강연초록:
In China of the 1950s, ethnologists, linguists, and Communist authorities undertook a bureaucratic-cum-social scientific project known as the “Ethnic Classification.” Here it was determined which among China’s hundreds of ethnic minority communities would and would not be officially recognized by the state. Such was the subject of the speaker’s first book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (UC Press, 2011). What followed after the Classification was an equally if not more complex process which historians have yet to understand, let alone document.
Having merged nearly 400 minority communities into just 55 officially recognized minority categories, the Chinese state would now need to determine (or invent) the “standard” form of each: a standard or “representative” dialect, clothing style, dance-form, folklore, historical narrative, and much more. What ensued was a deeply politicized process in which state authorities, social scientists, and ethnic minority elites struggled to determine the hierarchies that would govern intra-ethnic (as compared to inter-ethnic) relations for which group - a profound challenge when we consider that single “groups” encompassed upwards of dozens of distinct subgroups or “branches.”
For those ethnic subgroups whose spoken language and cultural forms were designated as “representative” of the overall minority, one could expect to hear it broadcast over radio and television, and encounter one’s cultural practices in print, performance, film, pedagogy, museums exhibits, and more - to become the primus inter pares within one’s ethnonational category. For those whose cultural forms were demarcated as “dialectal” or “variant,” by contrast, their potential fate stood in stark contrast: a marked absence of state investment in their identity forms, and the specter of widespread, local-level cultural extinctions.
This talk will investigate the attempted standardization of minority identities in the post-Classification period, focusing upon one of the most illustrative post-Classification initiatives: the determination and creation of “standard minority dialects” for each of China’s newly recognized groups, which would form the basis of minority language newspapers, broadcasting, and newly invented writing systems for non-literate communities.
연사약력:
토마스 멀레이니는 미국 스탠포드 대학교 사학과 부교수이다. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China(University of California Press, 2011)의 저자이며, Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority(Global, Area, and International Archive, 2012)의 제1편집자이다. 존스홉킨스 대학교에서 학사 및 석사학위를, 콜롬비아 대학교에서 박사학위를 받았다.
그의 최근 연구사업인 “The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History”는 전신, 타자기술, 워드프로세싱과 컴퓨팅기술을 포괄하는 중국의 근대적 비알파벳 정보 기반의 발전과정을 다루고 있다. 이 연구는 2013년 애봇 페이슨 어셔 상, 미국 국립과학재단 3년 펠로우십, 헬만 교수 펠로우십을 받은 바 있으며, 저서용 원고가 현재 정식 출판리뷰를 앞두고 있다.
멀레이니 교수는 또한 인문학 및 사회과학의 30여개 분야에서 최근 발표된 학위논문에 대한 리뷰를 매년 500건 넘게 출간하는 Dissertation Reviews의 창립자이자 편집장이다.