The Images Of Guizhou Ethnic Groups In The Eyes Of Samuel Pollard

In the 19 th century, a large number of western missionaries came to China and lived there for a long time. Most of them have done the preaching activities through the churches that have great influences on the society, culture and politics at that time. Meanwhile, it made the job of missionaries have the research significance on culture and history level.In domestic, there are abundant researches about missionaries, these studies are mainly concentrating on the achievements and faults that missionaries done, or the collections and arrangements of the texts that missionaries wrote. These studies almost never analyze missionary works from the methodology side, and they also lack of comparative method to analyze the deep reason of Chinese images. Till now, the studies start from the side of comparative literature that analyze the books the missionaries wrote during the preaching in southwest China among ethnic groups were not found. Today, studies on the culture recognition of minority groups and national identity have received more attention. This paper elaborates and analyzes the images of Guizhou minority groups from the western percept have not only breakthrough the sole perspective on minority group but enhance the understanding of different nations.In the southwest part of China, Samuel Pollard has mainly preached among the minority area where he has made great contribution on education, culture, religion and health care. He once created the extreme cultural prosperity in the Stone Gateway area and has deep source and relation with the southwest ethnic groups. This thesis extracts the ethnic minorities’ images from his books, through the description of different aspects of minority image to analyze the reason for missionaries constructed this kind of minority images from the aspect of image studies and culture.This thesis includes three parts: the introduction, main body and conclusion. The introduction part reviews the studies about Samuel Pollard and his works both at home and abroad, illuminates the research purpose, significance of this paper and puts forward problems this thesis is going to solve. The main body composes of four chapters:Chapter one introduces Samuel Pollard and his deeds, the analysis of the domestic and oversea background for Pollard came to China, also his preaching jobs in Guizhou Province.Chapter two collects the minority image in Pollard’s text works, what kind of the images the ethnic groups have? From the aspects of people, manners and customs, folk religion and written language, chapter two draws out the ethnic group image in the book of Samuel pollard.Chapter three analyzes how Pollard constructs the image of the minority people, combined with image theory to analysis the minority image in chapter two. Through affirmation of self and negation of the ethnic group image, affirmation of the ethnic group images through comparing with the Han people to shape a multifaceted ethnic group images of Guizhou.Chapter four analyzes why Samuel Pollard defines the ethnic group in Guizhou in this way. This chapter analyzes from economic and culture background of China and western countries, doxies of Christianity, missionary mission and personal cognitive of Samuel Pollard, in order to uncover the image of ethnic group as well as the image of missionary and the western society.Through the analysis and argumentation of four chapters above, this thesis figures out that the Chinese minority people are not objective in the eyes of missionary, the minority images in Samuel Pollard’s mind has its own limitation and subjectivity. But the images in the text works of Samuel Pollard have present us a new perspective of Guizhou ethnic groups. Through the theory of comparative literature image and texts analysis method, this thesis interprets the minority image, and discovers the historical changes of minority people in Guizhou.