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BOOK REVIEWS Asia Stevan Harrell (Ed.), Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle, WA: Uni- versity of Washington Press, 1995), 366 pp. Hardback. Stevan Harrell has produced yet another work focusing on the nationality minorities of China, this time an edited collection focusing on the construction and reconstruction of ethnic boundaries in China over the last few centuries. Harrell's opening chapter sets the theoretical frame on which he attempts to hang the book's contributions (half from students of his at the University of Washington in Seattle), an attempt that is reasonably successful. The editor tells us that the book is concerned with the successive ideologies of the Confucian, Christian, and Communist "civilizing projects" for the non-Han ethnic minorities (whom he calls the "peripheral peoples") of China. In a civilizing project, "the civilizing center interacts with other groups ... in terms of a particular kind of inequality" (p. 4); the center claims superiority and a commitment to raise peripheral peoples up to its higher level. Sexual, educational, and historical metaphors are employed to characterize minorities as women, children, and ancient. Most peripheral peoples accept some of the ideology of the civilizing project, including a stigmatized self-image. These phenomena are,
Journal of Asian and African Studies (in 2002 continued as African and Asian Studies) – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1998
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