent group that has evolved through millennia in a linear and represented a united and constant identity. Yao-ness appears to be a powerful and meaningful identity. At the same time, mostly to promote the tourism program, Han assume various identities deliberately to create the feeling of exotic, to achieve development goals materially or symbolically, and to draw boundaries differ from “others minorities”. The collected material, as what the Yao Museum presented, proves that we can contextualize the significance of Yao-ness by contrasting it with other minorities’ identity. Such contextualization tries to convince what Yao-ness actually is.
One of the objectives of this study is to demonstrate how the coherence of the Yao, as it is conceived of and advertised by state institutions and by many Yao themselves, disintegrates upon closer inspection, revealing Yao identity remain fragmented and diverse, and multiple categorites engaged in struggles over control of policies and tangible resources.
Meanwhile, scholars have also discussed the impossibility of a linear history and showed that Yao identity existed in a relationship with other identities such as Zhuang, Miao and other minzu. We can observe major changes in the ways Yao-ness has been framed in premodern—referring here most to the Qing period and modern periods. 很多镇压，but the boundaries of Yao-ness were relatively flexible since the imperial biopolitical controlling mechanism were limited, the boundaries of “the Yao” could not have been set and guarded by stat institutions of the degree possible today.
Although the Yao minze is a political category for nation-and state-making projects, the Yao identity was not invented half century ago solely for nation-making projects. Intertwined with Han, Miao, Zhuang identities, it existed long before the rise of Chinese nationalisms and is not a modern invention.
It is crucial to reflect on the very notion of being Yao and the historical transformations of this identity.
Premodern:
After 1949？particularly after the 1980s…
Nation building in China coincided with attempts to create a national community, nation history, national identity, national language, and national majority that would cement together the nation and the territory. As the ‘backbone’, the Han-ness—intertwined with Chinese-ness—has a clear State-related dimension. Early twentieth-century revolutionaries and nationalism-motivated intellectuals created and popularized “the Han” as a unitary nation, with the intent to mobilize Han to rise against the Manchu, the last imperial dynasty of Qing. The Han became the backbone of the first post-imperial state in China undergirded the Xinha Revolution of 1922. The Han is also the result of the massive state-driven biopolitical Minzu Classification Project launched in the 1950s. The Han has since been officially carried the role of national unifier, in the process of nation and state making in twentieth-century China. Clearly, Han has a dimension that link it directly to nation making, the official minzu policy, and the political discourse of ethnic diversity.
Both the Han and Yao, in the form of a minzu, are the result of a political category for nation-and state-making projects. It should clarify that neither the Han or the Yao identity was not invented a century ago solely for nation-making purposes.
One argument of this study is that the Yaozu, similar to many other ethnic or minority groups, are united and fragmented under the state’s Minzu policy. Each of many identity categories—Chinese, Yao, Local, or Southerner—creates and reifies understandings of distinct “others”. The notion of “Being Chinese” is one of many identities that people classified as Yaozu relate to, an identity entangled with others to form a mutually dependent network. When one identity is situationally mobilized, others become relatively less visible. These categories are linked relationally do not contradict one another. A Yao can be a Chinese, a Southerner, a Guangdong Person, a Local, or a Fang Persona (by family name). Each of these identities is situationally meaningful, and has a specific social function. Depending on the situation, one or more identities will be activated. Yao-ness is thus compatible with other, even multiple, social, ethnic, and nation identities.
During my fieldwork, I observed how and which identities of Yao are evoked and switched, by their dependence on scales of interaction with Han. Depending on their circumstances, Yao individuals activate different identities. 户口，生育计划，补助等，Whereas certain ideas of “being Chinese” are common throughout China, the roles and meaning of this identity are fragmented and individualized by each Yao in his/her identity negotiations. …. In different circumstances, individuals switch between identities relatively flexible, because the various identities have specific roles and relate to different scales of interaction, and are not mutually exclusive. Many of the Yao aware of what does being Yao mean to them, or more precisely, what “minority” identity offers them an what it deprives them of, and also express their awareness of how state-generated and enforce dimensions of Yao-ness influence their identity choices…. To draw attention away from these inequality, the Chinese government reiterates the obdurate significance of minzu boundaries. Such programs/policies reestablish minzu as important categories of identification. Through this reemphasis on boundaries between Han and other minzu, government agencies regularly mobilize and reinvent the identity categories generated in the Minzu Classification Project of the 1950s. Minzu politics and identity of Yao are thus unavoidably influenced by these workings of the state.
Yao-ness draws a significant part of its power form the local society and from the need of identification. It is a tangible and important identity to people who are classified as Yao, and has been maintained by the people who find it meaningful and useful. This identity is also meaningful and viable to Han, those who are finding the help of celebrate their own identity.
Two particular qualities in Yao-ness can be observed: as something private and enacted locally and as a link to state politics. My fieldwork observation reveals that the motivations identification with Yao are diverse and sometime fragmented.
2019-2-13-1550072633