Renaming the Barbarians: Ethnonymy, Civilization and Modernity in Southeast Asia and China

Magnus Fiskesjö, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University

Ethnonymy, as the set of names for others and selves,is never a matter of simple reference. Names neverare. But ethnonyms are famously embedded in sociolinguistic and historical context where they themselves serve as tools used to fashion social formations, in relation to others.

In this presentation I compare and discuss ethnonym usage in Southeast Asia and China approximating the Classical Western sense of barbarians, such as Thai khaa and Chinese man-yi. These are conceived and presented as external but in reality internal to, and firmly embedded in the state’s economy of signs as well as in its other economies. I discuss the borderlands of Southeast Asia and China, where such terms are conflated and mixed, and how this mirrors the history of imperial encounters in these areas.

In the modern era with new conceptions of unified citizenship, barbarian-style ethnonyms came to seem outmoded and derogatory. In this paper I discuss aspects of this new unease, in particular, the active transformation of the old written forms of barbarian names in China, famously deploying animal signifiers as means of marking their semi-animality, and the little-known but highly interesting early 20th century Republican-era project for the extraction of these same animal signifiers, while saving most of the imperial-era ethnonyms in new form.

Magnus Fiskesjo is an anthropologist and archaeologist educated in Sweden, China, and at the University of Chicago (MA, PhD). He served until recently as the Director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, and this year joins the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. He has written on hunting rituals in ancient China, on sacrifice and history in the Burma-China borderlands, and on the global politics of death and mercy in The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon (2003). He is the translator of People and Forests: A Human-cological History of Swidden Agriculture in Yunnan, by Chinese anthropologist Yin Shaoting (2001), and is co-author, with Chen Xingcan, of a book on the modern archaeological discovery of a China Before China (2004).


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