Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China "ss1.62"

ANALYSIS: THE NATURE OF YI ETHNIC IDENTITY AS AN EXPLANATION FOR THE YI RESPONSE TO SCHOOLING

Why, then, do the Yi not view school as a site for the contestation of ethnicity? I maintain that this is because Yi identity does not conform to the traditional dynamics of ethnicity as described by anthropologists who have worked in other ethnic contexts.

My basic premise is simple: The Yido not see school as a setting for ethnic identity contestation because, among the Yi, identity—ethnic and social—is fixed at birth and therefore not contestable. Yi society is divided into two

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ascribed, ranked, endogamous castes, the nuoho (Black Yi) and the quho (White Yi). No amount of money earned or education acquired can ever make a quho person into a nuoho, nor can a nuoho fall to quho. Nor, for that matter, will a nuoho ever want to marry a quho, even if the latter is rich and well educated. In the past, customary law dictated that quho and nuoho who tried to marry would be forced to commit suicide. Today this penalty can no longer be enforced, but the threats are nearly as severe. Many of my informants said their families, even their clans, would ostracize them if they married cross-caste. Several informants' parents told their children they would commit suicide if they tried to marry cross-caste or married someone who was not Yi. Thus who a Yi person is in terms of social status and marriageability is set at birth. Going to school does not change the way a Yi person sees himself or how others see him, in contrast to the situation in societies where status is achieved, and accessible through education.

Yet why is ethnicity politicized in schools in other caste societies? Surely race in America is one of the purest ascriptive ideologies in the world, and yet blacks and whites in America still struggle over their identities, and the manipulation of them in and out of school. In America, however, ascribed ideologies of race coexist with the ideology that status is achieved depending upon one's merit. The achieved and ascribed aspects of the ideologies interact and counteract each other, so that race becomes seen as manipulable to a certain extent. One's actual race may not be changeable, but in the arena where status becomes contested—in schools—racial allegiances and racial statuses can be contested: Doing well in school is viewed by, for example, some blacks as allegiance to white society and a betrayal of their own black communities (Fordham 1996). For other blacks, doing well in school becomes a means to challenge the low status of blacks by challenging the dominant majority's stereotyping of blacks as academically less capable (ibid., especially chap. 6).

But for the Yi, social status and ethnic status are both incontestable. And in fact they are really the same thing! The nuoho think of themselves as higher status precisely because they are pure Yi, whereas they believe the quho have some Han and other non-Yi blood mixed in. Those at the very bottom of Yi society are Han and other non-Yi who were captured as slaves shortly before the end of slavery in 1958. Thus Yi social hierarchy is based on an ethnic hierarchy. This link in hierarchies is manifested in marriage too, since the reason nuoho do not marry quho is because the latter are not pure Yi, and no Yi will marry a non-Yi, who is by definition lower in status. Even the Queen of England would be rejected by Yi men as a spouse, one nuoho informant jokingly told me (although the point he was making was a serious one). The social-ethnic link ensures that no fundamental aspect of Yi identity is contestable, hence the noncontested nature of education for the Yi.

The ethnic-social status link, curiously enough, means that ethnicity is

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defined in both an absolute dichotomized fashion (Yi versus non-Yi) and in a graded, relativistic fashion as well: those who are more versus those who are less Yi. (This relativism is most clearly seen among the quho. All of them are below nuoho because of their impurity, but some of them are higher than others because they are less impure, hence more Yi.) Thus, there is a sense in which Yi feel their ethnic identity to be essential, given at birth and from one's ancestors, and not merely constructed in opposition to the ethnic “other,” a dynamic anthropologists have described so often as central to ethnicity (Barth 1969, especially 14—15). Nor is one's ethnicity constructed based upon one's culture. As one informant insisted to me, a Yi-ancestry person who cannot speak Yi and knows nothing of Yi culture is more clearly Yi, and more clearly worthy of marriage to a Yi, than a Han-ancestryperson who has become Yi culturally and linguistically (a not uncommon occurrence in some parts of Liangshan). Thus a young person can go to a Han school, speak Han, and yet not have the sense of giving up Yiidentity.His or her Han teachers could just as well be absorbed into Yi society, but only as inferiors.

Thus the Yi, though poor and numerically insignificant in China, see themselves as superior to the Han. Therefore they do not act, with regard to school, like a minority group. This superiority is, again, not a construction based upon an opposing Ethnic Other. The Yi do not feel good about themselves by looking down on other ethnicities, as one informant explained to me. They simply know and feel that their essence makes them better. Thus there is no Yi feeling of inferiority at being a minority, nor is their sense of self-worth insecure and always in need of assertion, in contrast to the Han, who always look down on others in order to bolster their own insecure selfesteem. What all this means is that doing well or not doing well in school is not tied up with ethnic esteem issues. The Yi neither feel doomed to educational insignificance because they are minorities—in fact, as noted, many Yi believe they are smarter than the Han—nor, however, do the Yi feel they must prove their superiority educationally. How one does in school and in work is, in large part, due to fate, one informant explained, thus taking school attendance and performance out of the realm of personal, cultural, and ethnic identity. The one exception to this is the Yi recognition that the Han work harder at school, but again this observation causes no Yi any real sense of cultural inferiority or angst (as it might the Han). It is simply a fact—benign tradition, which can be easily changed without an identity conflict about becoming too Han if one works too hard.