Nicholas Tapp

The Impact of Missionary Christianity Upon Marginalized Ethnic Minorities: The Case of the Hmong

This paper combines historical with anthropological evidence on the relationship between Christianity and messianism among the Hmong of Southeast Asia and China. The lack of literacy is a motivating factor in Hmong Christian conversions. Messianism is seen as a reaction to Christian conversion, which encourages the alienation of minority groups.

Yunnan: Ethnicity and Economics-Markets and Mobility

Geographically, the province of Yunnan is extraordinarily diverse. It borders within China on Tibet, Sichuan, Guizhou and Guangxi, and beyond China on Burma, Laos and Vietnam. It is larger than Germany and has a population in excess of 45 million. The province ranges from the snow-capped Himalayan peaks of the Tibetan areas in the north-west to the irrigated wet-rice fields of the Dai people in mountain valleys and subtropical forest bordering Laos and Vietnam to the south and has several distinct ecological zones. Although conquered by the Qin Emperor’s armies as early as the second century BC, and further ‘pacified’ by the statesman Zhuge Liang in the third century AD, Yunnan was not properly incorporated into the Chinese Empire until Kublai Khan’s Mongol invasion and conquest of 1253. From a Chinese point of view, Yunnan has always been seen as a wild and peripheral area, inhabited by strange beasts and peoples, ghosts and miasmas (Schafer 1967). Eileen Walsh (2009) remarks in a recent review article on how, when she was applying for graduate programmes in anthropology in the US in the early 1990s, she was told by several departments that Yunnan was not really a part of China. This is a consistent perception, despite the very clear administrative, political and cultural incorporation of the province into the modern nation-state of China (Fitzgerald 1972). George Skinner (1977) grouped the Yunnan Plateau, encompassing Yunnan and parts of Guizhou, as one of the nine distinctive socioeconomic macroregions of Han China, which he called ‘Yun-Gui’ (Skinner 1977a, b, c). Recently, Bin Yang (2009a), on the history of Yunnan, is determined to consider Yunnan in its proper context as a part of world history and, for most of history, not really forming a part of China. Further, James Scott (2009) considers most of south-western China as part of ‘Zomia’, a vast ‘area of refuge’ from the state stretching from Bangladesh to Malaysia, as indeed does Jean Michaud (2000, 2006) in his references to the ‘Southeast Asian Massif ’ (cf. van Schendel 2002).

The consuming or the consumed? Virtual Hmong in China

Travel, indeed, struck him as being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience (Huysmans 1959[1888]).

Geomancy and development

Geomancy is common in Southeast Asia. The imaginative association of disparate spatial and temporal coordinates allows discourses to emerge in which problems that cannot be resolved in the real world may be ‘thought’ through geomantic images and symbols. The Hindu‐Buddhist cosmographies of Southeast Asia form a framework within which the ‘geomancies’ of minority peoples take place. By modifying the relations of the real world, or depicting them in a timeless way, geomancy like poetry may allow changes to be experienced at a conceptual level before they are introduced into pragmatic affairs, or act against suck changes being brought about.

Cultural Accommodations in Southwest China: The "Han Miao" and Problems in the Ethnography of the Hmong

The Hmong of southern China define themselves as an unmarked category in relation to two significant others: the Chinese and the Yi. Using data from fieldwork in Sichuan, the A. examines some problems of Hmong ethnography, inquiring why color terms were used for some groups of Hmong, as well as subdivisions of them. He attempts to consider the Hmong not only in terms of their relationships with the Han, but also with the Yi. However, the weight of historical evidence is against this; the Hmong were a very isolated group. Many Hmong subdivisions did arise through intermarriage with Chinese, but if culture is often transmitted maternally, how were Confucian values disseminated to minority populations through intermarriages with Chinese males? The official classification of Hmong (together with other groups) as Miao posits a fierce opposition between Han and Miao, yet the Hmong have stories of how Hmong and Han were originally two brothers worshipping at the same paternal grave, whose descendants lost touch with each other. This sort of genealogical model (variety out of unity) shows how idioms of patrilineality may overlap with diffusionist culturalist notions of assimilation to a greater Chinese identity. The genealogical model contrasts with a more existentialist and constructivist model that emphasizes the way identity may emerge from, or be imposed on, cultural differences. In fact both are mutually constitutive.

Religious Issues in China's Rural Development: The Importance of Ethnic Minorities

This paper considers Chinese religion in relation to the changing nature of rural society and modernisation. Rural/urban distinctions are questioned, while the realities of religious differences between them are affirmed. Development is related to modernisation and multiple sources of Chinese modernity are considered. Religion is examined in terms of its tendencies towards diversification and capacity to embody visions of an alternative moral order. Some aspects of ethnic minority religion and its renewal are introduced, with reference to the ethnography of the Hmong, to show that minority religious issues can reflect broader religious issues in China. Geomancy and ancestral worship are shared by Hmong and Han Chinese. In conclusion it is argued that religion is increasingly presented as cultural in China through a process of ‘folklorisation’, which in the larger sense may not be problematic, yet important aspects of spirituality are lost which may find expression in mass Christian conversions.

Geomancy and development: The case of the white Hmong of North Thailand*

Geomancy is common in Southeast Asia. The imaginative association of disparate spatial and temporal coordinates allows discourses to emerge in which problems that cannot be resolved in the real world may be ‘thought’ through geomantic images and symbols. The Hindu‐Buddhist cosmographies of Southeast Asia form a framework within which the ‘geomancies’ of minority peoples take place. By modifying the relations of the real world, or depicting them in a timeless way, geomancy like poetry may allow changes to be experienced at a conceptual level before they are introduced into pragmatic affairs, or act against suck changes being brought about.

Multicultural China: A Brief View

Throughout history, race, language and religion have divided China as much as physical terrain, political fiat and conquest. However, it is always a politically sensitive issue to identify those non-Han people as different ethnic groups. As a result, the total number of ethnic groups has never been fixed precisely in China. For example, in 1953, only 42 ethnic peoples were identified, while the number increased to 54 in 1964 and 56 in 1982. Of course, this does not include the unknown ethnic groups as well as foreigners with Chinese citizenship.

Employment and Wages

The ratio of employees to rooms for the industry is about 7 employees to 10 rooms (.72 employees per room). This ratio is lowest for the small establishments with 5 to 10 rooms that employ .42 persons per room, while the largest businesses with 100 rooms or more employ .85 people per room. Many medium and large lodging businesses such as hotels and country inns provide other than lodging services, such as dining and recreation, requiring additional staff.

Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia

Religion is somewhat like language in that it can seem to move almost by itself, spreading from one community or society of people to another who remain in their own places, or it can be transported to distant places by individual bearers or communities who move individually or are moved through collective dislocations. The great ‘world religions’ of Christianity and Islam have spread throughout the world through colonial missionary and trading activity and through their endorsement and adoption by local populations, as indeed has Buddhism and those South Asian faiths and practices which coalesced into what we know as Hinduism (Inden 1990). In the Christian context, Keith Thomas’s (1971) Religion and The Decline of Magic began a process of charting the complex relations between the adoption of new forms of faith and their accommodation with older practices which has continued through later work. The importance of Marian cults of devotion not only in Mediterranean societies (Carroll 1986) but worldwide, from India and South America to Uganda (Vokes 2005), shows not only the regional expansion and movement of beliefs and practices, but also their indigenisation by local peoples and their adaptation to pre-existing ‘structures of feeling’ which history had apparently submerged. For religion, exemplary of Geertz’s (1963) ‘assumed givens’ of social existence, also has a strongly gravitational pull, and place is often actively reinvented through such movements of religious belief or the bearers of those beliefs, as we realise when we find Buddha’s footprints or relics of the Buddha enshrined across parts of Southeast Asia unvisited by the historical Buddha, or shrines erected to Catholic saints who have become identified with earlier local mystics.