In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world’s languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People’s Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

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You can read more of Gerald’s work in his blogposts.

Transcript (coming soon)

Students at the German-Chinese College, ca. 1910 (Source: German Federal Archives)

The dichotomy of East and West is a recent phenomenon and associated with European industrialization. Yet, it is difficult to escape this dichotomy in contemporary thought, where orientalism continues to inform debates inside and outside the academy. The increasing construction of an opposition between East and West – rather than a view of Eurasia as a complex whole – can be dated back to the 19^th century, as social anthropologist Chris Hann explains in this 12-minute lecture.

Even when the divergence between East and West materialized in colonial contexts, it was by no means straightforward and clear-cut. Instead, the discursive construction of East and West was polyvocal and dialogical. A good example of these shifting discourses can be found in the fluctuation in European views of China. Since the Middle Ages, European views of China veered between Sinophilia and Sinophobia, as the historian George Steinmetz explains in his study of German colonialism, The Devil’s Handwriting, a summary of which is available here on Language on the Move.

In the 16^th and 17^th century China emerged as a highly positive model in European discourse. The Jesuits, who were the first Europeans to spend extended periods there and to seriously engage with China, described China as a stable state governed by learned men, the mandarins, in the manner of Platonists. They found a lot to admire in China: the practical philosophy of Confucianism as well as Chinese politeness, medicine and language. During that period, the Chinese were rarely regarded in racial terms. If they were, they were usually considered white. In short, Chinese civilization was viewed as equal to European civilization and in some respects, even as superior.

With increasing European colonial expansion, this changed from the late 18^th century onwards and another – negative – discourse began to emerge. The rise of Sinophobia was an “intradiscursive response to Sinophilia” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 388). In this discourse, the traditional stability of the Chinese state came to be seen as stagnant, despotic and the sign of a decaying nation. The learnedness and politeness of mandarins became a time-wasting pretension. The Chinese state exam for the selection of mandarins was no longer seen as a meritorious system but was now perceived as breeding imitation and copying. Confucianism was demoted from admired philosophy to false religion. And, last but not least, the Chinese became racialized as “the yellow race”, which was considered semi-barbarian and half-civilized.

Opening ceremony of the German-Chinese College, Qingdao, 1909 (Source: German Federal Archives)

These opposing discourses and the polyvocality inherent in interweaving discourses shaped a distinct native policy in the German colony of Qingdao. For a general overview of the colony, see Ingrid Piller’s summary of The Devil’s Handwriting.

The forces of Sinophobia were resounding at the dawn of colonization and during the first periods of segregationist German native policy in Qingdao (1897-1904). However, the precolonial discourse of Sinophilia had never fully retreated from the scene and it resurfaced again after 1905 in German Qingdao. Against this resurgence, German-Chinese cultural exchange emerged in the second phase of the colony (1905-1914), which can best be described as “an open-ended joint cultural program” (Steinmetz, 2008, p. 487). A key expression of this joint cultural program was the German Chinese College.

It was one of the stated goals of the German Chinese College to share the best of the two cultures.

At the school’s opening ceremony in 1909, speakers from both sides endorsed the idea of combining the best of their two cultures. A toast was raised to the Chinese emperor, the “national anthem” of the Qing Empire was sung, and the school’s German director proclaimed that “all of the cultural peoples [Kulturvölker] are linked by a common bond” and should “share their discoveries.” Here the Chinese were unambiguously (re)inscribed into the dominant pole of the German racial-anthropological binary. The imperial German and late Qing dynasty flags flew side by side in front of one of the school’s provisional buildings. (Steinmetz, 2008, pp. 486f.)

The German colony has left its traces in photos displayed on the wall of a Qingdao backpacker hotel (Photo: Gegentuul Baioud, 2012)

One of the men who pushed forward this cultural syncretism was Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930). Wilhelm was a colonial officer who lived in China for 25 years and became a renowned Sinologist in Germany after World War I. His cultural hybridity was admired by many and Carl Jung lauded him as a “mind which created a bridge between East and West and gave to the Occident the precious heritage of a culture thousands of years old” (quoted in Steinmetz, 2008, p. 505).

In sum, European representations of the Chinese were highly polyvocal and linked to different forms of cultural syntheses.

This raises an important question for our conceptualization of Orientalism. Can a universal concept of Orientalism explain the diverse representation of non-Europeans by Europeans and the subsequent multiple forms of cultural engagement ranging from clashes to cooperation? To put it differently, is there one orientalism or are there many orientalisms? To reflect on the multiplicity of the discursive space that has put East and West in opposition is crucial for mutual understanding and transcending this artificial binary.

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• The devil’s handwriting
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Ethnography as the “devil’s handwriting”

The Devil’s Handwriting takes its title from the memoir of Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), a German travel writer and colonial official. The memoir, published in 1953, when the Third Reich provided an ineluctable prism on the German colonial empire (1884-1918), advances the idea of a satanic mode of writing: travel writing such as that produced by the young Rohrbach about Africa and China had laid the basis for the evil of colonialism. Steinmetz makes this idea the central hypothesis of his fascinating inquiry and finds a close relationship between ethnographic representations and colonial policies. This may seem unsurprising and harks back to Edward Said’s dictum “from travelers’ tales […] colonies were created” (Orientalism, p. 117).

What is surprising is the many different forms of colonial policy and practice that The Devil’s Handwriting reveals. Even in the relatively short-lived and comparatively small German colonial empire, colonial governance was highly variable. That variation cannot be explained by socioeconomic or materialist theories, as Steinmetz shows with reference to three specific colonies: Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Samoa and Qingdao (in Shandong province). Each of these held a distinct and very different place in the European imagination prior to colonization.

Abject and devious savages

Ovaherero in chains, 1904 (Source: Der Spiegel)

Precolonial accounts of the people of Southwest Africa were extremely negative and represented them as sub-human savages. One 19^th century German explorer, for instance, described the Khoikhoi as “bizarre red people” of “pronounced ugliness” with an “animal-like clicking language” (p. 154). The Germans did not invent these tropes of African abject savagery but fell back on the accounts of earlier European travelers. Already in 1612, for instance, a British official had described the Khoikhoi as “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government, without manners or humanity, and last of all without apparel” (p. 81; spelling adapted to modern English).

By the time the German colonial state arrived in Southwest Africa in the late 19^th century, these negative representations of Africans as abject savages had become entrenched in the minds of Europeans. Additionally, these previous encounters added another dimension, namely that of deviousness, shiftiness and insincere cunning. The Cape Colony, which had been under European (first Dutch, then British) rule since the late 17^th century, had brought numerous Europeans – traders, settlers, explorers, soldiers and missionaries – to Southern Africa. 19^th century German arrivals felt that contact with these earlier Europeans had served to corrupt the locals even further. One travel writer opined that “contact with civilization seems to make the savage more savage” (p. 156).

The military leadership of Southwest Africa, 1905 (Source: Der Spiegel)

In this perverted logic, conversion to Christianity was seen to make the natives “worse” rather than “better”. One missionary, for instance, wrote in a letter: “According to many whites it is much easier to interact with a pagan who has had no contact, or very little, with the mission than with the baptized ones. […] In many cases this is sadly often true” (p. 121, fn. 195)

These entrenched negative perceptions of Africans – as abject savages who had been further degraded through contact with Europeans – largely precluded any kind of engagement with them, as is particularly obvious from the fact that Europeans rarely attempted to learn local languages. In fact, many considered African languages unlearnable. The Khoikhoi language was variously described as similar to the “clucking of turkeys”, the “screaming of cocks” or to the sound of farting. This “apishly [rather] than articulately sounded” “incomprehensible” language kept frustrating Europeans:

But while Europeans expressed frustration at being unable to learn the local tongue, Khoikhoi picked up English or Dutch very quickly. Europeans seemed incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion that the locals had more linguistic talent than their foreign visitors. (p. 82)

The Europeans’ staunch belief in their own superiority meant that they wanted to transform Africans. Their assumption that communication and meaningful interaction were difficult, if not impossible, meant that they considered force and violence the preferred mode of engagement. Consequently, colonial policy aimed to seize the land and livestock of local populations in order to turn them into a “deracinated, atomized proletariat” (p. 203). Where locals resisted, extreme violence was readily used, as in the 1904 “Annihilation Order”, which ushered in the 20^th century’s first genocide, of the Ovaherero.

2014 exhibition of (pre)colonial South Pacific photos at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology entitled “A view of paradise”

Noble savages

In hindsight, the Ovaherero Genocide is often read as a precursor to the Holocaust and an indicator that German colonialism was exceptionally brutal and destructive. Steinmetz, however, contends that this argument suffers from a methodological error, namely the lack of comparison with other national cases. It is not his aim to compare German colonialism with the colonialism of other European nations although he does point out in passing similarities of the Ovaherero Genocide with the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Queensland Frontier Wars between 1840 and 1897. Steinmetz advances the comparative case “intranationally” with reference to two other German colonies, Samoa and Qingdao. Although these were part of the German colonial empire at the same time as Southwest Africa, colonialism played out quite differently there.

European ideas about Samoa, as of the South Pacific generally, were rather different to those they had of African. Like Africans, Samoans were portrayed as inferior savages. However, in contrast to Africans, Samoans were considered beautiful, noble and virtuous and were thought to live in paradise in harmony with nature.

German enthrallment with Samoans coupled with their belief in racial hierarchies produced some absurd ideological maneuvers. For instance, when German settlers in 1934 (by which time Samoa was a colony of New Zealand) formed a chapter of the Nazi party, they duly made a case that Samoas were “Aryans”. Crazy as that may seem, Samoans were not the only ones whose “race” kept changing in European eyes:

One of the most absurd aspects of European discussions of “race” during the nineteenth century is the way in which certain populations “changed color” as their relative standing within comparative ethnographic discourse shifted. Thus, the Witbooi changed from black to yellow after 1894 […] and the Chinese changed from white to yellow over the course of the nineteenth century. Samoans underwent a process of racial lightening, becoming more like the early image of Tahitians – who themselves began to seem swarthier to Europeans as they lost their charm.” (p. 302)

“Looking into paradise” was not innocent: “scientific” photography in physical anthropology, Samoa, ca. 1875 (held in the collection of the Hamburg Anthropology Museum)

In short, by the late 19^th century, Samoa had become paradise in the European imagination. Therefore, the aim of colonial policy was not to change Samoans but – to the contrary – to keep them in their supposed paradisiacal state. To achieve that the use of explicit force was rarely considered and the idea was that the colonial state would offer a firm paternal hand. In contrast to Southwest Africa, where the possibility of learning local languages did not seem to enter the minds of Europeans, it did in Samoa. The colony was governed through the medium of Samoan and, to a lesser degree, English. Colonial officials periodically responded to reprimands from Berlin and pointed out that the use of German in the South Pacific was not practical. The two German colonial governors (Samoa was a German colony for only 14 years) both became proficient Samoan speakers, adopted Samoan titles and styled themselves as traditional Samoan chiefs. Their identification with the colony was such that one of them declared himself to be Polynesian when he was no longer in office.

An advanced civilization

Just to be clear, it is not Steinmetz’ intention to argue that Samoan colonialism was “good”. All colonialism involves subjugation and exploitation, and Samoa was no exception. In fact, he trains his eye not on the colonized but the colonizers and his argument revolves around one of the perennial problems of intercultural communication: the ways in which stereotypes inform action. While European stereotypes about Africans and Samoans were relatively consistent, this was not the case with China.

China had been known to Europeans since the Middle Ages and hence there was significant variability in the ways it was represented in ethnographic writing. From early vague views of a fabled land emerged a highly positive representation starting with the 16^th century Jesuits of China as a well-ordered advanced society that was superior to Europe. These discourses of Sinophilia were in the 19^th century complemented with yet another, now negative, strand of representations of Chinese as members of an inferior race. While negative views started to gain currency, the earlier positive representations never died out entirely and so discourses about China were always much more poly-vocal than was the case with Africa and the South Pacific.

The transformation of Sinophilia into Sinophobia was, of course, tied to colonial expansion at the time and another emerging idea was “that China was ‘crying aloud for foreign conquest’” (p. 389). The Germans particularly coveted a colonial port similar to what the British had with Hong Kong and so they annexed Qingdao on the east coast in 1897. The first couple of years of colonial rule saw a focus on aggressive segregation between the colonizers and the colonized. However, this hostile approach did not last long, not least because colonial officials from the military were increasingly replaced with administrators who had a background in Chinese studies or had previously worked as translators and interpreters.

Many of the Qingdao colonial officials were graduates of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of Berlin, a language-training institute with the mission to prepare graduates for the foreign service. Graduates achieved high levels of proficiency in Chinese and imbibed a spirit of Sinophilia. Putting these men in charge of colonial policy resulted in “a program of rapprochement, syncretism, and exchange between two civilizations conceptualized as different but relatively equal in value” (p. 470).

Another legacy of German colonialism: Tsingtao Beer. The brewery, which was founded in 1903, is today a major tourist attraction (Source: Wikipedia)

A bilingual high school and college were founded with the aim to orient Chinese elites towards Germany. The high school employed Chinese teachers to teach Chinese, math, physics and chemistry, and German teachers to teach German and history. In contrast to colonial schools elsewhere, there was no religious instruction and Christian holidays were not observed. The college similarly aimed at an equilibrium between German and Chinese elements and offered a mixed curriculum. Institutions such as these and the colonial policies they were based on “took for granted that China was an advanced civilization on a level equal to that of Europe. Opening these floodgates within a colonial context pointed beyond European claims to sovereignty and supremacy, beyond colonialism” (p. 534).

Beyond colonialism?

German colonialism ended with Germany’s defeat in World War I and its unconditional surrender. This did not mean independence for its colonies but a change in occupying power. Southwest Africa was assigned to South Africa, Samoa to New Zealand and Qingdao came under Japanese occupation.

The afterlife of German colonialism is highly variable, too. Discussions with Namibia over reparations and a formal apology are ongoing although, as Steinmetz points out, the economic structures created by colonialism remain in place, with 30% of all Namibian farms owned by Germans or their descendants. In Samoa, German colonialism seems largely forgotten or, at least, not a matter of public debate; and Qingdao is capitalizing on its German heritage by having it turned into a tourist attraction.

Overall, The Devil’s Handwriting is a brilliant historical study of a key question in intercultural communication: how are discourses of culture related to practices in intercultural engagement? My brief overview here cannot do justice to the wealth of detail it offers but anyone interested in history, colonialism and intercultural communication will enjoy this book. Another highly recommended!

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The March winner has been announced on Twitter:

Each month we celebrate the #Language-on-the-Move community by gifting a copy of Ingrid Piller's "Intercultural Communication" @EdinburghUP to one of our interactive followers. The March winner is @KhawlaBadwan. Who will get lucky in April? pic.twitter.com/0liU8J2EyD

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 1, 2018

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Heinrich Zille, “Die Original Australier” auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

One of the central arguments of my book Intercultural Communication is that, even today, much intercultural communication is approached from an orientalist perspective, i.e. a Eurocentric and colonial way of seeing people from other countries as stereotypes. Orientalism finds expression in a myriad of discourses and one way in which it is reproduced is through presenting “foreigners” as weird spectacles.

During the ages of European exploration and colonial expansion, the west delighted in viewing the wonders of the “new” world by collecting specimens of exotic animals, plants and cultural artefacts for display in zoos, botanical gardens and museums. The desire to collect and display “the exotic” did not stop at humans, either. For instance, in the 1830s a French merchant snatched the body of a young African man and stuffed it in the way animals are sometimes stuffed and prepared for display. The body was then shipped to Europe and displayed for almost two centuries in various museums. The body was removed from public display only in 2000, when the remains were repatriated to Botswana. If you are interested in learning more about the man behind the body, you will find this BBC article about “the man stuffed and displayed like a wild animal” as informative as it is disturbing.

Heinrich Zille, Sioux-Indianer auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

Another way to turn foreign people into spectacles for the western gaze was to put actual people on display. For instance, in the collections of Heinrich Zille, an illustrator and photographer who documented the lives of Berlin’s poor in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, there is a series of photographs of an amusement park festival, a “Rummel.” The photographs are ethnographic in the sense that Zille’s aim was to capture the perspectives of the common people who attended the festival. Many of the spectacles on display for the amusement of Berlin’s poor relate to “fremde Völker” (“foreign peoples”). Browsing through the photos, one notices an “Indian Pavilion”, one that displays “Roses from the South” (women in costumes), or another one that features “Sioux-Indians from the Island of [illegible].” In the displays, anthropological accuracy is obviously completely beside the point. While the name of the island, where the Sioux on display are supposed to come from, is illegible in the image, it obviously does not matter because the basic mistake is the claim to island residence. Furthermore, the painted image of a “Sioux” on the front of the tent is of a black person.

The image I find most haunting in the collection is of a tent displaying “Die Original Australier” (“the original Australians”). In front of the tent, three Aboriginal (or South Pacific?) men stand on display. They are wearing long white robes in the manner of Christian monks or possibly traditional Arabs. The headdress of two of them includes some feathers and the third wears a headdress that includes the horns of cattle. Again, accuracy is completely beside the point – do I even need to point out that cattle are not native to Australia and so could not have been part of traditional dress? One cannot but wonder what the three costumed men who are being gawked at make of their position. Their facial expressions seem withdrawn. How did these men from the Southern Hemisphere end up as display objects in a Berlin amusement park in 1900? What did they make of life in Wilhelmine Germany? Where did they die?

In addition to displaying real bodies and people as specimens of the “weird” Other, books, newspaper and paintings equally contributed to the exoticization of non-Europeans. The stalls photographed by Zille all also display painted images of and short slogans about the featured group. A vivid example of “textual display” comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection of children’s verses “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” First published in 1885, the collection continues to be in circulation today. Wikipedia informs us that the collection “contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics ‘Foreign Children,’ ‘The Lamplighter,’ ‘The Land of Counterpane,’ ‘Bed in Summer,’ ‘My Shadow’ and ‘The Swing.’”

It is the “cherished classic” poem “Foreign Children” that positions the non-European Other as weird spectacles – objects of a mixture of pity and amusement:

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Foreign Children” (first published in 1885; a “cherished classic” in 2016)

Collectible card character “Lani” representing Papua New Guinea, 2016

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

Country “fact” about Papua New Guinea on collectible card, 2016

Whether the poem presents any facts about “foreign children” is completely beside the point. That there are no lions or ostriches where the exemplars of “foreign children” in the poem live is beside the point. What the poem does – in the same way as the displays mentioned above – is to set the foreign Other up as weird spectacle. Ultimately, the point of the poem is not even about the Other but about the Self: the British child who reads the poem – or has the poem read to them – can feel reassured that they are safe, normal and proper – in contrast to all the imagined foreign weirdos out there.

The examples I have shared so far are over a century old and one might be tempted to dismiss them as the benighted ways of our forebears. We have certainly largely lost the appetite for putting real humans – whether alive or dead – on display. However, the proliferation of images of the cultural other as stereotypical spectacle continues unabated. Not only do texts such as the “Foreign children” poem continue to circulate but new texts presenting people as stereotypical representatives of a country and weird spectacle appear all the time.

For instance, the Australian supermarket chain Woolworths is currently running a marketing campaign aimed at children called “World Explorers.” The campaign is a collectibles program where shoppers can collect card sets. The front of each card is dominated by a cartoon character, who is clearly identified as a representative of a particular country. The back of each card contains two sections. One is titled “Have a go …” and consists of a one-sentence activity suggestion and the other is titled “Weird but true” and contains some random country fact. The cards can be flipped over and their insides reveals further sections, including “Did you know?”, which features another random country fact, “Food for thought”, which describes a national dish or food item, and a little section, where the character introduces him- or herself.

What is the lesson of this 2016 collectible cards wrapper? That white boys always take center stage?

The character for Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a little girl who introduces herself as follows:

Gude! I’m Lani and I’m from the town of Tari, Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the few places in my country where we still regularly wear traditional dress.

The card also features an image of two tribal men, accompanied by this “Did you know?” explanation:

The Huli Wigmen, where I live, grow their hair long to make helmet-like wigs. They often paint their faces yellow too.

The purpose of the campaign is supposedly “to educate kids about the world and different cultures,” as the campaign website states. “Education” supposedly also was the aim of the exotic people displays from an earlier period. As I showed above, this was an “education” not in facts, knowledge, understanding and empathy but an “education” into a particular way of viewing the world: one where the foreign Other is always defined by their national identity and destined to offer a stereotypical spectacle for the western viewer. This spectacle of the “weird but true” Other may cause amusement, pity or disgust in the viewer but, above all, it is designed to bring home to the viewer their own essential difference from, if not superiority to, those exotic foreigners.

References

Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A revised 2nd edition of the book is scheduled to appear in 2017 – watch this space!

Flügge, M. (Ed.). (1984). Heinrich Zille: Fotografien Von Berlin Um 1900. Leipzig: VEB Fotokinoverlag.

Dr Xiaoxiao Chen on her graduation day at Macquarie University

Language on the Move proudly presents another new PhD!

Dr Xiaoxiao Chen graduated from Macquarie University last week. Her PhD was awarded for her thesis about “Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s.”

Abstract

Since its opening up in the 1980s, China has become a major international tourist destination. This study examines the ways in which China has been represented as an international tourist destination since the 1980s both in tourism discourses emanating from the West, represented by travelogues from the New York Times (the NYT), and from within China, represented by travelogues from China Daily (CD).

Building on Said’s critique of Orientalism and applying the analytical toolkit of critical multimodal discourse analysis, the study reveals that Chinese people under the tourist gaze are represented in only a small number of ways: first and foremost, Chinese people are represented as destination scenery, appearing as symbols of timelessness, human circumstances, and objects in both newspapers. Meanwhile, there are different sub-themes in the two newspapers that fit together in framing Chinese people as scenery. In the NYT, ordinary people are portrayed as the ‘exotic’ touristified Other, faceless masses, and differentiated communities. In CD, they are depicted as cultural performers, community representatives, and displayers of ethnic costumes. Second, if presented as engaging in interactions with tourists, Chinese people are shown to be endowed with the subservient character of helpers, being cast in the roles of informants, guides, hosts, and servers. Third, in the NYT only, they are sometimes reversely represented as ‘foreigners’ in their own country who are portrayed as overtly reacting to American visitors. Another way to construct China as simple, exotic, and inferior is through the representation of its linguistic landscape, which is characterized as homogeneous, incomprehensible, lacking English, and lacking correct English.

Overall, the study demonstrates that contemporary travel writing in English, irrespective of whether it emanates from the USA or from China, contributes to the continuation of Orientalist discourses that represent Chinese people and China’s linguistic landscape as signifiers of the Other to be consumed by Western tourists.

The full text of the thesis is available for download here.

Aspects of Xiaoxiao’s research are discussed in these blog posts: “Orientalism and tourism” (English version and Chinese version) and “The exotic Chinese language.”

Xiaoxiao’s higher degree research was supported by a Macquarie University Excellence Scholarship and supervised by Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Kimie Takahashi.

Congratulations, Xiaoxiao!

Ernst Reuter, West Berlin’s post-war Mayor, was Professor of Urban Studies in Ankara from 1938 to 1946 (Source: turkishpress.de)

While the internationalization of higher education is a hot topic at the moment and is widely seen as unique to the present, internationalization of higher education is not new. The politics of internationalization at Istanbul University in the early years of the Turkish republic provide a fascinating case study (Ergin, 2009).

In the 1930s 38 out of 65 chair professors at Istanbul University were German. If university rankings had been around then, Istanbul University would obviously have done fantastically well on the ‘internationalization’ criterion. Two events in 1933 were responsible for this amazing level of internationalization: Hitler’s ascent to power meant that Germany’s Jewish and/or Socialist intellectual elite started to leave the country. Simultaneously, the Turkish republic undertook a major reform of higher education, which was to be a radical break from the Ottoman past.

In its efforts to modernize and Westernize, Turkey employed a large number of Western academics in the early years of the Republic (1923-1950), many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. The irony of employing the victims of Western modernity to achieve Western modernity was not lost on many of those academics who inhabited this paradoxical world.

The Turkish reformers largely accepted the Orientalist and racist world view of the time but wanted to switch sides. They accepted that ‘the West’ was superior to ‘the East’ but contested the idea that they were part of ‘the East.’ The humanities and social sciences of the reformed universities were expected to demonstrate exactly that: that historically, linguistically and racially Turkey was on par, if not superior, to Western modernity and civilization, conceived as an essential trait of culture and race. Specifically, academics were mobilized to demonstrate the ‘Europeanness’ of Turks and their membership in ‘the white race;’ to establish the ancient and enduring character of ‘Turkishness;’ and to show that the Turkish language was the source of Western languages.

In effect, refugees from Nazi Germany, which was ideologically built on exactly the same universalist conceptions of history, language and race (localized, of course, to “Germanness” rather than “Turkishness”), became the local personifications of Turkey’s modernization project. How did they live their paradoxical situation?

Ergin (2009) explores this paradox with reference to the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who was Professor of Chinese at Ankara University from 1937 to 1948. Eberhard, who was widely seen as one of the most talented sinologists of his generation, left Germany because he was under pressure to become a member of the Nazi Party in order to advance his academic career. His approach to language and culture did not fit in with the nationalistic and racial ideologies of the time (neither in Germany nor in Turkey) and his work thus provides an interesting case of intercultural communication in research.

Specifically, Eberhard sought to reject the then-prevailing idea of Chinese as an autonomous civilization and to demonstrate that Chinese language and civilization were as much a product of linguistic and cultural contact and exchange as any other. In one article, he identified five major influences on ancient Chinese, including a ‘Western’ influence “whose possessors were of Turkish stock” (quoted in Ergin, 2009, p. 117). While intended to contest notions of national and racial purity, this academic article was reinterpreted by Turkish academics and in the Turkish media as evidence that many achievements of Chinese civilization occurred because of Turkish influence. Eberhard’s anti-nationalistic and anti-essentialist argument thus came to be read as its exact opposite.

However, it would be wrong to assume that Turkey’s German academics only participated in the Turkish nationalist project inadvertently and through being misinterpreted, as in this example. They also had their careers and the interests of their employer – the Turkish state – to consider. Like many others, Eberhard, too, on occasion explicitly located his research agenda in Turkish nationalistic and racial positions. The tension between producing universalistic research for local purposes was continuously present.

While finding themselves welcomed and admired as ‘Western intellectuals’ these émigré scholars also found themselves resented and envied by their Turkish colleagues. One terrain where resentment against ‘Westerners’ could be openly expressed was language: most of the German academics taught in English, French or German and their contracts stipulated that, after three years, they would switch to Turkish. The assumption was that they would help to enrich and develop the Turkish language by lecturing and publishing in Turkish. In practice, unsurprisingly, only a relatively small number was able to achieve sufficient proficiency in Turkish to be able to teach in Turkish. For most, the contractually stipulated linguistic transition period went by and they quietly continued to teach in English, French or German.

Internationalizing Turkish academia in the early years of the republic was a creative response by the Turkish modernizers to turn Western academic Orientalism to their advantage. They tried to establish the Turkish origins of Western civilization with the help of Western knowledge and Western academics. Ergin’s article is a fascinating account of the entanglements in global and local power struggles that internationalizing discourses and international academics can find themselves in – then as today.

Ergin, M. (2009). Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western emigre scholars in Turkey History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 105-130 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099137

Chinese: What does the Chinese language mean to Western tourists visiting China?

Ingrid’s blog post “Character challenge” has set me thinking about Chinese language learning these days. I have found her observation about learning Chinese characters as “the most intriguing pastime” particularly impressive, especially when I look again at the data I analyzed for my thesis. There I looked (inter alia) at the ways in which English-language travel writers describe their communicative encounters in China.

In my corpus, only few writers seem to have made any attempt to learn Chinese before they traveled to China. However, they usually have a lot to say about the English deficiencies they observe in Chinese locals (as is also the case in hotel reviews).

How does Chinese figure in English-language travel writing? Mostly as an absence. My corpus consists of travelogues from the New York Times and China Daily. Despite their different origins from outside and within China, both newspapers have little to say about any communication occurring in Chinese.

To begin with, Chinese languages tend to be lumped into one single variety, “Chinese.” Regional dialects and ethnic minority languages are generally rendered invisible.

Second, Chinese words or phrases are sometimes used as iconic tokens to refer to local cultural specifics and to signify authenticity. Examples include place names for which a conventional English translation exists such as Changjiang instead of “Yangtze River” and names of Chinese dishes such as xiao long bao (soup dumpling) or baochaoyaohua (fried pig kidney). Other Chinese terms that I’ve found in my corpus included Qipao (a type of clothing), Xiangqi (a game similar to chess), baijiu (an alcoholic drink), pipa (loquat) or shanzha (hawthorn). Instead of serving any communicative function, these snippets of Chinese languages act as “linguistic decorations.” They serve to inject some local flavor authenticating the writers’ touristic experiences and thus contribute to linguascaping the exotic in China.

Third, Chinese languages are also exoticized in meta-comments that make judgments about or express attitudes toward local linguistic practices, serving the purpose of drawing social boundaries and reinforcing similarities and differences between the Self and the Other. For instance, the Guilin accent is described as “fairly different” from Mandarin, Cantonese is labeled as “bird language” or the Jinan dialect is compared to Putonghua spoken by foreigners who cannot grasp the four tones. By recursive logic, such linguistic differentiation is transposed onto the differentiation of destinations and local people. Thus, Guilin is constructed as a peripheral destination; Cantonese speakers are rendered sub-human as their language is compared to animal sounds; and Jinan speakers are made to look foreign and non-belonging.

Finally, some travel writers playfully cross into Chinese languages to enact an elite identity of sophisticated travelers belonging to a global community of tourists. For example, in a travelogue about Yunnan, the travel journalist describes himself as greeting some pilgrims by saying “Tashi delek” (Tibetan greeting). By crossing into Tibetan, the writer momentarily embraces the identities of the Tibetan pilgrims but also maintains his identity as an American tourist. This instance of language crossing presents the travel writer as knowledgeable and well-travelled but not a cultural/linguistic imperialist.

So, what do Chinese languages mean to English-speaking tourists? It’s easy to say what they are not: languages that have any communicative value. Firmly assigned to the Other and lacking any intrinsic interest, they are reduced to commodified snippets serving to affirm touristic identities. One could almost conclude that travel to China is not about China but about the ‘me’ of the tourist.

Publications based on my research are forthcoming. In the meantime, I would refer readers to Jaworski et al. (2003) for further reading.

Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The Uses and Representations of Local Languages in Tourist Destinations: A View from British TV Holiday Programmes Language Awareness, 12 (1), 5-29 DOI: 10.1080/09658410308667063

(British) people ask, “Are you from Japan?,” so I say, “Yes, I am from Tokyo.” Then they really like it! They ask lots of questions… They want to know about the Japanese hair style and kimono, temples, how to use traditional wrapping cloth that we don’t even use now… They worship us. In their fantasy, they want to believe we wear kimono usually and serve tea nicely.

They seem to know Japanese culture through the media… geisha in kimono, Pokémon, advanced technologies… I came here (London) to become modern and independent, not a traditional Japanese woman. But Western men like traditional images of Japanese women, and they expect traditional Japanese women when meeting us.

The overall interest in, or fascination with, the appeal of uniquely Japanese culture in touch with tradition signifies the modern West’s desire to be cosmopolitan by intermixing with Japanese otherness in their capacity and willingness to take pleasure from the transnational cultural exchange. The representation of Japan in the Western popular imagination is paradoxical and complex; the Western fear of Japanese corporations, economic power and powerful masculine nationalism by which Japan is seen as a site of potential threat, but on the other hand, the Western attraction to an orientalist fantasy and subservient object of desire which is constructed through the West’s sexualization and feminization of Japanese culture.

If multicultural diversity is celebrated in a cosmopolitan vision of the world, Japan could stand for a distinctive, albeit ambiguous, positioning within reciprocal recognition. Cosmopolitanism, as a relational and dialogic term, operates within the contexts of encounters, favorable or unfavorable, inclusive or exclusive, thereby a cosmopolitan possibility may emerge or not. Such interplay may generate a situated, but characteristically thin cosmopolitanism; even while women denounced and repudiated Japan’s traditional masculine culture, they become more attached to the place called home with its cultural particularities yet simultaneously embracing pleasure from the interactions with the modern West, however in contradictory and implicitly forced ways with struggles in the language of paradox.

They are interested in traditional Japanese culture I don’t even know about. This is a surprising discovery. I have to learn to explain to them.

In Japan, I was not Japanese. I was liberal, against old traditions. I preferred the Western world and imagined changing my self through the media… I just imagine through the media but cannot act. I am becoming more Japanese while living abroad… There is no reason to change or become like them. Being distinctively Japanese is an advantage.

The Western worship of traditional Japanese otherness, often seen as accidental knowledge to many women on the move, can impact upon and interplay with how women come to redefine a new subject position. The fluidity of conceptions of identity and change were once powerfully imagined through the Western media and occidental longings in their homeland, while mobilizing the scope to act beyond localized contexts. However, the actual interactions, discursive and communicative encounters with the West re-contextualize such imagined cosmopolitan identification and precariously expose, or impose to some extent, a fixed categorical distinction of Japaneseness.

Why be a woman of the world? The motivational reasons, which would allow for the possibility of cosmopolitan subjectivity and the determination to act on it, depend on what distinction and what gain is to be made, to what end. Far from a robust cosmopolitan projection, a self-determined reaction to how best to act from the learning of cosmopolitan knowledge rather foregrounds a national self in the distinctiveness of cultural difference, representing Japaneseness even more strongly than before (“becoming more Japanese”) in the relational experience of the transnational field.

In point of fact, what he had in mind was a chapter titled Iran written by an American anthropologist in the four-volume set Countries and their Cultures. The text touched upon various demographic, socio-economic, political and cultural aspects of Iran. However, the written text, no matter how accurate, had been mediated by the images with which it was associated. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the adage goes, and my housemate clearly had remembered the images rather than the text.

Having been born and raised in Iran and having travelled widely across the country, I dare say the pictures seemed rather outlandish even to me, let alone to my housemate! The pictures showed either far-flung villages or people riding donkeys and driving trashy cars. For a foreigner unfamiliar with the country, the association is clear: Iran is a backward place.

As a matter of fact, anecdotes of similar intercultural miscommunication experienced by Iranians in the West are not uncommon. Several friends of mine have told me of being asked similarly misguided questions. Taken together, such anecdotes are evidence of stereotypical views based in media representations.

But why are such backward pictures used to spruce up the text while Iran’s modern life as evident in its major cities, where the vast majority of the population live, is totally absent from the pictures? The answer seems to have already been provided by Edward Said. In Orientalism, Said describes the features of the body of knowledge which was produced not only by poets, novelists, or travel writers but also by learned scholars especially in the 19^th century. These people almost unanimously represented the Orient as a repository of Western knowledge, rather than as a society and culture in its own right. In this connection, the Orient was described in terms of the way it differed from the West. Eastern countries have often been described in ways which denigrate them, which produce them as a negative image, an ‘other’. Over time, these representations have accrued truth-value to themselves through constant usage and familiarity.

The pictures presented in this recent encyclopedia suggest that Orientalist ways of thinking and writing are too established to die out.

Orientalism is not just a mis-depiction of the East; rather, as my encounter shows, orientalist representations are the basis of ways of seeing that inform mundane interactions between “Easterners” and “Westerners.” Uncovering the orientalist tropes of texts is thus much more than a hermeneutic exercise. It continues to form the basis of lived experience and daily interactional challenges “Easterners” have to contend with.

Reference

Beeman, W. O. (2001). Iran. In M. Ember & C. R. Ember (Eds.), Countries and their cultures, Vol. II (pp. 1057-1077). New York: Macmillan.

British Royal Wedding

Recently, the British royal wedding made international front-page news. It was globally portrayed as an auspicious occasion for the world to remember; much like a well-written fairy-tale. The outcome was record-breaking: the Westminster Abbey event attracted the eyes of millions of people from around the globe. Personally, I have too many more immediate concerns to care about the royal wedding. However, my lack of interest or the fact that I live in Iran didn’t allow me to escape snippets about ‘the extraordinary palace reception’, ‘the locally grown food’, ‘the secrets of Kate’s hairdo’, ‘the pomp and pageantry’, ‘the after-event private party’ and, of course, that ‘balcony kiss.’

Readers outside Iran may be surprised to hear that the British royal wedding was as much a media event in this country as anywhere else in the world. In particular, Iranians applauded the way how gently and appropriately Kate Middleton dressed and used facial make-up (see, for example, here). As so often, when global media events get adapted locally, this applause has in fact nothing much to do with the British royals but everything with Iranian women. Praising Kate’s modesty and demureness has become a way to implicitly criticize Iranian women for their lack of modesty and demureness, for their provocative dresses and their gaudy make-up.

Until I lived in Australia and experienced life in the so-called “West,” I might actually have agreed with this view of Iranian women mediated through an interpretation of British royal femininity along the lines “If an icon of Western femininity can dress so appropriately, why can’t Iranian women?!” “Kate’s simple dress and gentle make-up are a great role model for Iranian women.”

However, after my time in Australia I see the representation of Kate Middleton as a role model for Iranian women a bit differently and consider it a myopic cultural generalization aimed at humiliating Iranian women and make them toe the line of virtuous femininity. When I was in Sydney, for example, my house was across from Curzon Hall, a sandstone manor set in two magnificent gardens. It is a luxurious venue hosting, inter alia, formals and weddings. Weather permitting, parts of the celebrations would be held in the un-walled gardens and not in the main castle. Accordingly, I was a regular, even if accidental, spectator of the events unfolding in the gardens. The scenes or people I witnessed stand in stark contrast to ways Western weddings are nowadays depicted by some Iranian media. In these weddings the guests naturally comprised a variety of individuals. As far as female dress-codes were concerned, I observed some modestly dressed women, and many not-so-modestly dressed ones. In fact, I saw an abundance of artificially tanned skins and low-cut dresses.

It is axiomatic that the great majority of Iranians are Muslims and are thus expected to dress in accordance with Islamic doctrine. However, extolling the virtues of modest female dress codes through generalizing (incorrectly!) from the wedding dress of a British royal to all Western women and then recontextualizing it as a ‘fact’ to blast a large group of people in another country is the last approach any discerning mind would advise even if it is done with the best intentions.

From the 15th to the 20th century the Orient was described in terms of the ways it differed from the West. Colonised countries were denigrated and produced as a negative image, an ‘other.’ The production of a positive, civilised image of British society and its inverse – the negative, uncivilised orient – was a way to justify colonial relationship between “the west and the rest”. What is discomforting today is, however, not orientalism emanating from the West but from within Iranian society: a kind of self-orientalism that has the aim not to justify a neo-colonial relationship but a patriarchal one. If the British have already done this to us, why are we doing it to ourselves?

东方主义，这种西方文化中对东方文化及人文的旧式及带有偏见的理解，可谓是由来已久、根深蒂固。一日偶读澳大利亚旅游杂志《出发和到达》中一篇题为“爱情游戏，中国风”的文章，我对东方主义在当今世界的影响力，尤其是在旅游文本中的呈现，感触尤为深刻。

乍看标题“爱情游戏，中国风”，觉得有趣而有些费解：什么样的“爱情游戏”可以称为“中国风”呢？接下来的副标题解释道：“远离现代社会的纷扰，中国纳西族在罕见的母系社会中独享亘古不变的清静”。文中描绘的中国西南边陲的云南白沙古镇是纳西族的故乡之一。而作者描绘的方式却使得白沙镇成为代表整个中国的一个影像：亘古不变，陷入一个远离现代文明的永恒世界。

文章主要介绍“走婚”习俗，援引作者的话，即为“男人永不结婚，女人当家作主”。实际上，“走婚”是摩挲族的风俗，摩梭族乃纳西族的一支，通常被称为世界上仅存的母系社会。沿袭“走婚”传统的男人和女人都不离开自己的母家，男方仅在夜间的时候在女方家居住。由此所生下的孩子归母家抚养。“走婚”是区别纳西族和摩挲族的主要标志。然而，作者显然对此一无所知，因为他在文中写道“纳西和摩挲妇女在爱情游戏中理所当然占主动地位”。

据文中介绍，在纳西社会里，女人承担主要家务，而男人却“游手好闲”。这种鉴定性的描述源自一位曾经是学校教师的非纳西族人，他来自云南首都昆明。想来作者没有做过任何调研，否则他为何还要援引来自一位局外人和城市教师的话呢？下面这句话更是彰显说话者对纳西男人那不屑一顾、鄙视的态度：同样是这位学校教师断言有一半的纳西男人慵懒无为，与猪无异。

直到文章接近尾声的时候，作者才认可“纳西族年长的男人颇有书法造诣、深谙园艺设计、且音乐才能非凡”。但他们的乐队据说是“以‘三老’为名：人老（大多年逾八旬）、乐器老、歌老。”

由此可见，古老和亘古不变是贯穿全文和图片的主题。例如，文章开端给读者展现的是一位自称“又老又丑”的长者。在作者眼中，这位“八旬老人相貌不俗”，“在许多方面都代表了中国的谦逊之美”。文中描绘的影像与图片中老人的形象相互映衬：“宽松的棉裤”，“五十年代的夹克”，“神秘如天使头发的烟袋”，“银色的稀疏胡须”。不仅仅是文中描写的人物是古老的，白沙镇也是古老的：“自十一世纪以来就几乎没有变化的小镇”；这个地方“老就是好的、美的、值得珍惜的东西”；这是“古老文化的家园”，“不受时光变迁”的影响。

尽管文章的核心是纳西母系社会，纳西女性的形象在文字和图片中都被隐化。虽然文中提到纳西女人“在爱情游戏中主动出击”，这句听起来很诱人的话语在文字和图片中都没有得到回应。

简言之，文中描述的白沙镇就是一个人和事都亘古不变的陈列橱。这个白沙镇脱离了飞速现代化的中国这个大环境，实际上只是作者的一种幻像，而非今日白沙的现实。众所周知，白沙镇的母系社会早已不可避免地遭遇现代文明的冲击，而当地旅游业的发展就是改变这一古老社会形态的因素之一。比如，“走婚”习俗竟然成为迎合游客的红灯区的借口。奇怪的是，种种由旅游业给纳西摩挲人带来的变化，文中只字未提。现代文明没有在白沙镇留下任何痕迹，这符合西方旅者对中国及整个东方的期待和幻想。这种西方对东方的形象建构在萨伊德的东方主义中得到最佳阐释。它源于西方世界对东方人的控制和权威，而由此产生的西方对东方形象的偏见很难颠覆。所以，今日中国尽管现代化建设日新月异，在这种旅游文本中仍旧是一个“古老而永恒的国度”。

I know the area and the people well and, as a matter of fact, only a few months ago I spent time in Lijiang collecting data for my PhD research (which deals with practices and ideologies of multilingualism and language learning among the Naxi). The Naxi people I know bear little resemblance to the caricature presented in “Game of Love, Chinese Style.”

Let me introduce you to Jinfang HE and Xinwan HE (both are pseudonyms). Jinfang and Xinwan are friends of mine from Baisha. They are a typical Naxi peasant couple and their ancestors have lived in Baisha for generations on their self-sufficient farm. Both are extremely hardworking, as subsistence farmers have to be. Jinfang usually does most of the farm work in the field and all household work. Xinwan, her husband, drives a mini-bus operating between Baisha’s ancient town and Lijiang city (18 minutes one-way) during the tourism season (usually from April to November). During the off-peak season, he sometimes offers private car charter services to business men from Baisha who need to make a deal in Lijiang city. Jinfang and Xinwan live in a typical Naxi-style house and from the outside it may look “timeless.” However, look closer and you will see that except for the wooden doors and windows carved with traditional Naxi patterns, the interior of the home is very modern and they have the same electric appliances and furniture we usually find in the houses of the Han or westerners. There isn’t much difference there.

However, the local economy does depend on the image of authentic timelessness that the tourists come to see. In 1997, Lijiang’s old town was declared a UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage site. This site includes three ancient towns, Dayan (大研古镇), Baisha (白沙古镇) and Suhe (束河古镇). A lot of effort goes into keeping their ancient looks and old beauty! The historic stone pavements, wooden houses and small bridges, and the streams flowing through the streets and lanes do indeed form a very beautiful landscape.

In Dayan, Baisha or Suhe, the locals, particularly older people, are used to being a tourist picture motif. If you ask permission to take a photo of them, they will unanimously say: “I/We am/are old and ugly, why do you want to take photos for me?” with their friendly smiling faces – it’s part of the spiel and comes with being a living tourist attraction. The ladies in this photo with their healthy smiles all said to me they were old and ugly before posing for the photo …

I imagine that being asked to pose for a photo also happened to Dr. HE and that he graciously obliged. Although it really is a shame that the author of “Game of Love, Chinese Style” apparently has no idea who the old man in the white coat in his picture is. Dr. HE is 86 years old and that’s presumably why he gets featured in the picture but what is really important – and not mentioned at all – is that he is a famous Chinese herbal doctor. Dr. HE has cured many people with cancer from home and abroad. As a matter of fact, he also speaks very fluent English!

Now let me get to the heart of the article, the Mosuo custom of the walking marriage. To begin with, the occupations of my Mosuo friends vary a lot and I know a Mosuo doctor, a university teacher, a tourist guide and more than one researcher. Walking marriage (走婚), also called A Zhu Hun (阿注婚) or A Xia Hun (阿夏婚), is the marriage practice among Mosuo people ONLY (Mosuo  are considered a branch of the Naxi ethnic minority but have been campaigning for independent status for a long time), not for all Naxi. When Mosuo girls/A Xia (阿夏) or boys/A Zhu (阿注) reach puberty, they will get an adult ceremony and girls will from then on be called A Xia and have their own A Xia Fang (bedroom). When A Xia loves A Zhu, A Zhu will ask a witness to ceremoniously go to A Xia’s home with gifts for everyone in the family to ask for A Xia’s mum’s and uncles’ permission to be A Zhu. There are three forms of walking marriage, the most popular one is that A Zhu visits his A Xia at night only and goes back to his home at dawn, the other two forms include that A Zhu will stay in A Xia’s home (阿注定居婚) or A Xia will go to stay in A Zhu’s home (阿夏异居婚). But the latter two are not popular in the local area. Mosuo people have their own values and standards in sex and morality. A Xia and A Zhu respect each other and bear responsibility for each other. The walking marriage is not an arranged marriage and so love plays a very important role in continuing the A Xia-A Zhu relationship. Until they have children, there is some freedom to change to a new A Xia or A Zhu if they find they no longer love each other. However, after they have children, they generally can’t change to a new A Xia or A Zhu.

The way it used to be was that when a child was born, the child would live in the mother’s home and the uncles would take on the responsibility of educating the child. However, the paternal grandmother would come and visit the new baby with gifts for everyone in A Xia’s big family. A Zhu was not allowed to bring the baby back to his home but he would hold a dinner party and invite the seniors in the family and neighbors to show he is the father of the baby and he shoulders his part of the responsibility to raise the child even though mother and father don’t live together in the same household. However, nowadays more and more Mosuo people melt into the mainstream society and give up the walking marriage in favour of the official marriage system.

If anyone needs further evidence that the ethnic minorities of Yunnan are not stuck in a time-warp, look it up on a map. Yunnan is in Southwest China and constitutes the most convenient international passageway to access southeast and south Asia by land. The area is developing rapidly as a centre in the Greater Mekong sub-regional economic zone. It’s hard not to see traces of modernization there. The only ones who are stuck in a time-warp are those travel writers who fail to see how rapidly the lives of the ethnic minorities of Yunnan are modernizing!

Game of love, Chinese style.

Nowhere is the persistence of Orientalist ways of viewing the non-Western Other so obvious than in tourism brochures, as I was reminded when reading an article titled “Game of Love, Chinese Style” in the most recent issue of the Australian travel magazine Arrivals and Departures.

When I saw the title “Game of Love, Chinese Style” on the front page, I was intrigued. What sort of “game of love” could be labeled as “Chinese style”? The subheading provides more detail: “Undisturbed by modernity, China’s matriarchal Naxi minority exist in a rare time-warped world.” The destination featured in the article, Baisha, is a small town in China’s southwest province Yunnan and home of the Naxi ethnic minority. The way it is presented, however, makes Baisha an icon of China as a whole: forever old and trapped in a timeless world cut off from modernity.

The article centers on the custom of the “walking marriage,” which supposedly means that “men never marry and women wear the pants.” “Walking marriage” is actually a custom of the Mosuo, an ethnic group related to the Naxi and often presented as the only matriarchal society in the world. In this tradition men and women never leave the maternal household and men visit their female partners only at night. Children born of such relationships stay with the mother’s extended family. The practice of the “walking marriage” is a major difference between the Mosuo and the Naxi. However, the author is apparently unaware of this when he says “Naxi and Mosuo women are expected to take the lead in the game of love.”

According to the article, in Naxi society, women do most of the work while men are regarded as “slovenly.” The source for this characterization turns out to be a non-Naxi and a former school teacher from Yunnan’s capital Kunming. If the author had done any research, why did he need to source this comment from an outsider and an urban intellectual? More condescending and contemptuous quotes follow: 50% of Naxi men are judged to be lazy “like a pig” by the same school-teacher.

Only towards the end of the article does the author acknowledge that “male Naxi elders are renowned calligraphers, gardeners and skilled musicians.” Their musical collectives are said to be “famous for the “three olds”: old men (few players are under 80 years of age), old instruments and old songs.”

Oldness and timelessness thus are the overarching themes running through the text and the photos. For instance, the reader is also introduced to an old man who claims himself to be “old and ugly” but whom the author considers a “handsome octogenarian” who “in many ways typifies China’s humble beauty.” All the images of “loose cotton pants,” “1950s Mao jacket,” “an angel-hair tobacco pipe” and “his wispy silver beard” are echoed in the photos. It is not only the people featured in the article who are old, the city of Baisha is old, too: “a town virtually unchanged since the 11^th century;” a place where “old is good, old is beautiful, and old is something to be treasured;” and the home of a “time-locked culture.”

Although the article is about the matriarchal Naxi group, women are back-grounded in the text and pictures. Although there is the titillating piece of information that Naxi women “take the lead in the game of love,” they certainly don’t have a prominent position anywhere in the text or the pictures.

The image of Baisha as a whole is represented as a showcase of people and things that exist unchanged forever. Being taken out of the context of “rapidly modernizing China,” the timeless image of Baisha is thus more about the author’s fantasies than Baisha’s realities, one of which is that its matriarchal customs are unavoidably being challenged by modernization – including tourism. For instance, the custom of the “walking marriage” has actually become an excuse for the emergence of a red light district catering to tourists. Strangely enough, this sort of change, among other changes that are brought about by tourism to Mosuo Naxi, is absent from this article. The absence of all traces of modernization in Baisha matches the Western tourism imagery of China and the East at large. This Occidental construction of the Orient is best understood with reference to Said’s concept of Orientalism. It is grounded in Western dominance and authority over the East which has in turn produced a stereotypical Oriental image that can hardly be subverted. It is no wonder that China, despite its accelerating pace of modernization, remains “the ageless reign” in travel writing.