Chapter 4 Tribal People 115no doubt. From the standpoint of the Confucian worldview, civilization
was characterized by wenhua, which refers to the molding of the person
(and by extension the community to which the person belongs) by training
in the philosophical, moral, and ritual principles considered to constitute
virtue.... It follows that there was a scale of civilizedness, with the most
civilized being those who had the greatest acquaintance with the relevant
literary works, namely the scholar-officials who served the imperial state
and who served as theoreticians of the moral order. Other Chinese were
somewhat cultured; their family life, religion, language, and other attributes
were similar to those of the literati, even if they had no refinement or direct
knowledge of the important literature. Non-Chinese were a step down,
being not even indirectly acquainted with the moral principles laid out in
the classics.... This moral scale of peoples fits in nicely with the continu-
ing historical process of absorption of once-peripheral peoples into the
broader category of Zhongguo ren (people of the central country), or Chi-
nese. We know that ever since the southward expansion of the Han dynasty
(206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), regions had been sinified by a combination of Chi-
nese migration, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation of the former
natives. (Harrell 1995:19)
The lesson is that there is nothing “essential,” eternal, or primordial about
ethnic identities. These identities come and go; they can be created where none
existed before. They can be constructed internally by a people who have cause
to begin imagining themselves as “one people,” or they can be assigned from
the outside by people bent on differentiating “them” from “us.” Given suffi-
cient motivation and resources, one ethnicity can be shed in favor of another.
Yet when anthropologist Edmund Leach suggested that ethnic identity can
change easily according to the dictates of economic and political circum-
stances, another anthropologist, William Geddes, repudiated this as a danger-
ous view with no scientific backing that would be attractive to “proselytizers
and administrators of every faith and political persuasion” (Geddes 1976:11).
Geddes was concerned that this argument was in the interest of dominant
groups whose efforts at state building would assimilate the Hmong and eradi-
cate their culture. Invariably issues of power underlie issues of ethnicity.Hmong: A Case Study
Jou Yee Xiong lives in the United States. Though his Hmong ancestors
lived lightly on their dry hillsides, prepared to move every five or ten years as
necessary, depending on the productivity of fields, the distance needed to walk
to reach them, or their relations with neighbors, no one could have imagined
reaching such a distant land. His ancestors two centuries earlier had lived in
southern China. But they had fought against the Chinese, losing many men to
Chinese prisons and death, and so they followed their clan leaders southward,
into the hills of Laos in French colonial Indochine. As Jou Yee Xiong tells his
story, “The French asked the Hmong, ‘Why are you always fighting?’ The