Layered Alterities: Discourses of the Other in Lijiang, China

Presented at the Asia and the Other conference, this paper examines Said’s construction of the self/other and addresses a question posed by conference organizers: “Does a newly privileged ‘East’ construct its own ‘others’?” By focusing on the Naxi, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group, the author suggests that Said’s insights on alterity contradict at least some of the imperial, post-revolutionary and contemporary constructions of difference in southwest China. While this paper does not challenge Said’s critique, in Orientalism, of the West’s distortions and “inventions” of the Middle East, it does argue that China cannot so easily fill the role of the Saidian East as Other (to the West), especially when we look at China’s own projects designed to “civilize” the country’s ethnic minority groups. It argues that China, usually assumed to be part of the “East” as defined in Orientalism, did not occupy a fixed position of “Other” (with regard to the West or anywhere else), but in fact has long been engaged in creating its own “Others.” Rather than thinking of self/other and West/East necessarily as geographical designations, these binaries might better be understood as projects of domination, enacted during historical moments of change and fluidity.