Mountain, State, Minority: China’s Landscape as Post-Alteric?

Louisa Schein, Associate Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University will lecture at Stanford University on the topic of China's social landscape.

In this talk anthropologist and longtime researcher of ethnopolitics Professor Louisa Schein puts forward a contemporary “post-alteric” formulation of China’s social imaginary, one in which the state and the Han are less polarized with the rural remote. Schein adventurously combines interpretation of three disparate instances – the 1990s film Postmen in the Mountains (Na Shan, Na Ren, Na Gou), ethnic tourism in the Miao mountains, and the media packaging of a Guizhou pop star as an image ambassador. Through this juxtaposition, she revises her earlier formulations of “internal orientalism” to consider a more recent image of state and masses, minorities and Han, urban and rural less in terms of otherness and as increasingly co-imbricated in envisioning China’s social landscape.

Dr. Louisa Schein has taught in the Anthropology and the Women’s and Gender Studies Departments at Rutgers since 1993. She has researched the Hmong/Miao people in China and the United States for almost three decades. She is the author of an ethnographic study of the cultural politics around the positioning and experiences of the Miao, a southwest minority people, in China’s postsocialist transition. Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke 2000) takes a close look at the changing status of non-Han minorities over time and at how Miao people strategized cultural identities and economic change as China embarked on its market transition in the 1980s and 1990s.