Egao (恶搞)--defined by the English version of the China Daily in the following terms"[t]he two characters 'e' meaning 'evil' and 'gao' meaning 'work' combine to describe a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation, and multi-media high-tech" (quoted in Gong and Yang 2010)--have been an interesting part of peoples' participation in the creation and dissemination of new media in this country. Particularly interesting to me, however, is how members of minority nationalities have also engaged in this practice. In recent years, Tbtns have begun engaging in a number of media practices that are best defined as egao (and in some cases are explicitly labelled as such). Though I have yet to learn of a Tbtn term for this practice, what were first only really available to people with access to the internet have now been made available to people from all over the plateau thanks to the glories of 3g. In particular, the popular messaging, talking, sharing service WeChat (Ch: weixin) has helped people find access to all the latest in Tbtn egao. Egao can take the form of photos... …or videos (my account will not let me upload video, sorry), a number of which feature scenes from non-Tbtn (Chinese, Indian, American) films and TV series humorously dubbed into Tbtn. A majority of those that I have found have been done in the A mdo dialect (make of that what you will).
Perhaps the most popular video in recent years has been a series of clips from Braveheart that have been dubbed into a hilarious conversation about digging caterpillar fungus. In other clips, scenes from Chinese costume dramas have been overlaid with Tbtn conversations about Break dancing. If you're looking for some videos, check out the following links: The Braveheart one: http://www.56.com/u71/v_NTg5NDQ3MTM.html In an Indian courthouse: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTMzOTYzNDI4.html Foreign news: http://video.baomihua.com/url44721876/24251464 A costume drama: http://hot.mytv365.com/v/20130624/2206458.html Enjoy.
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I'm not even going to apologize for the alliteration in the title of this post, because I know that you know that you love it.
That having been said (as my high school Latin teacher, Mr. O'Neill, would say) I learned something interesting the other day. In Yushu, people use aging yogurt (not so old as to be unhealthy, but too sour to be enjoyable) as a yeast for their bread. That's pretty cool. I had an interesting ethnographic moment the other day when I finally learned, how, in Yushu, people actually indicate that they are full:
At the end of a meal, people from Yushu's capital Skye dgu--and particularly men--give a single loud click with their tongues. This simple action indicates both that the meal was delicious (people might also say zhang tee 'that was delicious!') and that they are finished eating. Afterwards, the person may rub their mouths with their hand in a satisfied manner. The click, however, is most important. It suggests that the person is finished eating. Sooooo, next time you're in Yushu and are full, and really don't want to keep eating, this should be your plan. This will be my plan everytime I'm eating with the in-laws. So my nephew almost got kicked out of school today. He's a naughty, boisterous, middle school boy. Exactly the type of kid I would have hated both as a student and as a teacher. He got blamed for breaking a chalkboard, though he was not the only person playing the game that led to the chalkboard "breaking" (developing a very small crack).
But that's not why I'm writing today. I'm writing because of what the teachers here are saying to the students. Verbal abuse is apparently accepted pedagogy, at least in this city. An acquaintance who is taking driving classes, recently complained about instructors verbally abusing their students calling them sha bi (a stupid, errr... part of a woman's anatomy). And yet, there is so little supply (of instructors) and so much demand (for instruction) that people put up with it. My nephew's teacher (and one could argue that the same basic supply/demand relationship applies with middle school teachers in Xining) is alleged to have told a Muslim girl she was so stupid she might as well just start eating pork. Let's leave alone, for a second, that this is incredibly hurtful. Let's also leave alone that the Han teacher was (unwittingly) insulting people who eat pork--and thus his own ethnic group--as stupid. But this teacher is allowed to shout racist, verbal abuse at his students. This is education in Xining. My child (whenever s/he comes into existence) will most definitely not be attending school in China. So there's been a rash of American action movies recently in which the white house is under attack, or been taken over, or something of that ilk, and I found it interesting to compare the heroes of these films, who they represent, and how they represent them, with Chinese films on similar topics. I'm not going to undertake analysis, but here's my two sentence explanation of the difference:
In American action films, people save the government. In Chinese action films, the government saves the people. That right there speaks volumes. So this topic draws its inspiration from a pair of recent experiences that have dovetailed nicely with some of the very issues that I have been pondering every morning as I selfishly use the last of the pre-dawn hours to work on my dissertation: language use and language attitudes on the plateau. This post only scratches the surface of these issues. I don't, after all, want to steal my own thunder and write something here that will be essential to my dissertation.
The first is the Ethnography of Communication seminar/reading group I am leading. The ethnography of communication is a body of theories that has yet to make it to Western China in almost any way, shape, or form.* And so a group of students and I have been looking at some books together on our own time. It has lead to a number of fascinating conversations. From a selfish point of view, it has been great to listen on the conversations. People are getting to articulate levels of detail they knew existed but never thought about discussing. It's also simply wonderful basic level information for me. Yesterday, in discussing "categories of talk" we talked at one point about the differences between scolding (sdig pa), arguing/insulting as a precursor to fighting (skug), and cursing someone (dmod). Cool stuff. A few days ago, in an entirely different venue, language came to the fore of discussions again. My wife and I were meeting with a woman from her hometown for lunch. There was a fascinating moment in which this woman talked about reading bedtime stories to her son, in Tbtn, but finding it useless because her son couldn't understand them. I was confused. Her son speaks Tbtn with her. How could he not understand folktales read to him at night? Generations of children have figured out ways to understand folktales. Then she said something along the lines of: "Of course he can't understand them! I hardly understand them, classical Tbtn/written Tbtn is very difficult." This indicates an interesting and very basic problem for me: that T scholars in today's cities are intensely afraid of language loss, but their definition of the language that is worth learning is limited primarily to the written language. I tried to argue with this woman that folktales are meant to be oral, and to be spoken, so that she should tell the stories to her son, rather than read the stories to her son, but I don't think she was convinced. She seemed singularly unimpressed by the notion of preserving spoken language, or of the importance of spoken language. Either way, I think that these are both really fascinating. The attitudes suggested by the latter anecdote are particularly interesting to me. Why is it that oral Tbtn is not considered to be proper Tbtn? Why is that people think that speaking is not so necessary for preservation? Why is it that the very people who think that culture is dying out seem unconcerned with oral culture? For answers to that, read my dissertation (in two or *I should note that I do believe that a handful of people from the Qinghai Academy of Social Sciences are aware of this, but it's probably only a small proportion even of that august and learned body. So I just had the "joy" of filling out my continuing IRB (Institutional Review Board) application AND my CITI (Collaborative Institutional training Initiative) certifications at the same time. Both of these are mostly formalities, and it's more time-consuming than anything else, but I did find both of these processes somewhat amusing in light of my experiences here. I say this, because I live in a culture where these things are ridiculous.
I remember in 2009 when a friend was helping me translate my approach script into T that he literally laughed out loud when I told him about some of the clauses I had to put in there. He said, "You don't need to say that. If a nomad doesn't agree to participate he'll just walk away anyway, you don't have to tell him that he's allowed to." Fast forward to 2013, and most of the people I'm interviewing are befuddled by the terminology I am bound to use before beginning any interview, and I think that more than one interview has been significantly effected by the way it changes the mood from a conversation between friends to an "interview." Even more recently, my wife has just spent the entire day translating (with some input from yours truly) a grant application for one of her cousins. That's how family works here. But the section about the collection of personal information and data privacy was three pages long and a bear to translate. These things have no meaning to most people who grow up in a society of contracts and fine print. But to people without any grounding in such a culture, it's flat out mind-boggling. More damning still is the fact that there's a clause saying that if the gov't wants it they can have it, so I don't feel like there's really any privacy in there to begin with. Plus (and I might get in trouble for saying this, but...) people here don't really have "r!ght$" to begin with so our concern with protecting them is sort of weird. Even if these things do exist, they exist only at the pleasure of the gov't. As aLet me be clear, I believe that it is good to have such training programs, and essential to learn about these things. But at the same time, they aren't what's ensuring that I protect my informants' privacy. Most of the Tbtn people I know don't like pasta with marinara sauce. What's up with that? Noodles are huge out here. Everyone eats noodles. But usually in soup. They just don't like marinara sauce. But they LOVE al fredo sauce.
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About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |