I was recently at a dinner with several T friends. All are reasonably educated, urban-based professionals. Some had college degrees, others had none, but all are intensely interested in culture. There is something centripetal about being T among urban T people (many of whom grew up in the country-side). Conversations frequently revert to the same topics of culture, history, language, and religion. There is, in particular, a sort of anticipatory nostalgia at play here in which people expect the loss of culture, see it all around them, and long for pasts that are still, in some ways present. Today, I'll give a few thoughts specifically on the topic of history.
At some point early in the dinner, the topic of history came up, and it continued to dominate discussion for nearly half of the evening. The group spent a great deal of time discussing, and attempting to prove the T origin of communities in Gansu and Qinghai (and even in regions far further West). Some of the arguments were a bit far-fetched (well, they have a monastery there, so it must be a T place). Others relied directly on relating communities of A mdo with historical personages and events (e.g. Srong btsan sgam po sent soldiers to the borders and they built their communities there). Forget, for a second, that the former argument and the latter argument are treated as linked, even though they are almost certainly not. Most of the monastic institutions in Amdo were built during/after the later spread of Buddhism (T: phyi dar, this period is generally said to begin a few centuries after the end of the fall of the T empire) rather than the earlier (T: snga dar, this period refers to the initial spread of outside religions during the imperial period)--and to me it would seem to be necessary for the two to be linked for the argument to hold up. A third argument was etymological, suggesting that certain toponyms are originally T, and thus prove T origins (for example, the Chinese Dunhuang 敦煌, was supposed to originally have been stong khung '1000 caves'). All of these arguments were interesting, because they were ways of trying to utilize various reasonably "safe" discourses (the first being religious, the second historical, the third linguistic) to legitimate the lasting importance of their ethnic group. Henry Glassie talks about the importance of history in the evening ceilis in Northern Ireland. In these situations, things are asserted to be true, and that the truthfulness of these stories is paramount. A lie is a horrible sin in the community. Here in Western China, I'm finding that history is similarly important to the sustaining of community in Western China. I have often railed with frustration about the obsession with history and origins in T scholarship, indeed, local scholars often show themselves to be less interested with what's happening in the world around them than they are to discussing putative origins that are difficult (if not impossible to verify) other than by having enough people saying that they are the origins. But I'm beginning to think that this primordialism plays a crucial role to both identity management and doing so within a discourse that re-appropriates discourses that are already considered legitimate in the public sphere. And it is a trend that is not limited only to the academic sphere, but, as this evening made clear, penetrates and dominates among many sectors of the urban T population. I welcome all respectful feedback, criticism, and debate. These ideas are not a completed or finished product, but rather musings based on observations. I feel like there is truth to these, but I haven't fully figured out yet the best
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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 |