Skip to main content
Event Details
October 7, 2016
-

UC Berkeley
180 Doe Library
Berkeley, CA 94720
United States

Public Talk - Berkeley, CA

Ethnic by Design: Branding a Buyi (Bouyei) Cultural Landscape in Late-Socialist Southwest China

Speaker: Yu Luo, Center for Chinese Studies postdoctoral fellow, 2016-2017, UC Berkeley
 
China's Worlds Lecture Series
 
The speaker asks how branding works in contemporary China through looking at the strategies of an ethnic minority in the southwest jockeying for regional and national positioning. Based on 18 months of fieldwork, she will highlight Tai-speaking Buyi (Bouyei) in multiethnic Guizhou Province which treasures minority culture as heritage to battle against its relatively modest level of development. Historically more Sinicized in public perception, Buyi face a conundrum: they are not “exotic” enough. “Ethnic by design” thus captures the conscious fashioning of cultural identity by which Buyi quests for “uniqueness” align with both the language and institutional power of the state as well as new market forces. As Chineseness is being redesigned with energy and ambivalence at this juncture of late-socialism, quotidian productions of Buyi identity by multiple layers of participants reveal subtle negotiation and misrepresentation in juggling the politics of difference.
 
Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321