Who “Who” is, and Other Local Poetics of National Policy: Yunnan Minzu Shibie and Hui in the Process

Starting with the observation that the 1954 minzu shibie Ethnic Categorization Project was part of a continuing process, this article addresses the suspicious finality implied in most narratives of minzu (nationality) formation. In arguing that the process continues, Hui communities of Yunnan serve as exemplars of the embodied life minzu shibie is leading today; i.e., as part of the ongoing process of culture. “Culture,” conceived in part as a cultural production process of dynamically (re)producing social relations through structural and practical dialogics, helps illuminate the reality of the Hui situation in Yunnan. It follows that the 1954 minzu shibie project was a new nation-state “ethnicization” of the ongoing social categorization; or in other words, a nation-state appropriation and continuation of an imperial “poetics of the categorical” where the inventiveness of local agency meets state institution in the cultural dialogics of (re)making. Showing how the minzu shibie in 1954 was a conjunctural event where the categorical structure of culture was transformed, it is further argued that the continuing process of categorical (re)making in locally minzu practical poetics is itself part of culture as a symbolically conditioning determinant of the process of everyday life for a community.