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The Political Economy of Ethnicity in Yunnan's Lijiang Basin

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14442211003727989

1740-9314

Sydney D. White,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Abstract The present article explores how post-1949 political economic changes and changes in representations of cultural identity have been experienced by both the village residents of Longquan and the town residents of Dayanzhen in north-west Yunnan's predominantly Naxi Lijiang basin. Longquan is now at the epicentre of the new 'Shuhe' epic tourism village development complex, whereas the gucheng (or 'old town') part of Dayanzhen (or Lijiang Town) was essentially the epicentre for an even earlier epic tourism town development project. The impact of this recent large-scale (primarily domestic) ethnic tourism is contextualised within the entrenched urban–rural divide that lies between these two locales. Implications for state, popular culture and local representations of Naxi ethnic identity, gender, rurality and class are examined. Keywords: Lijiang NaxiEthnicityTourismRuralityShuheYunnanChina Acknowledgements The author is indebted to the following organisations for research support: the Committee on Scholarly Communication with People's Republic of China (CSCPRC), the Wenner–Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Sigma Xi, and Temple University. Special thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for TAPJA for the excellent feedback they provided. Notes 1. See Cohen 1993 Cohen M. L. 1993 'Cultural and political inventions in modern China: The case of the Chinese "peasant" Daedalus 122 2 China in Transformation (Spring, 1993) 151 70 [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] on the construction of the category of "peasant" in the PRC. 2. My periods of fieldwork research in the Lijiang basin encompass the summer of 1987, February 1989–December 1990 and subsequent follow-up research visits in 1994, 2000, 2004, 2005 and 2009. 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One of the anonymous reviewers has importantly pointed out that the civilising projects of the imperial Chinese state that have influenced the Naxi have not always been Confucian—specifically, that the early Mu kings of Lijiang submitted themselves to Mongolian rule during the Yuan dynasty, who, indeed, used a Buddhist civilising project in their narrative and governance of the Chinese state. The neo-Confucianism of the Ming and Qing, particularly with the imposition of regular government in Lijiang in 1723, clearly subsequently reshaped the civilising project agenda of the imperial Chinese state in the Lijiang basin. 5. See Mueggler (1991 Mueggler, E. 1991. 'Money, the mountain and state power in a Naxi village'. Modern China, 7(2): 188–226. 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