In Defence of the Archaic: A Reconsideration of the 1950s Ethnic Classification Project in China

This paper argues for a new understanding of the Chinese ethnic classification project of the 1950s, which is too easily read as merely an exercise in colonising representations. Claiming that there may yet be cultural spaces uncolonised by 'modernity', the paper argues that recent research, through over-emphasising the transformation of local identities by the state and concentrating on minority elite views, may have missed something of the facticity with which culture is experienced at the local level. The paper examines the main effects of classification, drawing on the author's Sichuan research to show that it may sometimes be necessary to indulge in a kind of essentialism in order to understand the complexity of the changes which have taken place. It is suggested that minority policy together with other social changes has in some cases paradoxically strengthened traditional expressions of identity at the expense of both the official minority categories often stressed, and more local cultural sub-distinctions. However, the problems of isolating the effects of these changes in the absence of detailed local accounts of the 1949-89 period are drawn attention to, and the paper calls for a new ethnography of the classification project itself. In conclusion, the shortcomings of an extreme constructivist approach in accounting for the strength of local 'indigenisms' are examined, and the classification project is shown to have had important aims in common with those of anthropology in elucidating vital local senses of difference.