Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural Politics (Body, Commodity, Text) - Softcover

Schein, Louisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082232444X ISBN 13: 9780822324447

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2000

Synopsis

Minority Rules is an ethnography of a Chinese people known as the Miao, a group long consigned to the remote highlands and considered backward by other Chinese. Now the nation’s fifth largest minority, the Miao number nearly eight million people speaking various dialects and spread out over seven provinces. In a theoretically innovative work that combines methods from both anthropology and cultural studies, Louisa Schein examines the ways Miao ethnicity is constructed and reworked by the state, by non-state elites, and by the Miao themselves, all in the context of China’s postsocialist reforms and its increasing exchange and fascination with the West. She offers eloquently argued interventions into debates over nationalism, ethnic subjectivity, and the ethnography of the state.
Posing questions about gender, cultural politics, and identity, Schein examines how non-Miao people help to create Miao ethnicity by depicting them as both feminized keepers of Chinese tradition and as exotic others against which dominant groups can assert their own modernity. In representing and consuming aspects of their own culture, Miao distance themselves from the idea that they are less than modern. Thus, Schein explains, everyday practices, village rituals, journalistic encounters, and tourism events are not just moments of cultural production but also performances of modernity through which others are made primitive. Schein finds that these moments frequently highlight internal differences among the Miao and demonstrates how not only minorities but more generally peasants and women offer a valuable key to understanding China as it renegotiates its place in the global order.

About this title

From the Publisher

“Minority Rules is breathtaking. Combining sophisticated cultural analysis with sharp attention to political economy, Schein illuminates not only the way the Miao have been constructed historically but how they shape their own identities through cultural performances, whether in state theater or for tourists.”—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments and Writing Women’s Worlds

“A highly readable exploration of the cultural politics of reform-era China that deserves a broad readership among anthropologists, historians, and those in cultural studies.”—Ann Anagnost, author of National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China

From the Back Cover

"A highly readable exploration of the cultural politics of reform-era China that deserves a broad readership among anthropologists, historians, and those in cultural studies."--Ann Anagnost, author of "National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China"

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 082232444X
• ISBN 13: 9780822324447
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384