State governance and cultural interactions in minority Southwest China: A social history of Sang River valley since the 18th century

The Lecture

In this talk, Xiaomei Zhao presents her monograph (in progress) on how ethnic minorities have established their identities through cultural interactions in daily life according to ever-changing state governance in the Sang River valley in northeast Guangxi Province, China.

Besides presenting the Sang River Valley case study, this talk aims to reflect on the methodology for interdisciplinary research and discuss how to tell an integral story from diverse perspectives. Xiaomei Zhao cordially invites attendees to share their thoughts and experiences for more open and deepened research and for building dialogues between scholars from different fields.

Sang River Valley, located at the southwestern foothills of the Yuechengling Mountain Range, is home to five officially recognised ethnic groups. Direct control by the central government was established in the 18th century, much later than its neighbouring minority regions. From the government's perspective, ethnic communities were divided into two general categories: those that served the country's governance and those that were governed. The different governance strategies have been shaping the social grouping, the sacrifice rites, and the ways in which these communities interacted with each other. The ethnic policies in the latter part of the 20th century and the recent tourism development have also influenced their ethnic identities and how their ethnicity is presented and interpreted by themselves and the local government. The social changes are recorded not only in the written documents by ritual experts and government officials but also in the folk stories as well as the physical spaces of their living houses and rural settlements. All these materials are applied to reconstruct the region's social and cultural history and explain the vertical interactions between the state and the local society and the horizontal interactions among the ethnic communities.

The Speaker

Xiaomei Zhao is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Guest Researcher at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). She is trained in archaeology and architectural history. Her research focuses on rural villages and urban landscapes in South China. She looks into vernacular buildings and settlement patterns through the lens of social history and architectural anthropology. She delivers courses on conservation theories and heritage studies at her home institute. She published widely on vernacular architecture and critical heritage studies, including a monograph on the Dong minority settlement and papers on comparisons among houses of different ethnic groups. Recently, she has drawn her research interest to connections between space and rituals.