bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Writing History in China: A Comparison of Official and Private Histories
Authors: Yang Haiying 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which ‘history’ is recorded, written or narrated, thereby exploring the interface between history and anthropology. The discussion focuses on the Hui Muslim Rebellion in the Qing period, which broke out at the end of the 19th century, spreading over a vast area in the northwest of the empire and Central Asia. State-sponsored publications of history such as Tong shi (General History) or others describe the Hui Rebellion as a ‘revolt by an ethnic minority against the Qing dynasty’. They do not describe the pillage, atrocities and massacres perpetrated by the insurgent Hui troops. However, regional history books compiled in various localities describe the serious destruction caused by the Hui rebel army. The paper also explores the diverse representations of the rebellion by Mongol and Hui historians. While recognising the courage of the Hui insurgents whom the Mongolian army fought, the privately written Mongolian chronicles describe the rise and fall of the Rebellion in a relatively neutral and objective manner. Hui historical sources provide an entirely different perspective, revealing the religious motivation of the rebellion, and providing the basis for the sort of ethnohistorical project that Zhang calls a ‘history of people's way of life’. Given these widely differing perspectives in the historical records, the paper urges the exploration of the commonality between the anthropological approach to history and Zhang's ‘history of a way of life’ approach so as to better elucidate historical incidents that have had a major impact on history.
Chinese Communities in Western Siberia in the 1920s–1930s
Authors: Boyko Vladimir 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper aims to outline the origins and main dimensions of the Chinese immigrant communities which were established in the Russian heartland (Western Siberia) during the interwar period (1920s—1930s). It argues that Chinese – primarily male groups – had managed to adapt peacefully, though temporarily, into the local environment due their particular mentality and social features: they were often occupying free labour and demographic lacunae, caused by the losses of men in WWI/Russian civil war and devastation of economy/infrastructure. The growth of authoritarian tendencies under the Stalinist regime in Soviet Union, economic shortcomings and the ethnic purges of 1930s closed the agenda of Chinese presence in theWestern Siberian, aswell as in thewhole Soviet scene. Actually all persons of Chinese origin were accused of being ‘outside’ (Japan's) collaborators, and they were assassinated or, at best, forwarded to concentration camps. Just a few survived. The Chinese in Western Siberia represented a very particular socio-demographic and ethnical phenomenon, remarkably distinctive fromother similar, Russian Far East or worldwide, immigrant communities.
Men and Women in Contemporary Kalmykia: Traditional Gender Stereotypes and Reality
Authors: Butovskaya M. L. , Guchinova E. B. 
Published: December 2010

AbstractKalmyk social life has been transformed over the 20th century, and this article documents changes specifically in the sexual division of labour and gender relations. Previous social norms (which differed from widely-held suppositions aboutmale dominance in all spheres of life)were drastically altered by the Soviet regime, changing work patterns and living conditions for both sexes. The article focuses mainly on Post-Socialist transformations, which are discussed through analysis of field-data concerning Kalmyk children. It was found that there are significant differences between the play activities of boys and girls, the gender norms they uphold, and the actual patterns of relations between men and women found among adults. The gender norms children uphold in speech are stereotyped and more ‘conservative’ than either their own behaviour or that of their parents. Nevertheless, observation of boys and girls at play showed definite differences in aggressiveness and responsiveness, the types of games preferred, and patterns of inter-relations among / between the sexes, and the article concludes that human behavioural universals may be evident here.
Notions of Rights over Land and the History of Mongolian Pastoralism
Authors: Sneath David 
Published: December 2010

AbstractIn the 1990s the Mongolian state implemented a series of reforms designed to create a competitive market economy based on private property. These included the wholesale privatisation of the pastoral economy and the dissolution of the collective and state farms. The Asian Development Bank and other international development agencies advocated new legislation to allow the private ownership of land. This remains a highly controversial issue in Mongolia, particularly with respect to pasture land which remains a public-access resource.
The Secret Secret: Cinema, Ethnicity and Seventeenth Century Tibetan-Mongolian Relations
Authors: Barnett Robert 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThe Secret History of the Potala Palace, a 1989 film about Mongol-Tibetan relations in the seventeenth century, was a milestone in the still tentative development of Tibetan film, with significant Tibetan participation and close attention to Tibetan sources of history. This paper suggests possible reasons for the withdrawal of the film from circulation, and proposes ways of reading film in the context of contested versions of ethnicity.
The Reincarnations of Desi Sangye Gyatso in Alasha and the Secret History of the Sixth Dalai Lama
Authors: Jalsan  
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper deals with the history of the two lines of reincarnated lamas of the Baruun Heid monastery in Alasha and is written by the most senior representative of this tradition. According to The Biography of the Sixth Dalai Lama, sometimes called The Secret Biography, and according to the tradition of the Alasha Mongols, the Sixth Dalai Lama did not die in 1706 in the Khökhnuur area as described in standard histories. Instead he is said to have escaped while being taken to Beijing under custody and after various travels to have settled in Alasha, where he died in 1746. His disciples founded a monastery and two complementary reincarnation lines which combined the reincarnations of the de-throned Sixth Dalai Lama and those of Sangye Gyatso (1653–1705), the Tibetan regent or desi (sde srid) who had recognised him. The author, who is at the same time Professor of Linguistics at Inner Mongolia University and the current reincarnation of Sangye Gyatso, describes this widely discussed tradition and its re-emergence in Alasha after the Cultural Revolution
History and its Televising: Events and Narratives of the Hoshuud Mongols in Modern China
Authors: Bayar Nasan 
Published: December 2010

AbstractIn the seventeenth century Güüshi Khan, leader of the Hoshuud Mongols, conquered the Kökhnuur area and Tibet. Since he was at the same time an ally of the Qing, this episode has been emphasised in contemporary Chinese historical discourse as a key event in the process of constructing the Chinese nation in such a way as to include Tibetans and Mongols. This paper describes the vicissitudes of a group of Hoshuud Mongols that migrated and settled in the Alasha area in Inner Mongolia where they became subjects of the Qing dynasty. During the Republican Period they transformed their status to become members of the modern Chinese nation and later they were included in the People's Republic of China. The paper explores the way in which these processes are represented in various forms of contemporary official discourse – from television films to publications – in order to detect the underlying logic on which current historical narratives are based and which serve as the ‘historical truth’.
The Power of Imagination: Whose Northeast and Whose Manchuria?
Authors: Narangoa Li 
Published: December 2010

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, Manchuria became what Owen Lattimore called a ‘Cradle of Conflict’ where Russia and Japan competed for supremacy in Northeast Asia. Russian and Japanese involvement in Mongolia and Manchuria, especially after the Russo-Japanese War, compelled Chinese authorities to certify that the Northeast (Dongbei), that is Manchuria, was an integral part of China. Japan, for its part, asserted the opposite and represented Manchuria as a territory separate from China in order to justify its presence there. In this paper I argue that Japanese and Chinese travellers’ accounts, their reconnaissance or memoir writings on Manchuria and its Manchu and Mongolian inhabitants, were part of larger geographical and historical constructions of power struggle, in terms of both the Japanese claim for Manchuria and the Chinese ‘response’ to the loss of Manchuria.
The Barbarian Borderland and the Chinese Imagination: Travellers in Wa Country
Authors: Fiskesjö Magnus 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThe Wa lands continue to be seized upon in the Chinese imagination, and elsewhere too, as representing what is dangerous and off limits. This is one important underlying reason why these lands, located in between China and Burma, have been some of the least-travelled areas on China's southwestern borders during most of the last few centuries. In fact, these areas have long been regarded as impenetrable for outsider travellers unless assisted by a full-fledged army, its gunpowder dry and its guns loaded. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the British occupation of Burma as well as increasing opium trade prompted increases in the numbers of Chinese and other visitors: officials, soldiers, traders, and so on. The first attempt at delineating a Burma-China border having failed, a second, joint British-Chinese survey was launched and almost completed in the late 1930s. These activities prompted a flurry of patriotic-scholarly efforts to claim these borderlands for the reconstituted Chinese state, which continued into the second half of the twentieth century. This brief paper explores some of the conflicting views of the various kinds of travellers and locals, including early Chinese judgements of the Wa, the nationalistic and scientistic travellers and writers of the 1930s, as well as the teams of ethnologists and soldiers dispatched there in the 1950s and 1960s – notably also Alan Winnington, the famous British correspondent for the Morning Star, and his Wa reception.
Searching for Qiang Culture in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Wang Ming-KE 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper critically examines attempts by western missionaries, scholars and Chinese intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century at defining the ‘Qiang culture’, for the purpose of delineating the ethnic boundaries of the ‘Qiang nationality’, in western China. I start by introducing a long historical process, in respect of boundary-formation, from the Shang to the later Qing period, which finally turned the habitants of the Upper Min River valley into a cultural and ethnic mix of hybrids between the Han and the Tibetan. Then, I explore how these outside observers – western missionaries/scholars and Chinese intellectuals – had attempted to find the exemplar of the Qiang culture that could fit in with the ‘history’ of the ‘Qiang people’ each of these authors bore in mind. Even though these attempts produced many confusing aspects, possible misunderstandings and debatable results, nonetheless the works produced and the ethnographical data contained have become important sources for the Han Chinese to later construct the ethnic category of the Qiang in the scheme of the Chinese nation, and also for the Qiang natives to build their own culture and history. I argue that the modern Qiang nationality was not necessarily the product of the ethno/cultural-centralism of the Han Chinese, but was produced after a battle between many centrisms, and that the modern attempt by the Han to define ‘the Qiang’ through their history and culture is not necessarily a new ‘invention’ but only the newest attempt at defining the western ethnic boundary of the Han Chinese, which had been defined, persisted and then was re-defined periodically for more than two thousand years.
Between Chinese Nationalism and Soviet Colonisation: A Chinese Orientalist's Narration of Inner and Outer Mongolia (1926–1927)
Authors: Borchigud Wurlig 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis essay questions the nature of ‘Chinese orientalism’ vis-à-vis the Western model of ‘orientalism’. It examines the dialectics of the interconnection between Chinese civilisation/nationalism and Soviet communist colonisation/modernisation, and how these shape and limit the perceptions of a Chinese scholar politician, Ma Hetian, in his travel writing about Inner and Outer Mongolia in the mid 1920s. Unlike most travel writings which focus on cultural differences of the ‘inferior’ others as study object and aesthetic idol, Ma's was a political travel writing, which represents his Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Republican government in relation to its internal frontier Inner Mongolia and the independent ‘Outer Mongolia’ (the MPR) at the time. This political travel writing challenges Kojin Karatani's coherent though essentialised reinterpretation of orientalism from its specific sociocultural contexts and geopolitical positions. Similarly to Western orientalists, Ma had an authority to speak of his ‘inferior’ Inner Mongol objects as their civiliser as well as to represent his ‘helpless’ Outer Mongol ‘brothers’ as their national guardian. However, unlike many orientalists (Western and non-Western), Ma's politically charged Sinocentric position and often chauvinistic attitude towards Mongols align him closer to his ‘enemy/friend’ – Soviet Russia.
An Ethnographic World Formulated: On Yih-fu Ruey's Academic Construction of Minority Histories and Cultures in South China
Authors: Hsieh Shih-Chung 
Published: December 2010

AbstractYih-fu Ruey was one of the most important ethnologists in the history of anthropological development in China and Taiwan. Ruey's kind of ethnology can be divided into ethnic classification of China, ethnography of minority peoples, and ethnohistory of the non-Han group in the Southwest. Ruey had very limited ‘standard’ field records in contacting people's daily lives, but did have full experiences of travelling historical southwestern China through literature reading.
The Reconstruction of Mongolian Identity in the Pantheon of Polyphonic Images
Authors: Bilik Naran 
Published: December 2010

AbstractDespite the wish for homogenisation on the part of nation builders of China – the Central Kingdom that has now turned to embrace a market economy with ‘Chinese characteristics’ – Mongolian ethnicity in Yunnan, like ethnicities in other places of this country, is strengthened due to increasing tourism and contacts facilitated by modern technologies of communication and transportation. Different cultural elements and different ethnic groups gather, help build, and celebrate, a renewed Mongolian identity.
Ethnicity in Contemporary Buryat Political Ideology
Authors: Skrynnikova T.D. 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper looks at the role of ethnicity in post-socialist political ideologies in Russia. It offers an examination of the language of nationalist and other political discourse in Buryatia and the ways in which post-socialist ideologies are largely a result of Soviet-era policies. In doing so, it examines the resurgence of Buryat ethnicity and argues that the ethnos has highly developed adaptive capabilities: it does not adapt only to its environment, but it adapts reality to its needs. The Buryat case can also been seen as providing a more general example of the formation of a political culture.
Lost in the Post: Technologies of Imagination, and the Soviet Legacy in Post-Socialist Mongolia
Authors: Sneath David 
Published: December 2010

AbstractVerdery has suggested exploring the parallels between post-socialist and postcolonial studies. Mongolia has, like many post-colonial states, experienced a series of almost simultaneous transformations in the twentieth century. After the advent of Soviet control in the 1920s Mongolia began to receive Leninist Modernisation and all the trappings of the Soviet version of the European nationstate. The imaginative project of Soviet order shaped the notion of the ‘nation’ and required an equivalent notion of the Russian Narod or ‘people’. The State Socialist ‘theatre state’ with its newly imagined (national) People as a compulsory audience, employed various ‘technologies of the imagination’ – parades, show trials, festivals, meetings and speeches etc. Relations between the Russian and Mongolian peoples were framed in terms of a fraternal metaphor – ah (elder brother). Today Mongolia finds itself in an economic and political position that is comparable to many post-colonial nations. It is now subject to the same discourse of development and the national and transnational institutions that shape conditions in the former colonies. The explicitly junior status of Mongolia with respect to a big Russian brother has been replaced with the implicit infantilisation of western-led Developmentalism, and the danger of a sensation of exclusion that Ferguson calls ‘abjection’.
Buryat Urbanisation and Modernisation: A Theoretical Model Based on the Example of Ulan-Ude
Authors: Batomunkuev Sergei 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper provides a model for understanding the modernisation process undergone by ethnic minorities in Russia during the twentieth century. Modernisation is often seen as a negative process implying cultural loss, but focus on this theme has distracted attention from the more humane and positive aspects of the process. Using the example of the Buryats, the article makes a strong argument for the inevitability of socio-economic change, as people gradually adapt to, and then grasp, the opportunities offered by urbanisation. It is true that the cost has been a relative loss of cultural autonomy and the decline of the Buryat language as a multi-functional means of communication. This happens because allencompassing institutional unification is an inescapable effect of modernisation, and linguistic unity follows the cultural dominance of the majority ethnic group. For minorities cultural autonomy is a transient form and is conditional on even more urgent problems of socio-economic vitality and viability. Thus, culturallinguistic autonomy is inversely proportional to the degree of access to selfrealisation and mobility within industrial societies.
The Mutual-Aid Co-operatives and the Animal Products Trade in Mongolia, 1913–1928
Authors: Atwood Christopher P. 
Published: December 2010

AbstractFrom the first decade of Mongolian independence after 1911, nationalist publicists and officials denounced the dominance of foreign merchants and capital in the Mongolian economy. Officials and historians declared co-operatives to be the road for simultaneous improving the peoples' living standards and also strengthening national independence. Yet examination of statistics and the vigorous debates at the early party congresses and Great Khural meetings from 1924 to 1927 shows that the co-operatives were neither effective in their mandate nor popular with the herders they were intended to help. From the beginning, the co-operatives appear to have answered the needs of the new state more than those of the herding populace.
Manchu Empire or China Historical GIS? Re-mapping the China/Inner Asia Frontier in the Qing Period CHGIS
Authors: Ryavec Karl E. 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis study critiques the China Historical Geographic Information System in terms of its failure to distinguish between regions of Chinese civilisation that were directly incorporated into an imperial field administration and Inner Asian regions under indigenous polities. Although the focus of this study is on eastern Tibet, specifically China’s southwestern Tibetan Frontier in Sichuan, the general methodological approach employed is relevant to the entire Inner Asian cultural region. Despite China’s long history, only some eastern Tibetan communities located along the transition zone between the eastern Tibetan Plateau and agrarian China were integrated into the traditional Chinese field administration. Most of this expansion occurred during the last dynasty known as the Qing or Manchu, c. 1644–1911.
The Movement for Reconstructing Identity through Shamanism: A Case Study of the Aga–Buryats in Postsocialist Mongolia
Authors: Shimamura Ippei 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis paper focuses on the Aga–Buryats of Dornod province, a Mongol minority group in post-socialist Mongolia, and examines the role shamanism played in reconstructing their ethnic identity throughout their cultural revival movement. The paper stresses the socio-psychological aspects: their identity crisis after the collapse of the socialist regime and the role played by shamanism in dealing with this crisis and in reconstructing the Aga–Buryat ethnic identity.
The History and the Political Character of the Name of ‘Nei Menggu’ (Inner Mongolia)
Authors: Borjigin Huhbator 
Published: December 2010

AbstractAfter the independence of ‘Outer Mongolia’ in 1911, and especially after the founding of the Mongolian People's Republic in 1924, ‘Outer Mongolia’ (Wai Menggu in Chinese or Gadaad Mongol and Ar Mongol in Mongolian) became a historical term. Inner Mongolia, on the other hand, became the focal point of the so–called ‘Mongolian problem’, and its name Nei Menggu (C) or Dotood Mongol (M) remained sinocentric, denoting direct rule as it did in the Qing geographical– administrative demarcation of the Mongols. The question of naming Inner Mongolia in both Chinese and Mongolian has thus become significant not only for the Mongols in China, but also for Mongols in the independent state of Mongolia. The founding of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Government in 1947 introduced a new name in Mongolian: instead of Dotood Mongol, it is now called Öbör (the sunny side of mountain) Mongol, thereby forming a geobody with Ar Mongol (formerly Outer Mongolia), and it no longer connotes internal administration within China. However, this change has not been reflected in Chinese translation, as Inner Mongolia continues to be called Nei Menggu and historicist Chinese continue to refer to Mongolia as Wai Menggu. In recent years, some Mongols began to call Inner Mongolia ‘Nan Menggu’, and with it came the change of English translation from Inner Mongolia to Southern Mongolia.
The Aftertaste of Hope: Elements for a Historical Approach to the Study of Collectives in Mongolia and Buryatia
Authors: Delaplace Grégory 
Published: December 2010

AbstractThis review essay concerns the collective farms in Mongolia and Buryatia. What is considered here is not collectivisation per se, but the way it has been studied by European and American specialists in this field, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s.
Relationship Between Man and Nature: A Hermeneutical Approach to Interpreting the Affective Thinking of the Mongolian People
Authors: Terenguto Aitoru 
Published: December 2010

AbstractIn the traditional nomadic culture of the Mongols, their philosophy does not centre around people when it comes to relating to the environment. Instead, sky and nature are worshipped as having the significance of a spiritual being with a Divine soul. This manner of worship manifests itself not only in their daily greetings – Höörhii–Amitan, for example – but also is reflected in their literature, their rituals regarding life and death, and in historical events. This philosophy allowed them to protect their natural habitat, and to live in harmony with nature for centuries; it brought them an inner world of profound peace and tranquillity. In this modern world where their natural environment is facing destruction, and their cultural environment is being contaminated, it is important for us to re-evaluate these issues and redefine traditional Mongolian worship and its meanings.