From Round to Square (and back)

For The Emperor's Teacher, scroll down (↓) to "Topics." It's the management book that will rock the world (and break the vase, as you will see). Click or paste the following link for a recent profile of the project: http://magazine.beloit.edu/?story_id=240813&issue_id=240610

A new post appears every day at 12:05* (CDT). There's more, though. Take a look at the right-hand side of the page for over four years of material (2,000 posts and growing) from Seinfeld and country music to every single day of the Chinese lunar calendar...translated. Look here ↓ and explore a little. It will take you all the way down the page...from round to square (and back again).
*Occasionally I will leave a long post up for thirty-six hours, and post a shorter entry at noon the next day.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Asian Ethnicities (8)—Dynamics of Ethnicity (d)

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series Asian Ethnicities
A year ago on Round and Square (21 July 2012)—Fieldnotes From History: Provincial Elections (q)
Two years ago on Round and Square (21 July 2011)—Longevity Mountain: Introduction
[a] Seasonal RF
In the next dozen entries, I will be posting an initial draft of a book introduction on Asian ethnic groups. It is meant for the blog, and does not represent anything like what will eventually be published. I do so especially because this represents a compilation of my thoughts after a full year of intensive teaching and research on Asian ethnicity. The introduction to this series shows some of my thoughts from last year—before I taught my advanced seminar by the same title as this series. This is something of a culmination of the process, even though I will be now moving in many new directions in the teaching and study of Asian ethnic groups.

Click below for other items in this essay:
Dynamics 1          Dynamics 2          Dynamics 3          Dynamics 4          Dynamics 5 
Dynamics 6          Dynamics 7          Dynamics 8          Dynamics 9          Dynamics 10
IV
Northern and Central Asia (b)
[b] Respite RF
Today’s central and northern Asia has a complex dynamic that has been shaped by the changing power—and financial—configurations of the former Soviet Union, today’s Russia, and a growing power from the People’s Republic of China. The first things to contemplate are the vast spaces between urban centers and trading networks. Unlike the major urban centers in Japan, Korea, and China—where large cities dot the most common thoroughfares along the Tokkaido, or Eastern Sea Route, the coastal line in China from Tianjin to Fuzhou, or even the links from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula to the mid-north—travel respites of any size are far more scarce in central and northern Asia.
 
The reasons for this are as distinct as the differences in the geographical areas. To begin, it is often difficult to place the precise “settlement date” of a Mongolian city, and for practical reasons that few people in the southerly provinces of China would understand. The cities—they moved. Ulan Bator is just one example of a mobile city that created a semi-nomadic patterning of stasis and change that makes it impossible to place an “origin,” as one can do for Kaifeng or Rome. It literally and figuratively moved up and down the river, and has been, as city boosters might say “a city on the move."
[c] Moving RF

The underpinnings of this idea can tell us a great deal about life beyond the “settled” regions of China. To begin, the presence of constant agriculture (even in conditions in the north and northwest that were not particularly well-suited to it) marks a great break in the growth of civilization and empire. The early Chinese historian Sima Qian wrote that little children in the far north and northwest grew up riding sheep, sitting up in their already formidable stirrups, and shooting rodents on the prairie, even at a tender age. The contrast with the children of cultivated China—and, of course, this phrase has several connotations—are dramatic. Although Mongols, Manchus, and many groups that were prominent in earlier Asian history (such as the Xiongnu), could wreak havoc on the Chinese plains, they were not “built” for a lasting presence unless they found ways to accommodate the presence of a vastly larger and far more urban agricultural and commercial population.
[d] Vast RF

In the north, even today, the distance between even small cities is often vast. Today, the Jeep, long-distance trucks, as well as several train routes, figure in long journeys. Even the centers themselves are quite intriguing when we contemplate the history of these transportation nodes. Many began as Buddhist monastic sites, and grew only slowly into communities with a presence beyond the Buddhist orders. Even in their early incarnations as small cities, they partook of what the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss described as a dynamic of travel and respite. The centers provided places of rest and regeneration in the cold months, before pastoralists would take their herds to farther-flung destinations in the spring, summer, and autumn. This patterning of movement and reconnection is so much a part of central and northern Asian life that it must be considered as one of the great dynamics in its history.

The contrast with settled areas of China and Korea (and Japan, although no conqueror penetrated its shores until the twentieth century) is enormous. Settled agricultural life, with its concomitant market centers and precise agricultural calendar, created a dynamic that led to great domination in all cases, except when northern (or central) groups organized into large conquering forces. The latter happened several times in the past thousand years of Chinese history (and that narrative takes up, arguably, more than half of that time). This is hardly insignificant, and these entries will help to show the ethnic persistence of some of these group
***  *** 
[e] Trucks RF
The challenge for understanding central and northern China today lies in balancing the dynamic histories of these areas with a rapidly changing economic, political, and social climate. The central, northern, and northeastern areas of Asia have figured prominently in the larger East Asian historical narrative, but only for several centuries at a time. Today’s areas are in the vice-lock of an aging (former) Soviet Union and a growing and increasingly aggressive People’s Republic of China. This can be seen in several examples that would ordinarily be overlooked by analysts. Which “way” do the railroads run? Well, mostly they still run to Moscow, or at least its environs. On the other hand, which way do the trucks drive? To Beijing (or its environs)—and even on bumpy, problematic, and uneven roads. The earlier pull of the former Soviet Union still affects mining cities all over northern Asia. The same pressure plays into all of the politics and economics of the central Asian countries, which have always been an amalgamation of complex ethnic, religious, and economic entities. 
[f] Force RF

There is nothing analytically “simple” about understanding this region. For example, Buddhism is a powerful force that is not tied—at least not in a direct sense—to environment or the modes of production. As in China, and the rest of Asia, it has a powerful place in the history of the region, and affects everything from the written languages of the various central and northern regions to their traditions. One anthropologist recently told me of an encounter she had with a stunned Mongol, who was surprised by her deft use of language and context. “You must be a reincarnated Mongolian,” she was told. From there, I have learned of a tremendous wave of fictional kinship ties that can be extended very far into personal family networks…or kept evasively distant, depending on the situation.Finally, linguists have noted many of these dynamics for the past two millennia. Even the Ballad of Mulan is widely known to be of Turkic descent. The entire history of East Asia has much more to do with the cultural dynamics of central and northern Asia than many current textbooks show. And, indeed, even the ethnic histories of eastern Asia show a complex mixing of ethnicity, region, and circumstance than we ordinarily see in overviews of the region 
***  *** 
We turn now to a consideration of East Asia, and China’s pivotal historical role within it.

Click below for other items in this essay:
Dynamics 1          Dynamics 2          Dynamics 3          Dynamics 4          Dynamics 5 
Dynamics 6          Dynamics 7          Dynamics 8          Dynamics 9          Dynamics 10
[g] Powerful RF


Notes
[1] Sima Qian, Historical Records [史記] (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1982), juan 110.



[2] Marcel Mauss, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology [Translated by
     Ian Cunnison] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 76-77.



[3] Chen Sanping, Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 39-41.


No comments:

Post a Comment