(2014) Review: EMPIRE AND IDENTITY IN GUIZHOU: LOCAL RESISTANCE TO QING EXPANSION (original) (raw)

AHP 35 REVIEW: EMPIRE AND IDENTITY IN GUIZHOU

Luo, Yu. 2014. Review: Empire and Identity in Guizhou. Asian Highlands Perspectives 35:227-236. Review of Weinstein, Jodi L. 2014. Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion. (Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.) Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. xvi+217pp, 3 maps (xiv-xvi); foreword by Stevan Harrell, acknowledgments, notes, Chinese glossary, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780295993270 (paperback 30.00);ISBN9780295993263(hardback30.00); ISBN 9780295993263 (hardback 30.00);ISBN9780295993263(hardback75.00). __ Vagabonds, swindlers, bandits, and rebels. These figures may lie in quiet corners of Qing archives, but under the pen of historian Jodi Weinstein, they not only come alive, but ring out their voices, enmeshed with regional history and state formation. Focusing on the Zhongjia, who are believed to be the forbears of the current day Buyi (Bouyei) minzu – one of China's fifty-six state-designated nationalities – Weinstein is interested in how members of such a lesser-known ethnic group in late imperial China's southwestern frontier responded to state centralization with ingenuity. Giving equivalent attention to both imperial and indigenous perspectives, Weinstein carries out a careful, honest examination of historical narratives and livelihood strategies from below. Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion is thus a timely and refined contribution to the recent waves of scholarship engaged in reappraising agency and livelihoods in the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands, also known as 'Zomia' in Scott's 2009 influential monograph The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. ...

Anthropology of China's frontier: From the periphery to the centre

Social Anthropology, 2009

This special issue begins with an introduction to the anthropology of China, and indeed how this may be providing new directions for anthropology as a field as China moves to a central location in the discipline. Anthropologists of China are a rapidly growing and diverse group, and their work may be developing new ethnographic traditions. Similarly, the anthropology of China's periphery is pushing itself into a central position in the anthropology of China. Like many of the contemporary social scientists working in China, scholars of China's periphery are inclined to pay special attention to state and local relations, and discuss new forms of modernity for these regions; their topics vary from local questions of identity and consumption to relations between formations of different levels of the state, to the effects of globalizing markets, international public health issues, or globalized migration. Yunnan, a province in China's southwest that exists as a meeting ground of Tibetan, Southeast Asian, and Chinese cultures, has launched more than its proportional share of recent English language ethnographies (as well as Chinese, French, German, etc.). To an extent, Yunnan, and the southwest, as a periphery, have worked their way into a central position in the anthropology of China. In this review, I discuss in particular Xiaolin Guo's State and Ethnicity in China's Southwest (2008), and contrast it with several recent ethnographic works set in this region;

(2018) Entangled Loyalties: Qiaopi, Chinese Community Structures, and the State in Southeast Asia

The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora, 2018

Dialect, region, and lineage—these were the markers of belonging around which both Chinese emigrant communities and the qiaopi trade were organized. However, these local bases of identification could exist in tension with nationalist attachments, especially when crisis struck. The conflict between local and national principles of belonging in Chinese communities is reflected in the story of qiaopi, which concerns the local and regional bases of its operation channels, the state’s efforts to incorporate these channels into state institutions such as banks and post offices, and the resistance against these efforts. This chapter discusses qiaopi through the lens of the main features of Chinese migration, the structure of Chinese community organizations, and the role of the state in their shaping and reshaping with a focus on Southeast Asia. The “state” in this context does not only include the sending state of China, but also the policies affecting Chinese communities before and under colonial rule and following decolonization in Southeast Asia.