The Fortress Of People: The Origin Of Memory, Survival In China's Frontier

My dissertation, entitled The Tunpu People-Ethnogenesis, Memory, and Survival on a Chinese Frontier, is a study of the continuing 600-year path of emergence and socio-cultural evolution of the Tunpu, a people group of southwestern China. I understand Tunpu social and cultural development as largely driven by an active and continuing historical process of competition with other local people groups, and resistance against incoming human migration waves, under various historical and material/circumstantial stages. This process has led to the constructed division into the three primary people groups(Tunpu, Han, and ethnic minority) we see locally today-with associated interrelationships and social hierarchies (including systematic inequality), and settlement mapping over physical territory. By carefully tracing the path of Tunpu formation, I have learned that while changing circumstances may trigger many socio-cultural responses-for example social boundary creation or realignment, and symbolic exclusions of specified others-at the same time, the results are not simply deterministic, as the Tunpu regularly apply socio-cultural values to chose specific strategies from preexisting socio-cultural inventories, selectively discarding certain elements, or modifying and subtly giving new meanings to preexisting cultural material. In this case, it appears that culture does matter, as a combination of circumstances and culture largely channels further socio-cultural change. Looking specifically at the 600-year evolution of Tunpu historical memory, including the Tunpu origin narrative and the Tunpu social obsession with that narrative, I have found that group imaginations and understandings of self, others, and the world, are strikingly pliable, susceptible to dramatic reinterpretation and redefinition, both intentional or unconscious, even under very short time periods, and even in the face of counter evidence, or self-contradiction. These group understandings serve the needs and whims of the group, especially under competitive pressures, yet they are also subject to factors and complex forces from a range of actors-inside and outside the group-including now in the modern era, government, media, tourist companies, and invasive social scientists.