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New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society #4
Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority
Constituting over ninety percent of China's population, Han is not only the largest ethnonational group in that country but also one of the largest categories of human identity in world history. In this pathbreaking volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examine this ambiguous identity, one that shares features with, but cannot be subsumed under, existing notions of ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and civilization.
- GenresChinaNonfiction
418 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2012
About the author
Thomas S. Mullaney
8 books65 followersThomas S. Mullaney is an award–winning Stanford historian, Guggenheim fellow, and former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author of four books on Chinese history and technology and lives in Palo Alto, California.
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November 27, 2024
A solid 2.5 / 5 rounded down. The issue here is that the articles are of such uneven quality (and also ordered in a non-intuitive fashion) that I finished the collection feeling more irritated than enlightened.
Standout articles: Tamara Chin's "Antiquarian as Ethnographer," Mark Elliott's "Hushuo: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese, James Leigobld's "Searching for Han: Early Twentieth-Century Narratives of Chinese Origins and Development", Uradyn E. Bulag's "Good Han, Bad Han: The Moral Parameters of Ethnopolitics in China".
It feels mean to point out what I felt like the weakest articles were, so I won't name them directly. But in general, it would behoove many authors in this collection to be mindful of Kieran Healy's lovely monograph "Fuck Nuance." Adding nuance or detail to avoid directly answering a question is an act of intellectual evasiveness and borders on cowardice. I am not a fan of the academic rhetorical move to simply say "both things can be true" or "it depends" as the answer to any question that asks whether X or Y is more true - not because I think the world isn't really nuanced, but because I don't think you really need to publish a piece whose conclusion is "it's complicated" unless, for some reason, the stakes of the question itself demand the utmost attention to detail.
What did I take away from this collection? That Han-ness is (surprise surprise) a social category that is actually relatively modern in its current usage, that myths of a primordial or ancient Han-ness are used for political leverage, that the usage of "Han" as an ethno/racial category rose directly alongside Western frameworks of racial classification and superiority. At one point in history "Hanren" was a capacious enough term to include Mongols and Turkic peoples; this is no longer the case.
Notably: "The current Han nationality, in fact, does not even correspond to the four Stalinist standards of nationality employed by the Chinese state, namely, a common territory, language, economy, and psychological nature."
Standout articles: Tamara Chin's "Antiquarian as Ethnographer," Mark Elliott's "Hushuo: The Northern Other and the Naming of the Han Chinese, James Leigobld's "Searching for Han: Early Twentieth-Century Narratives of Chinese Origins and Development", Uradyn E. Bulag's "Good Han, Bad Han: The Moral Parameters of Ethnopolitics in China".
It feels mean to point out what I felt like the weakest articles were, so I won't name them directly. But in general, it would behoove many authors in this collection to be mindful of Kieran Healy's lovely monograph "Fuck Nuance." Adding nuance or detail to avoid directly answering a question is an act of intellectual evasiveness and borders on cowardice. I am not a fan of the academic rhetorical move to simply say "both things can be true" or "it depends" as the answer to any question that asks whether X or Y is more true - not because I think the world isn't really nuanced, but because I don't think you really need to publish a piece whose conclusion is "it's complicated" unless, for some reason, the stakes of the question itself demand the utmost attention to detail.
What did I take away from this collection? That Han-ness is (surprise surprise) a social category that is actually relatively modern in its current usage, that myths of a primordial or ancient Han-ness are used for political leverage, that the usage of "Han" as an ethno/racial category rose directly alongside Western frameworks of racial classification and superiority. At one point in history "Hanren" was a capacious enough term to include Mongols and Turkic peoples; this is no longer the case.
Notably: "The current Han nationality, in fact, does not even correspond to the four Stalinist standards of nationality employed by the Chinese state, namely, a common territory, language, economy, and psychological nature."
Displaying 1 of 1 review