Portraits Of Primitives

Ethnicity is a highly politicized issue in contemporary China. Twentieth-century nation-building has been intimately involved with classification of ChinaOs fifty-five ethnic minorities and with fostering harmony and unity among nationalities. Officially sanctioned social science classifies the majority group, the so-called Han, at the pinnacle of modernization and civilization and most other groups as Oprimitive.O In post-socialist China, popular conceptions of self, person, and nation intersect with political and scholarly concerns with identity, sometimes contradicting them and sometimes reinforcing them. In Portraits of OPrimitives, O Susan D. Blum explores how Han in the city of Kunming, in southwest China, regard ethnic minorities and, by extension, themselves. She sketches Oportraits, O or cognitive prototypes, of ethnic groups in a variety of contexts, explaining the perceived visibility of each group (which almost never correlates with size of population). Ideas of OHannessO can be understood in part through Han desire to identify unique characteristics in ethnic minorities and also through Han celebration of the differences that distance minorities. The book considers questions of identity, alterity, and self in the context of a complex nation-state, employing methods from linguistic anthropology and psychological anthropology, as well as other forms of cultural analysis. Providing nuanced views of relationships among political, scholarly, and popular models of identity, this book will be an invaluable guide for those working in China studies, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

"As an account of growing up female, it is a fit companion piece to Mary McCarthy's classic Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood."—Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times.

Tylor's ideology is best described in his most famous work, the two-volume Primitive Culture. The first volume, The Origins of Culture, deals with various aspects of ethnography including social evolution, linguistics, and myth. The second volume, titled Religion in Primitive Culture, deals mainly with his interpretation of animism. On the first page of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides an all-inclusive definition which is one of his most widely recognized contributions to anthropology: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Primitive Culture remained the pinnacle of Tylor's career, important not only for its thorough study of human civilization and contributions to the emergent field of anthropology, but also for its undeniable influence on a handful of young scholars.