Folklorized politics: how Chinese soft power works in Central Asia

Tovar, Soledad Jiménez; Lavička, Martin

doi:10.1080/14631369.2019.1610355

Cited by 12 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Apart from Mongols’ fear of Chinese cultural infiltration, there is another factor that always impedes the innovation and transformation of Mongolian culture. That is China’s imposition of an essentialized and sanitized ethnic identity on its marginal non‐Han subjects, which is dubbed “folklorization” by Jiménez‐Tovar and Lavička (2020, 262) – a (soft) tool to govern minorities by depoliticizing ethnic culture. The state’s tendency to reduce and simplify Mongolian identity and culture to one that are associated with pastoralism, Mongolian music, colourful traditional costume or traditional ritual, restrains the creative possibility of Mongolian culture.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 1 China’s civilizing/assimilatory project carried out among deaf Tibetans and Mongolian, that is the promotion of Chinese and Chinese Sign Language over the use of local sign and written languages, is excellently studied by Hofer and Sagli (2017). See also Bellér‐Hann (2020), and Jiménez‐Tovar and Lavička (2020) for the drastic shift of ethnic policies and evermore shrinking space for expressing minority voices in China. …”

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confidence: 99%

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Transforming Mongolian Wedding Speech Genres in Bilingual Bicultural Urban Inner Mongolia

Baioud

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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In Mongolian culture, wedding speeches are a traditional component of a marriage celebration, but in bilingual, bicultural urban Inner Mongolia, China, two hybrid genres have emerged which reflect competing ideologies of languages and speakers. There can be a Mongolian performance with a commentary in Chinese, or a blended Mongolian and Chinese language performance. In these hybrids, Mongolian is often associated with a minority status but an authentic tradition, while Chinese seems to represent a modern majority, but alien, culture. By situating the hybrid and bilingual Mongolian wedding speech genre in the contexts of Mongolian cultural loss and revival, urbanization, and the increasing weight of the Chinese state’s political discourse in public space, the study unravels the complexity and contestations inherent in a hybridized traditional Mongolian speech genre. Drawing on the inherent duality of genre, that is its boundedness/monology and its plasticity/heteroglossia, this paper presents ethnographic evidence of these sociolinguistic representations, and contributes to the understanding of hybrid genre, agency, and a transforming expressive culture in the context of social displacement, cultural shift, and internal colonization in China.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%