Creating a Common Fate: The Negotiation Meeting of the Bai’s Ethnonym / 制造共同命运:以“白族”族称的协商座谈会为例

Abstract

Abstract Based on archival studies, this paper analyses an “ethnic symposium” organized by the party committee of the Dali Prefecture in 1956. The author argues that determining the Bai as the ethnonym is a process of “name standardization”. It was neither the decision of the state power, nor was it led by the scholar’s opinion, but by the local elites’ deliberate complicity with the state project. It could be thus called a process of “creating a common fate” under the combined principles of the discourse of “liberation-cum-backwardness”, historical evidence, anti-discrimination, legibility to the ordinary member, conformity to the communist value, etc. It defamiliarizes the everyday knowledge of the people and creates a liminal stage in which a shared fate could be felt. Therefore, this paper is not intended to deconstruct the ethnic identity, but attempts to provide the empirical analysis on a sociological issue of knowledge through contextualizing the usage and implication of the word “minzu” (ethnicity, nation).