Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, dated October 1995, contains the proceedings of a conference on ethnic conflict held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored it. Academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials presented papers on ethnic and territorial conflict in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. They also discussed what these conflicts mean for US policy. The document contains no UFO material.
“Anderson”6 pages
C00123268 Until now, most China scholars have dismissed the Anderson (1983), it is the feeling of "otherness" one possibility as remote, and the violent incidents on the experiences while in exile or, I would add, while being margins of China's great landmass were not consid- incorporated and dominated into a nation-state that ered a serious threat to the monolith. The Uighur, may more than anything lead to a strong sense of eth- Kazakhs, Tajiks, Mongols, and even the Tibetans are nicity. To follow Dorine Kondo (1989:43), the notion still felt to be insignificant minorities: politically and of relational identity stresses "multiplicity, contextual- militarily inept, internationally isolated, and expected ity, complexity, power, irony, and resistance." It is the to go the way of the Manchu and others who have articulation of the multiplicities of these identities, been thought to be long assimilated into the Chinese within the context of where they have been expressed, mainstream. Although I am not predicting or advocat- that these identities become salient. ing the dissolution of China along the lines that Victor Louis predicted, in this paper I argue that recent Nationalism is not just an idea but also a certain style events among the Uighur in Kashgar are related to the of representation that is now most often defined by Hakka in Canton and explain why these linkages have interactions within or resistance to the nation-state. As generally been ignored by China scholarship. Hobsbawm argues, "Nationalism is a political pro- gram ... .Without this programme, realized or not, I suggest that we need new ways of thinking about 'nationalism' is a meaningless term," (Anthropology ethnic and regional identity that often leads to local Today 1992:4). Nationalism is not arbitrary, but nei- conflict along unexpected lines. What is going on in ther is there any core content to it. It has no essential southern China is linked to the rise of local ethnic essence. It is not shifted and redefined. nationalisms-the rise of the Cantonese, the assertion of the Hakka, and the galloping economy of the south- I began to think much more about the nature of what ern Fujianese-to traditional nationalisms on China's relational and oppositional identity means (see Glad- borders as well as global trends that have affected ney 1991) after interviewing Turkestani refugees and China domestically and internationally. My research emigres in Turkey. It convinced me that much of what parallels work in contemporary anthropological and I had been reading in ForeignAffairs and other jour- ethnographic theory, which rejects notions of homoge- nals about the resurgence of "tribalisms" in Central nized cultures and posits the existence of multiple Asia now that the Soviets have withdrawn was very identities and shifting associations. wrong. I became convinced that these people were profoundly different than they were before their domi- Despite the frequent wishing away of ethnic and nation by the centzalizing states of Soviet and Chinese nationalist loyalties, we are witnessing the rise of eth- Central Asia and that their multifaceted identities are nic nationalisms that define the arenas of conflict anything but tribal. across the globe. This flies in the face of earlier predic- tions by both modernization theorists and even Marxist Han Nationalism and the Rise of the Chinese ideologues that ethnic identities would fade in favor of Nation-State individual, secularized, economic-based behaviors. As yet, no larger studies of the creation of Han nation- "'Ilibalism," thought to be a thing of the past, is now alism have emerged-mainly because it is assumed by the watchword of the 1990s. Most people are surprised sinologists trained in the dominant tradition that at the viciousness with which people, who were long "Han" is generally equal to "Chinese"-a tradition thought to be assimilated, modernized, and secularized, created and maintained by the current regime in are assaulting and "cleansing" others in the name of power. Studies of Chinese nationalism have generally primordialized self-identity, self-determination, and ignored the issue of-the creation of the Han majority in ,ethnic nationalism. What is going on here? favor of the larger question of Chinese identity. Few have questioned how the Han became the 94-percent National identities, although imagined, are never arbi- majority of China. Perhaps, the traditional Confucian trary but arise in particular sociopolitical contexts in relational opposition to specific others. To follow Ben 112
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.