Abstract
Woman villagers of the Ch'iang nationality today wear very colorful and distinctive "national dress". During the first half of the Twentieth century, however, their dress had been plain and basically in white and gray color, as shown by field researchers' reports and photographs. Because it was so devoid of distinctive character, one scholar in those days suggested that it would be difficult to distinguish the Ch'iang from the Han in the mountainous area of western Sichuan on the basis of their dress. This article explains the formation of the national dress of the Ch'iang as the reflection of the development, from the early Twentieth century to the present day, of ethnic nationalism both among the Han and among the people who are being labeled as the Ch'iang. The dress of minority women partially displays a characteristic national culture that self-consciously confirms and strengthens various identities and distinctions such as those of Chung-hua min-tsu versus foreigners, the Han versus non-Han minorities, men versus women, and town-dwellers versus villagers. These distinctions have been created or modified by a movement of explicitly defining minority nationalities and their ethnic characteristics.
There are two mutually contradictory elements in ethnic nationalism: tradition (or unification) and modernization (or progress). In the process of nationality-building in China, "tradition" is stressed on the one hand as it represents historical continuity and ethnic unity, but is avoided on the other hand because it contains the potential of conserving the backwardness of the past. It is therefore by dint of their mostly inferior and peripheral social position that the woman villagers of the Ch'iang have become the only ones wearing the "national" dress. In doing so, they are strategically placed as "performers" of the newly-defined minority identity.
Keywords
nationalism, minority nationality, the Ch'iang, women, national dress
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