Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers edited by Stevan Harrell. [print]

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Introduction-- Part I. The historiography of ethnic identitiy-- The Naxi and the nationalities question/ Charles F. McKhann-- The history of the history of the Yi/ Stevan Harrell-- Defining the Miao : Ming, Qing, and contemporary views/ Norma Diamond-- Making histories : contending conceptions of the Yao past/ Ralph A. Litzinger-- Pere Vial and the Gni-pa̕ : orientalist scholarship and the Christian project/ Margaret Byrne Swain-- Voices of Manchu identity, 1635-1935/ Shelley Rigger-- Part II. The history of ethnic identity-- Millenarianism, Christian movements, and ethnic change among the Miao in Southwest China/ Siu-woo Cheung-- Chinggis Khan : from imperial ancestor to ethnic hero/ Almaz Khan-- The impact of urban ethnic education on modern Mongolian ethnicity, 1949-1966/ Wurlig Borchigud-- On the dynamics of Tai/Dai-Lue ethnicity : an ethnohistorical analysis/ Shih-chung Hsieh-- Glossary-- References-- Contributors-- Index.

A civilizing project, as described in this book, is a kind of interaction between peoples, in which one group, the civilizing center, interacts with other groups (the peripheral peoples) in terms of a particular kind of inequality. In this interaction, the inequality between the civilizing center and the peripheral peoples has its ideological basis in the center's claim to a superior degree of civilization, along with a commitment to raise the peripheral peoples' civilization to the level of the center, or at least closer to that level.