Popular culture and the production of difference: The Miao and China

This thesis investigates the workings of the production of difference in the domain of popular culture and critically examines its effects on the social order. The case of one ethnic minority--the Miao--in a site that is internally complex and divided--contemporary China--provides the ethnographic ground. The analysis explicates processes by which cultural difference becomes conflated with gender and status distinctions so as to constitute and entrench social hierarchy. This permits the author to rethink theoretical issues of power binaries, the essentialization of difference, the state-society dichotomy and problems of voice and representation.;Conclusions are based on a total of two years of research in China between 1982 and 1989. Multi-site research was conducted at several administrative levels among persons of varying ethnic and occupational statuses culminating in a year of fieldwork in a Miao peasant community in Guizhou province, southwest China.;The author interrogates the elaboration of alterity under conditions of power asymmetry from several perspectives. Historiography, ethnology and state policy are investigated as discourses which construct the Miao as a fixed category with a unitary content. Second, official and popular imaging of the Miao and other minorities is linked to the impulse in 1980s China to craft national identity out of contrast with a putatively backward, feminized other. Ethnographic research at sites where such production of difference took place revealed minorities' multiplex engagement with what has been considered unilateral representation. The author contests earlier theorizing that characterized objects of dominant representation as irrevocably silent.;Miao cultural production revealed active construction of selves and others outside of formal state structures. Miao themselves enunciated relative status positionings through ritual, craft, performance, commodification, etc. The concept of "mobile othering" is offered to describe how subalternity was continually displaced onto those framed as less "modern.";The final perspective comprises an experimental reading of representations of the author's own presence in the field which allows insights into Chinese visions of the internal and international social orders. These four dimensions of cultural production yield understanding not only of the persuasive hold of constructed difference, but of its rupture by hybridity and heterogeneity.