Native and Nation: Assimilation and the State in China and the U.S.

Abstract

Native Americans and peoples in China designated “minorities” or “minority nationalities” would seem to have much in common if viewed through the contemporary lens of popular culture prevalent in the two nations. Both Native Americans and China’s minorities have been described as “ethnic” peoples, groups outside the nation’s majority population that represents the nation’s culture and history. Ethnic groups are often seen as “tribal,” a term with connotations of primitiveness and the implication that they have recently emerged from loosely organized tribal life, or otherwise failed to achieve the familiar political configurations of state or empire. Relative to the majority populations, these minorities may be romanticized as repositories of “traditional” knowledge and behaviors reflecting a closeness with nature now lost to the majority freighted with the knowledge of science and the experience of technology and urban life. The flip side of the romance with peoples uncorrupted by contemporary urban life is the ethnocentric notion that minorities need tutelage or direction from the majority population, a response to the related perception that they lag behind the times and are beset with problems arising from their inability to adapt to modern life. Such perceived shortcomings are often attributed to their tendency to cling to irrational customs, their geographic isolation (hence, their failure to learn the national language and culture), and general ideologies, more or less determinist, about their inferiority.