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Uighur Identity
That’s really interesting. The Uighurs that I talked to about racial identity (in Xinjiang) all said “we’re not Chinese, we’re Uighur!” I wonder if it’s a difference between Shanghai Uighurs and Xinjiang Uighurs, or if it’s a question about talking to a vaguely Semetic looking white person vs. a Chinese person.
yrs–
–Ben
I don’t get panel #4 clearly…it seems like the guy’s not assuming white=foreign from his words but then you say he’s assuming white=foreign, even though it almost looks like in the conversation it’s you who’s assuming white=foreign. I think I missed something there. Also I can’t read if it says Ulghur or Uighur or Urghur, since I’ve never heard that word before (making it minutely more difficult to look up, even though probably it would turn up on google no matter which I input..)
Still interesting!! I like the little talking countries – so cute.
I wonder how much of the Chinese construction of race is a product of the umpteen centuries of Chinese history? Does geography ancestry trump citizenship or ethnicity, for example, because there have been so many centuries of continuous occupation of the same area (and the consequent shuffling around of people)?
Makes me wonder, how do Americans sort those same categories into a hierarchy?
If I lay out all the info those categories cover for me…
My Ancestral Homeland would be:
Wales, Ireland, France, or Germany…depending on which part of the family tree is the oldest
If were talking the more fluid definition… my mom’s family is in Michigan and my dad’s (adoptive) family is mostly Alabama, with the last few generations of my mom’s mostly French/German and my dad’s as…moonshiners, of distant relation to the infamous McCoys (sorta Irish)?
Country of Citizenship:
Well, America for me, my ‘rents, and several generations back on either side
Ethnicity:
White, where ‘white’ means of Western European (now including Ireland!) stock.
If you asked me to rank these, based on importance for identity formation….I’ve already changed my mind 3 times in the course of a minute, but I guess I’ll go with Citizenship>Ethnicity>Ancestral Homeland with the provision that Citizenship and Ethnicity often get into ugly catfights over ranking. There’s plenty for my anthropogolical mind to pick apart about what that says about American identity (wooboy, we’ve got ‘individualism’ issues) but that’s for another day.
It’s “Uighur”, and I was just surprised at his racial white-ness. I wasn’t implying that the white Uighur wasn’t Chinese, whereas he assumed that when I said “white”, I meant “western”. Does that make sense, or have I screwed it up completely?
I think geography ancestry for Chinese people raises an interesting issue, which is that while the central part of China has stayed pretty consistently China, the outer regions — xinjing, tibet, mongolia, manchuria, have wiffled in and out depending on dynasties. This is where current citizenship-based nationalism comes into play, I suppose. Interesting to see your identity hierarchy!
Oooooooh I get it. ::is slow::
And my Ancestral Homelands are Italy, Romania, Germany, and Prussia, in no particular order. Do you think it matters that a lot of Americans have ancestors who came from a great diversity of places, like mine and Cat’s, while Chinese people are (correct me if I’m wrong) more likely to marry within their own origin group? It seems like it would be easier to define oneself by one’s ancestral homeland if all one’s ancestors came from the same place.
That is definitely true. Of course, one can argue that your ancestors all came from “Europe”, which is about the size of China…
Another thing to consider is the effect that urbanization and immigration has on removing the importance of homeland. In the agrarian parts of China, people marry a few villages over. I think it was quite similar in pre-Industrial Europe.
Re: Uighur Identity
Yeah, it might have to do with the Shanghai-ness of my Uighur friend. He is a very cautious person, so he said very clearly: That person is a Chinese Uighur. (Uighur being the ethnicity/origin, and Chinese being the nationality). Perhaps in Xinjiang, Chinese is shorthand for Han Chinese, the ethnicity? Or were the Uighurs also saying “We don’t want to be a citizen of China”?
But when Chinese people identify themselves by their ancestral homelands, they’re not talking about an area the size of China, they’re talking about an area the size of Romania, correct? My point was that in America many people’s ancestors come from many different areas that size, and in China many people’s ancestors don’t.
True. But I’d think that it would be still somewhat true in Europe — whether you’re Andalucian or Scotch or Romanian or Moldavian or whatever still matters, just like in China whether you’re Cantonese or Shanghainese or Sichuanese or whatever.
America is different because, well, non-natives are dominant and from all different lands. When you’re an immigrant, you probably marry someone from “the old country” only in the first generation (me=case in point). So even though I’m technically Shanghainese, here I’m “Chinese”, or even just “Asian”. Just like someone from Romania would just be considered “Eastern European” here.