Ethnic ChinaLit

The first 8 of 55 volumes—one for each officially recognized ethnic minority in the PRC—have been jointly launched by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Liaoning Publishing Group (辽宁出版集团). The series is titled <走进中国少数民族丛书> (Inside China’s Ethnic Minorities).

Each book focuses on the culture and history of one ethnic group located in the northeast: Manchu (满族), Chaoxian (朝鲜), Mongol (蒙古), Xibe (锡伯), Daur (达斡尔), Oroqen (鄂伦春), Evenki (鄂温克) and Hezhen (赫折).

A quick look at the contents page for the Evenki volume (鄂温克族) indicates a fairly formulaic approach, with chapters on their origins, history of interaction with the Chinese empire, culture and customs, animism and folk tales and art. News reports stress that each book has been written by members of the featured ethnic group, a major break with the past where Han ethnologists were usually the authors.

The section names in the second chapter on warring periods and the “outlook for a brighter tomorrow” are an indicator of the “positioning” of the Evenki vis-à-vis Chinese dynasties across the centuries and up to our day:

• Establishment of the Banner System under the Qing
• Battle Over the Evenki Mink Tribute to the Qing Court
• Defending the Chinese Homeland
• Struggle Against the Japanese Imperialists
• New Society, New Life

It’s unlikely that you will find much here on the impact of post-1949 PRC ethnic policies such as those documented by Richard Noll and Kun Shi in their The Last Shaman of the Oroqen of Northeast China in 2004, or Richard Fraser in his 2010 study, Forced Relocation amongst the Reindeer-Evenki of Inner Mongolia.

According to China’s Ministry of Education (数据库), several minority language projects underway during the current 12^th Five-year Plan (2011-15) have been appraised and approved by experts. They are:

• Database of Modern Tibetan Grammar Research (现代藏语语法信息辞典数据库研究)
• Database of Daur, Evenki and Oroqen Voice Acoustic Parameters (达斡尔、鄂温克和鄂伦春语语音声学参数数据库)

Undertaken by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院民族学与人类学研究所), applications for these databases include promotion of minority language education, language engineering research, and in the case of the Tibetan database, text annotation and machine translation. Read the rest of this entry »