(Re)envisioning Southwest Ethnic Minorities: Visual Images in Republican Era and their Impacts on Shad/ping Modern China

• Main Authors: Peng-hui Wang, 王鵬惠
• Other Authors: 謝世忠
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96142031969844100281

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 人類學研究所 === 97 === This dissertation aims to explore the process in which historical visual recordings of China’s southwest ethnic minorities, and the subsequent dissemination of such material, served as a means to strengthen Chinese nationalism via nationalistic propaganda in the 1920s to 1940s, and the ways these surviving visual records became rich resources for tourism promotion and the social effects they had on reshaping Republican memories in modern China. This study on ethno-visual history is based primarily on historical photography and supplemented by other documents on cinema and documentary films. During China’s Republican era, borderland crises and the advent of the Second Sino-Japanese War forced the then-deeply frustrated nation to safeguard its frontier and retreat to the southwest to zealously strengthen national identities throughout the nation. One of its tactics was to infuse such ideology into the southwest frontier people by incorporating them as national citizens. At the time, anthropology was a newly established academic discipline and scholars treated China’s southwest region as a resourceful ethno-laboratory. The accomplishments made during their time laid the foundation for later research and development, and left behind considerable quantities of visual records. At the time, interest in southwest China gained a revival and was recognized as a romantic utopia: researchers, journalists, and travelers frequently visited the border areas and produced large amounts of visual archives of the minorities. The visual images produced in this era depict intensive interaction between the majority Han people and southwest minorities. Images of southwest minorities also made their way to the silver screen, although the general audience’s reception to such subject matter was mediocre; despite being praised by the KMT, Yaoshan Yanshi, a film adapted from a real life story claimed to be the first real footage in the Yao mountains, only reached a status equivalent to “barbaric” films in the history of Chinese cinema. After 1949, the PRC’s political campaigns transformed various people, events, and even artifacts of the Republican era into political taboos. Memories of the Republican era were gradually distorted and forgotten, including many efforts by Chinese and foreign individuals who had documented and researched China’s southwest ethnic groups. It was not until the 1990s when historical photographs of southwest China taken by American botanist Joseph F. Rock in Republican era became involuntarily involved in southwest China’s tourism revival with many counties vying for the term “Shangri-la”. It was a clear example of how Rock’s interpretation and imagination of China’s southwest region from a Western perspective had been transformed into tourism-boosting resources in modern China. Meanwhile, China’s contemporary media industry has helped rekindle wide interest in its own historical photography by uncovering the photographic and cinematic masterpieces of senior photographers such as Zhuang Xueben and Sun Mingjing. Once considered taboo, visual images of frontier ethnic minorities from the Republican era have grasped the people’s attention and have been circulated widely, becoming assets of China’s cultural heritage and are no longer the forgotten and distorted memories of the Republican era. This study concludes that visual images of China’s southwest ethnic minorities, through the development of anthropology and visual history, as well as the construction of touristic codes and historical narratives, explicitly explain the unique role that visual images have played in the cultural reproduction of modern China from a historical context.