Wild histories: Popular culture, place and the past in southwest China

Media representations increasingly dominate our world by shaping identities and interests. This dissertation analyzes the ongoing relationship between transnational, national and local representations of the people and past of Dali, Yunnan, a Bai and Muslim minority region of southwest China. Although Dali is a small, borderland place in the Himalayan foothills, it has figured prominently in Chinese popular culture. Employing both media analysis and participant observation, this study suggests that we can achieve a more complete understanding of the relationship between power, inequality and identity by examining representations in practice. Groups and individuals formulate, appropriate and negotiate representations of people, place, and the past as they seek to claim identities and control resources.; An examination of five types of representation—(1) historical texts; (2) a film; (3) a novel; (4) a museum; and (5) a pilgrimage festival—reveal marked differences in portrayals of Dali's people and past. Textual emphasis on similarity to or difference from a generalized “Chinese culture” reflects overarching political agendas, which Bai intellectuals and villagers must negotiate. A 1959 film illustrates that during the revolutionary era Bai minority villagers served as role models of socialist modernity and women's liberation. In the current reform era developers use the film, along with a Hong Kong martial arts novel, to market Dali as an exotic tourist destination to over half a million national and transnational tourists each year. While tourism provides short-term employment, it threatens long-term displacement as homes and land disappear under hotels, highways and airports. Dali villagers use their own popular culture, in particular a pilgrimage festival, to illustrate that their history is integrally tied to the land itself. Displacement from the land means a displacement from their history. While Dali fits a growing global pattern of tourism development and displacement, it demonstrates that minority peoples also subvert external models of “rational” development. Finally the study examines why Chinese popular culture has focused on Dali's Bai minority to the exclusion of Muslim history and culture.