Repositioning Ethnicity in the Process of State Building:
The Power of Culture and The Poverty of Interpretation
Naran Bilik
Email: naranbilik@gmail.com
Abstract
In this article, I try to analyze the incongruity between ethnicity and its theorization in China, and explore the tension between Minzu discourse that did not take full account of minority linguistic-cultural “heteroglossia” in “translingual practice” (Liu 1995) and new ethnic performatives. Drawing on Walker Connor’s study of the national question, I argue that the old formula of “national in form, socialist in content” as has been applied in China lacks an “indexical embodiment” dimension, which leads to political ambiguities and identity conflicts. [ethnicity, form, content, indexical embodiment, nationalism]
Soviet nationality model has greatly influenced Chinese communist revolution; it strategizes that communists can first manipulate national aspirations ‘as a means of furthering the world revolutionary movement’ though nationalism is incompatible with a postrevolutonary society because it is “a bourgeois and petit bourgeois ideology” (Connor 1984:xiii). It is believed that the communists will eventually abolish nationality and that “the working men have no country.” Two ideologies are at war: one believes that humans should classified horizontally into socioeconomic classes (Marxism), and the other insists humanity should be divided vertically into national compartments (nationalism) (Connor 1984:6). Here Marxism bears resemblance to Saussurean linguistics. The former foregrounds the universal law that dictates the inevitability of social evolution; the latter conceptualizes language as an arbitrary system of signs and a self-contained system of synchronic-grammatical relationship. Both prefer “horizontal” to “vertical.” We can locate Saussurean linguistics in the nominalist strain in philosophy of Western thought, which “treats all universal concepts (including “nature” and “community”) as arbitrary social constructs” (Wollock 2001:250); there is no place for history and culture as far as it involves “meaning.” According to Soviet theorization, horizontal class distinctions can override boundaries of languages and cultures, bypass historical social formations, and, in Connor’s paraphrase, “cut across national groupings” (Connor 1984:5). Lacking cultural dimension and its oversight of historic particularities Soviet nationality model is challenged by nationalism. This is again evidenced by widespread ethnicism and nationalism in present-day China where symbolic battles are fought on both national form and ethnic content.
Contemporary history of Chinese revolution is marked by a flexible application of Soviet principles and a long-term strategy of “united front” in dealing with nationality problems, a “dialogue” between revolutionary principles and the “Chinese characteristics.” Before and after the communist takeover in 1949 the CCP has carried out nationality policies that encourage Minzu education and cultural expressions, and even allowed political assertions. Between 1950s and 1970s the Chinese government has identified 55 officially recognized national minorities or Shaoshu Minzu according to, as it claims, Stalin’s “four-Common” definition of nation. In recent years, China’s transformation into a more viable market is accompanied by a surge of spontaneous passion for “nation-building” and “culture reinventing.” The old conceptual framework of nationality and its semiotic discourse is challenged. Even though this is an established fact that the boundaries of race, language and culture do not coincide (Boas 1940; Sapir 1921) and that “the problems of sovereignty and of nationalism, of states and of nations, are not the same” (Seton-Watson 1977:2), efforts to make all these boundaries congruent have never stopped all over the world. However, the real situation described by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan (1996) and Daniel Bell (1996) defies such assimilationist efforts. In New York, Glazer and Moynihan point out, responding to the pressures of mainstream assimilation, ethnic groups revitalize ethnic ties, as “defined in familial, historical, interest, and religious terms,” and convert them into political interest groups (John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith 1996). According to Daniel Bell such ethnic revival stems from the fact that “ethnicity combines affect and material interest” while class does not (John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith 1996).
MINORITY POLICIES AND CHALLENGES TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
As early as 1934, the Chinese Soviet Republic recognized the right of self-determination of the national minorities, and their right to complete separation from China, and to the formation of and independent state for each minority (Article 14 of the 1934 CCP constitution, MUF 1991:206-209). In 1935 CCP promised independence to the Mongolians and Chinese Moslems, calling upon them to organize their own state (Walter Connor 1984: 81).
In early years of New China, the Chinese Communist Party designed a series of preferential policies to guarantee the national minorities the freedom of language use and language development. Education Minister MA Xulun demanded that all those Minzu including the Mongols, the Koreans, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and the Khazaks use their own languages and writings in education; special fund be set aside for developing national minority education (Han 1998:103-104). Several instruments, according to Wu (one of the top-ranking officials at the State Ethnic Affairs Commission), were fundamental for materializing the CCP ideology of nationality education, which included training of minority political elite and professional personnel, dissemination of Marxist view on nation and nationalism, respect for local customs, use of minority languages by all government institutions, and preferential treatment for minority students (Wu 2000:4-9). Classics by communist leaders were translated into various minority languages; ethnic performances were staged singing the praise of CCP leadership and Chairman Mao; proportional number of minority members was promoted to hold offices in local government; self-government by the national minority became a standard. Such pro-minority policies were designed to serve the long-term strategy for realizing the Chinese version of communism.
Affirmative action programs, however, have suffered setbacks during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution ; the rise of mainstream nationalism in recent years is challenging these programs. During the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, for example, Inner Mongolian borders were redrawn to circumvent minorities’ ostensible raison d’être. In 1969 the size of Inner Mongolia, the first autonomous region created in 1947, was decreased by one-third due to the redrawing of its boundaries by the central government: “huge segments of territory were severed from both its eastern and western flanks and were assigned to Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Gansu, and Ningxia.” Since late 1978 the household contract responsibility system was introduced to Mongolian herding communities in Inner Mongolia. Livestock was sold to private households and rangeland was enclosed (NMGDCDBZWYH 1991:301). This replacement of Mongolian open horizons by regimented space, heterogeneous patchwork by homogenized fields, landscape diversity by resource concentration, and the casual mix of grass and sand by clear boundaries, has brought “social disorientation and general anomie,” disrupting “long-standing feedback loops between residents and their production environment (Williams 2002:203). “Visual cues on the landscape that once guided local herders as they made daily and seasonal resource management decisions no longer provide the same information”; “herding skills have become less relevant;” herders are losing their grazing strategy (Williams 2002:203). The original landscape disappeared, endangering the traditional repertoire of sociocultural embodiment between Mongolian herders and the landscape. Place matters (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001).
TRANSLATING MINZU
When modeling on the Soviet experience and classifying the non-Han from four to fifty-five nationalities, the CCP did not follow Stalin’s “four-common” definition of natsia (nation) . No distinction was made between pre-feudal and post-feudal community---they have all been lumped together as Minzu. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, for example, makes no distinction between “Han nationality” and “Han ethnic group” (Bianjishi 2002:765, 766). In Chinese the word Minzu can be translated into English “nation,” “nationality,” “minorities,” and “peoples.” Walter Connor argues that terminological chaos, even in English, help explain “why scholars have had trouble recognizing and appreciating the force of ethnonationalism” (1994: 89-117). For example, English speakers tend to confuse “nation” with “state;” people connect nationalism more to the state than to the nation (Connor 1994:91). This makes it possible for Chinese revolutionaries to play with terminological ambiguities to achieve pragmatic purposes. On one occasion, they decided that only nations, which are “large,” “well defined,” “historical,” and “great” peoples of “undoubted vitality,” have “the right of the great European nations to separate and independent existence;” such right was not to be granted to “those numerous small relics of peoples,” “such as Highland Gaels, the Welsh, Manxmen, Serbs, Croats, Ruthenes, Slovaks, and Czechs” (Connor 1994:15). On another, nations like the Germans, Italians, Magyars, and Poles were taken to “denote the forces of enlightenment and progress, a role previously reserved for the proletariat, while still other entire nations (particularly the non-Polish and non-Russian Slavic peoples) had now been substituted for the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in the role of darkness and reaction” (ibid.). Communist strategists sometimes distinguished “nation,” “nationality” and “class,” sometimes did not. They used them interchangeably when the international movements demanded. Generally speaking the Marxist evolutionary version of human history placed nation at a higher rung than nationality, and nationality higher than ethnicity. In the former Soviet Union, while the 14 ‘nations’ enjoyed republican status other “nationalities” and “tribes” have to be content with less independent autonomous forms of government. Back in China, the Han was the only nation by default when the Chinese is generally thought of as an equivalent to the Han (Gladney 1998:11). The non-Han are all nationalities, not nations.
Strategic labeling and revolutionary taxonomy, and, in their relevance, language, are vital for China and other socialist countries. In late 1990s Chinese government started to recheck the translation of Minzu and other terminologies, again with strategic considerations. Despite the Marxist evolutionary definition of nationality as social formation inferior to nation, policy makers are concerned that “nationality” is too close to “citizenship,” which can be synonymous with the nation-state. From the official newspaper China Daily to the state nationality commission, a silent replacement of “nationality” for “ethnic” in English has taken place. In China, however, “ethnic” is randomly used to designate national minorities, their subgroups; it also designates sub-groups of the Han such as the Hakka, Fukien, and some times, homosexuals and migrant laborers. Anthropologist Emily Honig uses the term “ethnicity” to refer to the Subei Han people in Shanghai (1992), and so do many other anthropologists of China who connect ethnic with immigration (Ownby 1990, Harrell 1990, Gates 1981, Blake 1981). “Ethnic / Ethnicity” does serve to depoliticizing minority labels; it creates what Viveiros de Castro calls uncontrolled equivocation,” a type of communicative disjuncture where the interlocutors are not talking about the same thing, and do not know this” (Blaser 2009).
LINGUISTIC ANXIETY
Though China has not yet designated Chinese as official language, the promotion of standard Chinese among the 55 national minorities has always been a mainstream concern. China’s leadership takes language as a vital component for constructing of a civil society, and “national form” should be replaced with “Chinese form.” Pinyin has become “the model for modernization of orthography in minority languages” (Zhou 2003:367-372). Similarly the Uygur Arabic writing was to be Cyrilliziced, and then was stopped to be Latinized after Sino-Soviet relation turned sour. There has long been the view that “Mandarin stands at the pinnacle of a metalinguistic hierarchy which mirrors the vertical basis of power in China today” (Dwyer 1998). One representative argument holds that the speed of building a Chinese civil society often corresponds to the speed of acculturation of the national minorities. Primary schools in minority-populated areas mostly use textbooks translated from their Chinese equivalents; the content lacks local knowledge and ethnic culture and history. In Minhe County of Northwest China, where the Monguor (Tu) live, “schooling” at the secondary level ends up with “artificiality of the educational experience.” Students cannot understand their teachers, “who teach only in non-local Chinese dialects”; “[a]ll the texts are in Chinese” (Zhu, and Stuart 1999). In Dai-populated Sipsong Panna of South China, minority students use the same textbooks for Han students in the rest of China ending up learning nothing about their own history, literature and religion but “a negative image of their own culture heritage” (Hansen 1999). In Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, mainstream officials commonly believe that the top priority for western development is to make local minorities learn Chinese. Local authorities make use of Justus von Liebig’s “Shortest Stave” theory (“The Law of the Minimusm”) and link it iconic-metaphorically to the minority language—the minority languages are the shortest staves.
A Chinese level test, HSK , has been designed to aid the efforts of replacing minority languages with Chinese as the teaching media. HSK has 11 grades with 6-8 as mid level and 9-11 as high level. An interviewee, an official at the local HSK center, explained that starting from 1998 Uyghur teachers who were born after 1958 and who teach non-minority language and culture classes in Uyghur should teach in Chinese and should reach Chinese level 10 in three years. In 1999 the Xinjiang Autonomous Government and its Education Bureau made further training plan and decided that no one would be promoted without obtaining a proper certificate for adequate Chinese level. It is argued that national minorities’ languages such as Uygur are not as “scientifically functional” as Chinese; Chinese represents advancement and minorities’ languages symbolize ‘backwardness.’ Minorities receive poor education because of inadequate teaching media. Minority members are confronted with a linguistic situation in which an increasing number of young people started to learn Chinese and a foreign language keeping an eye to job opportunities and postgraduate education (Cf. Bulag 2003).
Map is one important component of “cultural technologies of rule” (Dirks 2001, Hirsch 2005:12-15) that assist the centralized management of cognitive grids of political space. The iconic quality of maps lends more power to the cultural hegemony and symbolic violence. Though maps may undergo many modifications their optical effects never fail to give us a sense of authenticity; we are so innocently manipulated by such political use of Euclidean space. It is especially so when script (power of writing) is used to designate cartographic space and national boundaries. The Department of Anthropology & Ethnology (Now Department of Sociocultural Anthropology) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing started a project on Atlas of Distribution of National Minorities in China (Zhongguo Shaoshuminzu Fenbu Tu) in 1997, after years of hard work it was finally published by Sinomaps Press in 2002 (Hao Shiyuan 2002). There has been a tug-of-war between the English translator and the publisher over the translation of nomenclatures of national autonomous regions. The publisher replaced the original English translation “Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region,” “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” and “Tibet Autonomous Region” with the hybridized Pinyin “Neimongol Zizhiqu” and “Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu.” Such replacement hazed the English words of “Inner” (Mongolia), “Tibet,” and “Autonomous Region.” Map, together with census, museum and other “cultural technologies,” facilitates the process of assimilating the national minorities.
MINORITIES’ RESPONSE: INNER MONGOLIA
Out of “linguistic anxiety” (Bulag 2003) and in response to rising mainstream nationalism (Gries 2004), minority elites have become more conscious of their identities and try hard to protect their language-culture “form;” they resort to “symbolic appropriation”(Williams 2002: 196-199) or political use of the dead (Verdery 1999, Bulag 2002: 211-244).
English is taught in their own language to keep their language alive; publications in minority languages on local cultures and histories are bound up with translations of Party documents. This revival of “national/ethnic form” and “national/ethnic content” coincides with the mainstream efforts to resuscitate Chinese linguistic and cultural traditions.
In 1992 the former school master Sechen-jorokt (“Mr. Sejo” henceforth) and his colleagues started a Mongolian-Chinese-English trilingualism class to “train Mongolian transnational professionals who should have mastered the most up-to-date technology” (Interviews 1993, 2001). The Middle School Attached To the Inner Mongolia Normal University (MSAIMNU), a key middle school in the Autonomous Region, sponsored the program that recruits both Mongolian and Han students. The school was established in 1954, nearly half a century ago, famous for its teaching-in-Mongolian classes (minzu ban), for which it has received honors from the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau. The school offers Mongolian-teaching-as-supplementary class for urban Mongolians (Mongolian-supplementary Class), Chinese-teaching-as-supplementary class for urban Mongolians (Chinese-supplementary Class) , and Teaching-in-Mongolian class for students from pastureland (Pastureland Class) . The history of the school and its present structure of education in Mongolian make it an ideal place to try out this trilingual program to meet challenges to the Mongolian language and Mongolian education. The trial program has received both supports and protests from the Mongolians. At that time the Mongolian language has already felt deeply the challenge of a market economy that favors world languages such as English and the national language Chinese. This trilingualism program was designed to maintain Mongolian and also to enable Mongolian youngsters in the job market after graduation; it would reinforce Chinese teaching and adding English class at the level of higher middle school. According to the design, teachers of English should come from Chinese speakers so that both English, the subject of teaching, and Chinese, the language in which the class was taught, would be built into the class environment and the tutorial interaction. Mr. Sejo won the support from the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau that issued some important documents and directives to clear the way for the trilingual trial. Mr. Sejo’s proposal (Sechen Jorokt 1998: 4) received a prompt reply from the Inner Mongolia Education Bureau that defined the experiment as “a great project on ethno-national education reform in the Autonomous Region." In 1996 built on its previous successful records, the trilingual class started to recruit students from 11 leagues and cities in the Autonomous Region with enroll rate increasing from 100 to 135 (Sechen-jorokt, Interview 2001).
Ten years have passed since the first experiment of trilingual education at MSAIMNU and the results are dramatic. All graduates score high in all three languages and are "booked" by companies and government organizations even before graduation. Now there are 8 similar trilingual trials are carried out throughout Inner Mongolia with impressive achievements though further survey and research, however, need to be done. The success of such trilingual trial reminds us of a previous trial of teaching English in Mongolian--a project designed and practiced by Mongolian teachers and students from the Foreign Language Department of Inner Mongolia University. They wrote English textbooks in Mongolian and taught English on TV, also in Mongolian.
In Hohhot, Mongolian elites have successfully upheld polices that reinforce the use of the Mongolian writing in public places; bus stops and train terminals are announced in both Mongolian and Chinese. The Chinggis Khan Mausoleum in Ordos city was also expanded and renovated to impress tourists with its grandiosity; it has been designated a patriotic education base for primary and middle schoolers. Gigantic sculptures of Mongolian heroes who appear in the Secret History of the Mongols have been built on the Chinggis Khan Square. These bronze giants, some stand 15 meters high and weigh 480 tons, cost more than 30,000,000 Yuan (about US$ 4.3 million) to manufacture. In Hohhot there are also Chinggis Khan square and Chinggis Khan Boulevard, no less imposing.
ROMANIZATINGS CHINESE WRITING
There is a comparable parallel between what happened to minority language and culture and to the Chinese writing system. In late 1800s, China was repeatedly defeated by Western powers and Japan; reformers were desperately seeking ways of reviving the nation. Bringing Western culture into this ancient land of civilization, Chinese elites started to scrutinize Chinese culture against that of the West, wondering whether the Chinese logographic writing was a degrader rather than a promoter to social development. They were ashamed and felt guilty of their own script. Indeed, as a morpho-syllabic language (DeFrancis 1989, Sampson 1985, Chen 2001), morphemes of Modern Chinese outnumber syllables resulting in a huge number of homophonous morphemes only to be differentiated “in writing by graphically distinct characters (Chen 2001:76),” and comparing with learners of phonographic writing, the Chinese “have to spend an extra two years to acquire the characters of their writing system” (Chen 2001:76). The German philosopher Hegel commented that the Chinese writing is far from perfect and hampers the development of science” (He, Hu, and Zhang 1999:7). For a moment, together with feet-binding by women and pigtails-wearing by men, Chinese characters added to the nation’s embarrassment. Chinese script had to be reformed. According to Zhou Youguang (1961), in the final 20 years of the Qing dynasty there have been 28 proposals raised for reform of the Chinese writing (He et al. 1995:7), and between 1958 and 1980, “as many as 1,667 schemes off phonetic writing of Chinese were submitted to the language planning institution in Beijing” (Zhou 1992:214, Chen 2001:75). The great literary giant Lu Xun believed that Chinese square characters are best for fooling people, harming them like virus (He et al. 1995:8). In 1951 Chairman Mao Zedong of New China demanded reform of Chinese writing, promoting Pinyin and supporting simplified characters as the first step towards Romanization of Chinese writing. Even with government support, however, this Romanization movement came to a halt after reform and open-up in 1978. Among the four major functions that various phonetic schemes were to perform in relation to the original script, namely, auxiliary, supplementary, alternative, and superseding, “only those intended for the auxiliary role have achieved success” (Gottlieb, and Chen 2001:9). When nationalism predominates, “square script” is no more a curse—on the contrary, it is a boon. The great Chinese scholar Xu Shen asserted nearly 2000 years ago in his Shuowen Jiezi (Explanation and Study of Principles of Composition of Characters) that Chinese characters were the foundation of cultural classics and arts; they initiated kingly politics, serving as legacy for later generations to know classical times. The legendary goes that one the Chinese ancestors, a wise man by the name of Cang Jie, invented Chinese characters by observing nature. The moment his invention came to light, rain of millet fell from the sky and ghosts and spirits cried their eyes out (He, Hu, and Zhang 1995:6). Chinese square characters are indispensable in Fortune-telling and naming people in a traditional way. The meaning of radicals, the number of their strokes, their combination, their appearance and their correspondence to Yin and Yang, the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, and the Eight Trigrams (Bagua), form a tight-knit universe of embodiment connecting people’s spiritual life with their very body. The writing and homophonic associations of characters in poems, books, or even personal names bore substantial consequences. The Chinese script served to maintain and strengthen the symbolic order of patriarchy and royal power; it also reflects political taboos in Chinese history.
Written Chinese has achieved a regional universality within China and among China’s neighbors. Their indexical function and multisensory repesentation can hardly be exaggerated. Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages but for their written connections; a Chinese can understand a Japanese Kanji without being able to pronounce it. Chinese characters point to something in common at the semantic end and to something different at the phonetic for those speakers of different languages and dialects. Losing their iconic quality, a result that Romanization of Chinese writing will eventually bring, the Chinese would lose a written lingua franca for communities of dialects whose speech was mutually unintelligible.
Francis Bacon pointed out that Chinese has “direct correspondence between things and words” (Porter 2001:43), and native speakers, according to Juan González de Mendoza, can trace “written character on their palm in order to clear up an ambiguity in speech” (Porter 2001:36). Indeed, as important elements of Chinese script formation, the Xiangxing (“imitate form”) and Xingsheng (“form and sound”) provide pictorial representations of objects and clues to semantic and phonetic components. In traditional China calligraphy and painting are essentially the same, calligraphic styles and techniques can also be used in painting, and vice versa. Writing practice is a life-long process that demands full bodily involvement and mental concentration. The correct posture and the rational way of holding the five fingers and the wrist are important. Each stroke has its standard calligraphic name such as Xuanzhen (pendent needle) and Cantou Fengwai (head of silkworm and tail of phoenix), resembling the natural world. Starting from the Tang dynasty (618-907) Calligraphy became an indispensable component of imperial examination system. The mastery of calligraphy could often lead to political fortune. Many emperors, from Tang to Qing dynasties, were first-class calligraphers themselves. People are judged on their handwriting even now. Many Chinese people in the past had to devote their lifetime to practice calligraphy until it has been objectified into doxa, the merger of subjective and objective world (Bourdieu 1977:159-171). Chinese characters have thus become indexical embodiment of the people in a real sense. CCP language planners and their ultraist predecessors have neglected this decisive power of indexical embodiment that have saturated the body of their own people and are bound to abort their Romanization efforts. The abortion of Romanization of Chinese characters tells us that body has as much its own history as a writing system has its own memory. Like their Chinese counterpart, minority languages and cultures can serve as “embodiment-by-proxy” or become embodiment itself; the process is an open one.
DISCUSSION
The resurgence of ethnicism and nationalism in China supports Walker Connor’s argument that “ethnic consciousness has been definitely increasing, not decreasing, in recent years;” “ethnonationalism … posits the primacy of the ethnonational unit over its class divisions” (1994: 39, 159). Analogically, in the former Soviet Union “interest in class has declined among Soviet historians, and nation, a topic that earlier received extraordinarily little attention, has become a new focus for research” (Suny, and Martin 2001:3). Traditional Soviet thinkers saw in human history the replacement of bourgeoisie nationalism by communism and the overcome of national separatism by class unity. The reality, however, proved time and again that this is out of sync with a new, digital, both globalizing and ethnicizing world: nationalism is on the rise.
Nationalism and Marxism are philosophically incompatible. Nationalism is predicated upon the assumption that the most fundamental divisions of humankind are the many vertical cleavages that divide people into ethnonational groups. Marxism, by contrast, rests upon the conviction that the most fundamental human divisions are horizontal class distinctions that cut across national groupings. The nationalist would therefore contend that, in a test of loyalties, national consciousness would prove more powerful than all intranational divisions, including that of class. Marxists, on the other hand, would maintain that class consciousness would prove the more powerful (Connor 1984: 5).
Examining Chinese reality, we should say that nationalism and Marxism are partially compatible at an earlier stage, especially when Marxism and nationalism unite to fight a common enemy (such as invasion from a foreign country); however, when “communism and nationalism have been perceived as at odds,” nationalism have tended to take priority (Walker Connor 1984: 584). The communist movement, both in the past and at present, has underestimated the power of nationalism.
As the crux of Lenin’s legacy on the national question, the communist party should, “prior to the assumption of power, promise to all national groups the right of self-determination (expressly including the right of secession), while proffering national equality to those who wish to remain within the state”; “following the assumption of power, terminate the fact—though not necessarily the fiction—of a right to secession, and begin the lengthy process of assimilation via the dialectical route of territorial autonomy for all compact national groups” (Walter Connor 1984: 38). The Soviet formula of “national in form, socialist in content” is a transitional stratagem for realizing communist ideal. Following “state-sponsored evolutionism” it aims “to speed up the evolution of the population through the stages on the evolutionary timeline of historical development” (Hirsch 2005). Marxism-Leninism takes single strong interest in horizontal class unity across national borders; it recognizes only one version of history that is lineal and universal, and such history should serve to strengthen the horizontal class unity. Marxists insist that the historical moment of class unity, though it first occurred in the West, should be taken out of its historical flow and therefore no longer treated as historical. It became “horizontalized” standard; those “peoples without history” should “leap forward” and join the larger nations who have “history,” together, striving for the speedy realization of communism. This horizontal, revolutionary time will not recognize bourgeoisie history from now on, if not before; there is no place for ethnonational history. This line of dichotomized thinking fits the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, who emphasizes the arbitrary relation between the signifié and significant. Lenin opined that “the key element was not the language but the message” in dealing with national diversity in early Soviet period (Walter Connor 1984: 37). Following this line of thinking, socialist content (signifié) can be arbitrarily assigned to national form (significant) whenever it seems to fit. In its early days CCP not only tolerated national diversity but also went a long way to design writing systems for national minorities. Important works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were translated into various minority languages; nationality translation institutions have been established in Beijing, Hohhot, Urumiqi, Lhasa, Kunming, and other cities in minority regions. However, during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution of the late 1950s through the most 1970s, such linguistic tolerance was jettisoned because minority languages were associated with “feudalism” (Dwyer 2005:8). Surfaced was the universal perception on the part of Chinese elites that peripheral peoples were “backward” and “without culture;” and that “minority languages were allegedly inadequate for the rigorous communicative demands of modern life, especially modern science” (Dwyer 2005:7, 10).
In appearance, such pragmatic, convenient relationship of arbitrariness often means a rupture between form and content; but reality proves opposite. The relation between content and form is not arbitrary in Saussure’s sense; it is determined in the final analysis by nationalistic needs. In China Leninist revolutionary content has been transformed into mainstream-centralistic content, and both ethnic-national “form” and communist “content” have been mediated by powerful ethnicism-nationalism.
Contrary to the view that signs are arbitrary, verbal representations of their objects, and are as free to depart from them as “rose” from its flower, Peirce points out that sign-object relation is not that arbitrary: many interpretants predict real relations between signs and their objects. He calls such signs indices, and one of his favorite examples is the interpretation of a weathercock as accurately signifying the direction of the wind because of its having a real relation with the wind (James Hoopes 1991:12). Such indexical signs bear a family resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenal body, further developed by Scordas.
If embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not “about” the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world (Csordas 1999).
Since embodiment is “the existential ground of culture and self” and “culture is grounded in the human body” (Csordas 1994:6), it matches nicely Peirce’s triadic formula of human cognition:
According to Peirce, the triadic nature of thinking is exemplified in the process through which the concept of the self is, itself, created. An infant, inferring no self, knows no distinction between its body and the body of a hot stove. The child may therefore touch the stove. From the resulting feeling (sign), the child arrives at the conclusion (interpretant) that there is such a thing as error and that it inheres in its self (object) (Hoopes 1991: 8).
This bodily sign (the resulting feeling) is a kind of embodiment. The stove is touched by the infant resulting in his/her body a haptic sign, which produces the interpretant that “there is such a thing as error and that it inheres in its self (object).” The relation between the body of the hot stove and the body of the infant self is one of mutual embodiment facilitated by the “touch,” finalized by the formation of interpretant. It is through touching the body of the hot stove that the infant starts to know its own body. To the infant, the stove has become “embodiment-by-proxy”— “the process of embedding oneself in a meaningful array of symbols” (Rouse 2004). The embodiment connects the self as object on one end, and interpretant on the other, in the same way the interpretation of a weathercock is signifying the direction of the wind because of its real relation with the wind. This indexical, contiguous relationship is vital for understanding and interpreting culture, society, and history of human beings. Ethnic language and culture and other social aspects are related as a coherent whole; their relationship is not arbitory nor insignificant. Ethnic symbols and events are “embodiment-by-proxy” for relevant communities, and their connections to “forms” often bear ontological significance. By “touching” those symbols and experiencing those events community members realize their “being-in-the-world.” Ethnic/National identity is part of such “being-in-the-world.”
Practitioners of the form-content formula could not see where the culture and self are grounded. Form and content without indexical / embodiment connections are only dead form and dead content; they are dead even before they are put to use. The mainstream elites treat minority language and culture only as handy tools that can be used for universalistic purposes, not for their intimate links with social life and everyday practice. These uncertainties have left the form-content formula off-balance. It should be replaced with a theory foregrounding indexical embodiment, which takes into account the inseparable role of linguistic-cultural indexicality and embodiment with real social life and history.