Melissa J. Brown
Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Number 13
February 1997
The Center for Chinese Studies presented a public lecture on February 21, 1997 by Melissa Brown as part of the Berkeley China Colloquia series.
The question of Chinese identity, so entwined with discussions of political identity, has been of paramount interest to scholars in the PRC, Taiwan, and abroad. Although centuries of Han political domination have made Han culture synonymous with most definitions of "Chinese" culture, China actually encompasses a range of cultures and peoples. Through her fieldwork in China and Taiwan, Melissa Brown investigates changing identities of intermarried Han and non-Han and examines the historical processes by which definitions of Han Chinese culture have changed.
Melissa Brown is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington in 1995. Her talk reflected the manuscript on which she is currently working.
Wen-hsin Yeh, Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies, chaired this session, while Liu Xin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, commented on the talk.
Brown discussed the implications of traditional assumptions regarding sinicization, or hanhua, which, as historian Pamela Crossley said, "implied that through nothing much more subtle than the sheer charisma of Chinese culture, people were attracted to China and its society from elsewhere and, no great obstacle withstanding, were consumed in the flames of hanhua."Brown focused on four implications of this ideology.
First, the ideology assumed that there were no great obstacles to adopting a Han identity. Second, these assumptions implied that culture, rather than a line of patrilineal descent, was the key to becoming Han. Third, sinicization implied that assimilating non-Han had no effect on Han culture. Finally, the ideology implied that there was a static definition of Han culture.
Brown presented material that contradicted these assumptions. There were obstacles to adopting Han identity, she said, such as the Ming prohibition against Mongols adopting Han-sounding names. Judging from the profusion of genealogies compiled after the Song dynasty, patrilineal descent seemed crucial in the adoption of a Han identity. Furthermore, Brown said that contemporary diversity among Han regions questions the theory that all non-Han became exactly like the Han and that there is a single definition of Han culture.
In her case studies of southwestern Taiwan and southwestern Hubei province in China, Brown examined the changes in identity and culture that took place among descendants of non-Han peoples who were brought into the political and cultural sphere of Han China through colonial migrations and annexations.
Brown argued that demographic, cultural, and social forces led to high rates of intermarriage between Hokkien immigrant men and local women of Aborigine or mixed descent. Through these forces, aspects of Han culture were introduced to Aborigine communities while aspects of Aborigine culture were maintained. When political circumstances made it advantageous to claim a Han identity, Brown said that intermarriage gave many people of mixed descent an opportunity to do so by virtue of their Han patrilineal descent.
By contrast, descendants of those who migrated to the foothills, where Brown did field research, were considered huan-a, or savages, through the early twentieth century, even though they practiced many Hokkien customs.
Brown found that many people in these communities were reluctant to identify themselves as Aborigines, and several people produced genealogies to prove that they were Han. Brown said that although they are descendants of plains Aborigines, they are now "culturally largely indistinguishable from other Hokkien Taiwanese" and are now considered Hokkien. Brown attributed the opportunity for this identity change to the 1915 ban on footbinding among the Han issued by the Japanese colonial government. The ban removed the last important marker used locally to distinguish "savages" from Hokkien.
Brown conducted research in southern Hubei in the Enshi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture with a professor of ethnology at the Zhongnan Minzu Xueyuan and one of her Tujia graduate students. The area contained descendants of intermarried local peoples and waves of immigrants from the Yellow River valley, the Sichuan basin, the Yangtze River valley, and possibly Mongolia, she said. There were scholarly, genealogical, and oral history reports of periodic forced migrations into the area, including migrations of tu, exiled convicts. Thus, said Brown, it was difficult to determine whether the tu in Tujia referred to "local" people or to convicts forced to migrate into exile.
Brown interviewed a retired official whom she referred to as Mr. Weng. She said Mr. Weng was responsible for the 1982-83 ethnic identification of all people in seven rural and semirural xiang in Enshi City's administrative district. Brown said Mr. Weng told her that Tujia classification used a combination of surname; the ethnicity of local ancestral place, as determined by historical references, the language of local place names, genealogies, or customs and oral histories; and the timing of migration to the local ancestral place. Immigration and intermarriage between Han and local people was so widespread that Mr. Weng said a cutoff date was established at 1735, when the area came under Qing bureaucratic administration; only people whose ancestors immigrated or intermarried before 1735 were considered Tujia.
Brown reported that before 1949, local people did not have a notion of Tujia as an ethnic group, although they did distinguish between families as outsiders (kejia) and locals (tujia). Some people who reported their families were outsiders were officially registered as Tujia. Brown argued that with each new wave of outsiders, the dichotomy between locals and outsiders shifted. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, when Enshi was the provisional capital of Hubei, the people there became locals to the Nationalist outsiders. Although locals were apparently viewed as coarse or uncouth, Brown said, they seem to have been accepted as Han in the 1940s.
During her interviews, Brown learned that although many local customs in the 1920s through 1950s were similar to Han customs in form, there were differences in the meanings and perceptions of these forms. For example, although the people buried their dead with rites by Daoist priests, practiced annual graveside rites, and worshiped patrilineal ancestors, Daoist priests had very low status, only wealthy people had ancestral tablets, and graves were often placed next to houses because spirits of the dead were not believed to reside in graves.
Many people were ambivalent about being classified as Tujia, Brown said. Although some people there, as elsewhere in China, wanted minority status to get minority benefits, some people who had legal grounds for claiming Tujia status preferred Han status. Some who legitimately had Tujia status through matrilineal ties told Brown they were "really" Han because their patrilineal ancestors were Han.
Brown said her case studies show that sinicization does not work in practice the way ideology says it will. In addition, Brown said that because descendants of non-Han could acquire a Han identity in this way, without regard to their customs or beliefs, it seems that non-Han cultural influences did lead to contemporary diversity within the Han.
The ideology of sinicization -- specifically the assumption that total assimilation occurs -- helps explain the strong link accepted between ethnic identity and national identity, Brown said. In China, this assumption leads to close government monitoring of minority activities for evidence of separatism. In Taiwan, the ideology is contrasted with evidence of the actual historical processes of sinicization of plains Aborigines through intermarriage with Han immigrants to debate the Chinese-ness of Taiwan. Brown argued that accepting the ideology of sinicization has led both sides of the Taiwan Strait to accept this cultural debate as synonymous with the political question of Taiwan's future.
Brown said her study reminds anthropologists that intermarriage, migrations, opportunistic manipulations of identity, and cultural hegemony are not modern developments; these processes have shaped China for more than two thousand years.
Furthermore, Brown said her analysis questions three common theoretical dichotomies in anthropology, which she characterized by the following labels and questions:
Brown said that dichotomizing this way, researchers do not see both sides of the picture and often ignore information on the "other" side. Researchers need to develop a more inclusive approach to studying social and cultural phenomena, she said. Brown proposed analyzing such phenomena in terms of four interactive forces: ideological predispositions, social order pragmatics, rational self-interest, and demographic factors.
Brown explained that ideological predispositions are derived from discourse and experience and affect the meanings that individuals give to events and ideas. She said these meanings influence their actions and lead them to accept, reject, modify, innovate, and transmit new meanings and ideas. Brown said that according to "social order pragmatics," individuals' attempts to achieve or maintain power are constrained by existing social and political relations.
Summarized by Frith Breitzer.
