Content area
Abstract
This dissertation examines how written and visual texts in Tang China constructed ethnic identity. It uses sources from a wide variety of genres and covers a range of topics to analyze from different perspectives the relationship between Chinese cultural identity, Han ethnic identity, and the ethnocultural concept of the “barbarian” that was used as a foil for the other two overlapping categories. Previous works on ethnic heterogeneity in Tang society have assumed that the dominant trend was cosmopolitanism, accommodation, and ultimately the assimilation of non-Han peoples (“sinicization”) based on the understanding that ethnic identity in China was defined by cultural traits. This work, however, proposes that descent, geography, physiognomy, and political orientation were equally important in the discursive construction of ethnic difference and barbarianness by Tang elites, thereby altering our understanding of how identity was defined and the nature of Chineseness itself. Indeed, a central argument with significant implications for our understanding of how non-Han peoples functioned within the Tang empire is that the state and elites in many instances valued non-Han peoples because of their barbarian qualities, such as martiality, countering the accepted picture of Tang political elites as always promoting assimilation.
This dissertation relies heavily on recent anthropological and sociological theories of ethnicity, though it is also indebted to the work of earlier historians of China working in both the classic sinological and Morganist-Marxist traditions. The body of the dissertation examines various genres and topics of Tang discourse—jokes and insults, stereotypes, Buddhism's foreign origins, physiognomy and heredity, clothing, non-Han as depicted in mortuary art, geographic thought, political loyalty, and migration—where the construction of ethnic difference played a central role. Although this study is far from exhaustive and provides only a foundation for the future analysis of the role of ethnicity in Tang social, economic, and political history, the wide range of subjects where ethnicity played an important role in structuring elite discourse, and, I would argue, popular behavior, points to the necessity of integrating evolving notions of ethnic identity and the nature of China itself into the various narratives of premodern Chinese history.
