Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands

摘要: The place of Yao and other ethnic minorities in official museums histories China, Thailand, Vietnam shows the state’s involvement identity politics. museumizing minority identities tends to endorse particular markers difference, simultaneously conceal both role sanctioning suppression cultural agricultural practices that previously reproduced social difference. discursive framework modern nation-states contrasts with explicit exclusion upland populations by pre-modern polities region, I argue this apparent othering was only partly about nonstate peoples had as much do tensions among levels state. case suggests various entanglements ‘tribal’ projects, indicates how anthropological theorizing ‘peoples’ systemically failed observe historical state bifurcating natural landscape.