The power of the past : a comparative study of three ethnic narratives concerning Daur's ethnicity, 1911-1956

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to compare three ethnic narratives addressing Daur’s ethnicity between 1911 and 1956, facilitated by three historical protagonists, including Daur elites in the Republic of China (“ROC”), Japanese imperialists in Manchukuo, and the state-sponsored Chinese ethnologists in early Socialist China, respectively. In this thesis, ethnicity is primarily posited as a kind of social knowledge by which social relationships are substantiated i.e. with whom one ought to be and with whom they ought not. Ethnic knowledge is fundamentally produced and internalized in a social process called ethnicization. It can be a voluntary process among the members of an ethnic group or an imposition from outsiders as well. These three political protagonists all maintained a primordialist attitude towards ethnicity in general and invoked the past, though from different perspectives and methods, in particular to justify their ethnicization of Daur. The focus of this thesis is, nonetheless, placed in the discussion of how the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”) and the state-sponsored Chinese ethnologists, the last political protagonist to participate in the ethnicization of Daur, had endeavored through a nationwide campaign called Minzu Shibie (民族识别) to attenuate the ethnicizing claims produced by two other parties in earlier time.

Daur is an ideal group of research subjects for this thesis because of their ethnocultural ambiguity, geopolitical specificity, and ethnological generality. First, Daur were not able to form an ethnoculturally independent community or state in the Qing Dynasty, leading to frequent identification with Manchu and Mongol, which belonged to a more socially prestiged class. Second, they were subject to increasing ideological influence from Pan-Mongolism and Japanese Toyoshi (东洋史) before and during the World War Two (“WWII”). Third, the ethnic classification of Daur reveals some subtle principles of how an ethnicity or a nation was defined in Minzu Shibie. The argumenets of this thesis are based on an analysis of historical texts about Daur, ranging from the official gazeteers published in the Qing Dynasty to manuscipts and ethnological reports written by Chinese ethnologists in Socialist China. The analysis enables this thesis to compare the distinct perspectives and methods used by the three historical protagnoists separately as well as the intellectual intersetions where they converged when ethnicizing Daur. Empirical evidence shows that although all three protagonists shared primordialism – an invocation of the past to justify the present solidarity of a group – as a basic attitude to define ethnicity, they differed in the means of invoking the past. Arguably, the ethnicizations facilitated by Daur elites and Japanese imperialists were resulted from a paradigm shift of invoking the past from a history-informed descriptive integration to an anthropology-informed scientific reconstruction that has begun in a philosophical movement in Germany since the 18th century. On the other hand, through a unique method of history-informed ethnography, Minzu Shibie (民族识别) came up with a progressive understanding of ethnicity and nation i.e. Minzu (民族) that was particularly attentive to how one has acquired certain primordial characteristics in the development of history instead of fixation of one’s ethnicity to an unfamiliar past.