Author: Marc S. Abramson Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812201019 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Ethnic Identity in Tang China is the first work in any language to explore comprehensively the construction of ethnicity during the dynasty that reigned over China for roughly three centuries, from 618 to 907. Often viewed as one of the most cosmopolitan regimes in China's past, the Tang had roots in Inner Asia, and its rulers continued to have complex relationships with a population that included Turks, Tibetans, Japanese, Koreans, Southeast Asians, Persians, and Arabs. Marc S. Abramson's rich portrait of this complex, multiethnic empire draws on political writings, religious texts, and other cultural artifacts, as well as comparative examples from other empires and frontiers. Abramson argues that various constituencies, ranging from Confucian elites to Buddhist monks to "barbarian" generals, sought to define ethnic boundaries for various reasons but often in part out of discomfort with the ambiguity of their own ethnic and cultural identity. The Tang court, meanwhile, alternately sought to absorb some alien populations to preserve the empire's integrity while seeking to preserve the ethnic distinctiveness of other groups whose particular skills it valued. Abramson demonstrates how the Tang era marked a key shift in definitions of China and the Chinese people, a shift that ultimately laid the foundation for the emergence of the modern Chinese nation. Ethnic Identity in Tang China sheds new light on one of the most important periods in Chinese history. It also offers broader insights on East Asian and Inner Asian history, the history of ethnicity, and the comparative history of frontiers and empires.
Author: Mette Halskov Hansen Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295978090 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
This comparative study of the Naxi and Tai minority groups in Southwestern China examines the implementation and reception of state minority education policy. Hansen (Center for Development and the Environment, U. of Oslo) argues that state policy is not uniformly successful among all minorities, no
Author: Wenfang Tang Publisher: Policy Studies (East-West Cent ISBN: 9781932728866 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Beijing has faced the challenge of granting autonomy to ethnic minorities but maintaining their loyalty to the Chinese state. This paper tackles complex issues of ethnic identity and nationalism among the most politically sensitive groups in China: the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, Huis, and Kazaks. Specifically, it draws on original research conducted by the authors, the 2006-2007 Chinese Ethnicity Surveys, to explore the extent to which ethnic minorities are sinicized and the meaning of being Chinese. With an analysis of current arguments about whether national identity in contemporary China is based on a Han-dominant Confucian tradition or a multiethnic society that originated during the Qing empire, Separate but Loyal examines ethnic identity through the lens of ethnic-language learning, religious practices, and interethnic marriage. It also provides an illuminating comparison of perceptions of group identity and national identity in China with those in the United States and Russia. The survey points to some surprising findings, including the fact that ethnic minorities in China showed higher levels of both ethnic identity and national identity than U.S. and Russian respondents. These findings seem to support the argument that national identity is based on the multiethnic Chinese state, and they offer a rare empirical perspective on how the government can maintain the balance needed to preserve its legitimacy.
Author: Jennifer Cushman Publisher: Hong Kong University Press ISBN: 9622092071 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
In June 1985, a symposium, "Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II" was held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This volume includes many of the papers from that symposium presented by ANU scholars and those from universities elsewhere in Australia, North America and Southeast Asia. Participants looked at the current thinking about the parameters of identity and shared their own research into the complex issues that overlapping categories of identity raise. Identity was chosen as the focus of the, symposium because perceptions of self - whether by others or by the individual Chinese concerned - appear to lie at the heart ' of the present-day Chinese experience in Southeast Asia, It is also evident that identity wears many guises and that we cannot talk about a single Chinese identity when identity can be determined by the different political, social, economic or religious circumstances an individual faces at any given time. One of the distinctive characteristics of all the essays in this volume is that they are written from an historical perspective. While the papers forcus on how recent developments in Southeast Asian society have shaped Chinese identity, they also discuss those changes in terms of the historical matrix from which they developed. Because many of the essays in this volume combine an historical overview with more recent statistical data, it should serve as a useful companion to the increasingly popular case studies in which much of the writing about the Chinese in Southeast Asia is now cast.
Author: Shao-yun Yang Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295746017 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.
Author: Kwok-bun Chan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 113420311X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
Drawing upon wide-ranging case study material, the book explores the ever-changing personal and cultural identity of Chinese migrants and the diverse cosmopolitan communities they create. The various models of newly-forged communities are examined with the added dimension of personal identity and the individual's place in society. With particular emphasis on the changing face of Chinese ethnicity in a range of established places of convergence, Chan draws on extensive experience and knowledge in the field to bring the reader a fresh, fascinating and ultimately very human analysis of migration, culture, identity and the self.
Author: Thomas Mullaney Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520289757 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 419
Book Description
Constituting over ninety percent of China's population, Han is not only the largest ethnonational group in that country but also one of the largest categories of human identity in world history. In this pathbreaking volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examine this ambiguous identity, one that shares features with, but cannot be subsumed under, existing notions of ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and civilization.
Author: P l Ny¡ri Publisher: Central European University Press ISBN: 9789637326141 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
The "war on terror" has generated a scramble for expertise on Islamic or Asian "culture" and revived support for area studies, but it has done so at the cost of reviving the kinds of dangerous generalizations that area studies have rightly been accused of. This book provides a much-needed perspective on area studies, a perspective that is attentive to both manifestations of "traditional culture" and the new global relationships in which they are being played out. The authors shake off the shackles of the orientalist legacy but retain a close reading of local processes. They challenge the boundaries of China and question its study from different perspectives, but believe that area studies have a role to play if their geographies are studied according to certain common problems. In the case of China, the book shows the diverse array of critical but solidly grounded research approaches that can be used in studying a society. Its approach neither trivializes nor dismisses the elusive effects of culture, and it pays attention to both the state and the multiplicity of voices that challenge it.
Author: Marc S. Abramson
Author: Marc Samuel Abramson
Author: Mette Halskov Hansen
Author: Wenfang Tang
Author: Jennifer Cushman
Author: Shao-yun Yang
Author: Kwok-bun Chan
Author: Chang-Yen Tsai
Author: Thomas Mullaney
Author: P l Ny¡ri