Han and the Chinese other: The language of identity and difference in southwest China.

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with identity in southwest China, an area of great ethnic diversity. Using intensive interviews, discourse analysis, sociolinguistic experimentation, and reading in the contemporary press and historical sources, the dissertation demonstrates that people in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, hold views of self and other that are distinctly at odds with official ideology regarding ethnicity, while considerably influenced by such ideology. It investigates fissures running through Chinese society, showing that though contemporary China as a nation possesses a great deal of coherence and unity in some respects, in others it is riven with contradiction and diversity. One of those aspects is language: while Standard Mandarin is understood by the majority of the population, local linguistic varieties retain great vitality and covert prestige--though people who never use Mandarin may nevertheless report appreciation for it. The dissertation reports about attitudes toward others, whether stereotypical or informed by experience, and analyzes the dimensions along which difference is established. In turn, understanding of Chinese notions of personhood can be deepened by seeing that difference is the obverse of identity, and that categories of identity and difference are mutually defining. Finally, the use of the metaphor of modernization is shown to pervade the discourse regarding identity, especially that of ethnic differentiation. This infiltration of terminology may be seen as a triumph of the state in its twentieth-century attempt to foster a sense of Chinese nationalism, but in people's ordinary discourse, they use language that shows the imperfect absorption of official views of identity.