Dimensions of Ethnic and Cultural Nationalism in Asia —A Symposium Editor's Introduction

DAVID D. BUCK

*NE OF MY GOALS AS EDITOR has been to develop cross-regional consideration in the pages of this journal of major issues drawing scholarly attention in both the social sciences and humanities. The most common approach for such projects is to bring groups of scholars together at a conference and then to publish a conference volume. Indeed, JAS has published groups of papers from such conferences, most recently the four articles on vernacular Muslim literature in Asia organized by John Bowen (JAS 52.3 [August 1993])- In a variation on that approach, other academic journals, such as Daedalus, assemble groups of articles around a common theme. Many scholarly journals have some or even all of their issues organized around special topics. The first such effort initiated by the editors of JAS was a special issue on Universalism and Relativism in Asian Studies, a project which was begun by my predecessor, Thomas Havens, and published three years ago (JAS 50.1 [February 1991])- That issue brought comments from readers (Brown 1992; McCormick 1991), as well as some additional contributions published in our pages (Metzger 1993; Nathan 1993). For our second effort, editors and readers suggested several intriguing avenues of common research agendas that cut across academic and cultural boundaries within Asia. After consultation with the other JAS editors, I issued a general call in August 1992 for our readers to submit articles on the theme of Ethnic and Cultural Nationalism in Asia. The topic appealed to the editors because several of the most innovative books published during the 1980s concerning ethnic and cultural nationalism were contributed by Asianists (Anderson 1983; Chatterjee 1986; Keyes 1981). In addition, in the post-Cold War era of the 1990s, nationalism has become an even greater focus of scholarly and popular interest. For example, a recent issue of the newsletter of the Social Science Research Council carries descriptions of three conferences concerning Asia in which defining cultural and ethnic aspects of nationalism were major themes (Items 47.4 [December 1993]). Many more such conferences and meetings

David D. Buck is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and editor of this journal. The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994):3—9. © 1994 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.

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were organized around similar questions over the past two or three years. Books presenting radically different approaches to the question of nationalism have continued to appear (Greenfeld 1992; Hobsbawm 1990; Jackson 1990; Norbu 1992; Smith 1992; Young 1993), including several volumes particularly concerned with nationalism in Asia in 1992 and 1993 alone (Befu 1993; Chatterjee 1993; Dittmer and Kim 1993; Yoshino 1992). The new journal Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique devotes its Winter 1993 issue to the theme of "The Nationalisms Question," and literally dozens of individual articles pertaining to Asian nationalism are appearing these days. In the J'AS call for papers, we put a twist on the topic by asking for contributions concerning ethnic and cultural nationalism (JAS 51.3 [August 1992]:509). We wanted specialists studying different parts of Asia to use specific data relating to the ethnic and cultural dimensions of nationalism in their research area to address the larger issues of nationalism in Asia and the world. The results were twenty-six submissions, of which twelve were selected for presentation at a conference held in February 1993-' From among those twelve, the JAS editors, following the conference, selected five and asked the authors to revise their manuscripts for inclusion in this special issue. We tried to select those papers that best fit the terms of our original call for manuscripts that take a strong interpretative approach, present their evidence in terms accessible to specialists working on other parts of Asia, and present significantly fresh viewpoints or modify established interpretations.

ALMON. G THE MANY EFFORTS TO DEFINE the types of ethnic and cultural nationalism, John Rogers's article in this issue (pp. 10-23) presents as clear a formulation as one can find. Rogers sets forth three positions: (1) a modernist one (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983) that sees nationalism as a general construction common to our times, drawing on both Western and indigenous elements, but born, especially outside of Europe, as a reaction against colonial rule and as a means of resistance to and transcendence of colonialism; (2) highly popular primordialist views encountered in political and journalistic mediums in which precolonial identities are believed to reemerge after suppression by or submission to an intervening cultural order, often imposed by foreigners or colonial governments; and (3) a new post-Orientalist position (Dirks 1987; Inden 1990) emphasizing how colonialism first created and then imposed ethnic and cultural identities on those under its rule. Scholarly opinion tends increasingly toward what Rogers calls the post-Orientalist position as a consequence of the enormous interest in identifying and arguing from interpretative positions that challenge the standard, accepted interpretations. As 'The conference was jointly sponsored by the Journal and the Joint Center for International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Marquette University. It was held at UW-Milwaukee's Hefter Conference Center on February 26-27, 1993. In addition to the five articles revised and published here, there were papers by Kevin Doak, Eric Hyer, Kavita Khory, Iftikhar Malik, Sheldon Pollock, Paula Richman, and Ashutosh Varshney. Benedict Anderson and Liah Greenfeld served as discussants. James Bartholomew, Sandria Freitag, Charles Hayford, Young Whan Kihl, Craig Lockard, and Anand Yang from the Journal's editorial board also participated, as well as several scholars from both universities and the surrounding region, including Richard Friman, Abbas Hamdani, Ihab Hassan, Philip Shashko, and Raju Thomas. I would like to thank Mark Tessler, director of the Joint Center, as well as the Center staff and the UW-Milwaukee Golda Meir Library staff for their assistance and support for the conference.

H. D. Forbes (1985, pp. 11-15) has perceptively pointed out, the desire for revisionism is heightened in current academic writing because both the social sciences and the humanities have become increasingly dominated by concerns expressed best through the Frankfurt school—but running through the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and ever-growing legions of others in Europe, North America, and around the world—that scholars must break away from culturally determined biases to articulate views that challenge and reshape our understanding. This is necessary because accepted methods of understanding are seen as hopelessly limited as a consequence of certain Western, rational, and universalistic biases. Partha Chatterjee's latest book, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post- Colonial Histories (1993), opens with ringing condemnation and aptly sets out the charges brought against modern, Western rationality.

By now knowledgeable people all over the world have become familiar with the charges leveled against the subject-centered rationality characteristic of post- Enlightenment modernity. The subject-centered reason, we have now been told, claims for itself a singular universality by asserting its epistemic privilege over all local, plural, and often incommensurable knowledges; it proclaims its own unity and homogeneity by declaring all other subjectivities as inadequate, fragmentary, and subordinate; it declares for the tational subject an epistemic as well as moral sovereignty that is meant to be self-determined, unconditioned, and self-transparent. Against this arrogant, intolerant, self-aggrandizing rational subject of modernity, ctitics in recent years have been ttying to tesurrect the virtues of the fragmentary, the local and the subjugated in order to unmask the will to power that lies at the very heart of modern rationality. . . . (p. xi)

As a consequence, we see scholars speaking from subaltern, local, fragmentary, gendered, or other perspectives deliberately framed to break away from established interpretations. Two articles in this issue use such approaches with great success; Joseph Alter explores a male-gendered Hindu view to interpret aspects of nationalism in India, while Dm Gladney ties in the popular representations of minorities in China with the shaping of male and female identities among the dominant Han majority in China. Earlier in the twentieth century, the politics of nationalism in Asia, as in Africa and Latin America, were dominated by the efforts of broad coalitions to assert nationalist independence from their colonial rulers. Stefan Tanaka's article in this issue shows how art criticism played a role in creating Meiji Japan's sense of national identity. In most cases, these Asian nationalists succeeded in establishing new nation- states that assumed a character obviously derived from the ways of their colonial predecessors or Western models. The nature of the post-colonial state—including its organization, its powers and functions, its concept of territoriality, its dealings with other states—were all shaped by Western models and practices. Most early advocates of these new national states in Asia believed that local identities could be subsumed into larger national identities, as had occurred during the growth of European nationalism in France, Germany, and elsewhere. Today, the unity born of that common struggle against colonialism has faded, and we see many Asian political leaders increasingly calling upon narrower ethnic and cultural identities and challenging these more encompassing national identities. A few scholars, such as Walker Conner (1994), have long argued that ethnonationalism would inevitably reappear to challenge the modern European-style nation-state, but it certainly

is too early to declare the inevitable end to great multiethnic states around the world. Benedict Anderson called the "imagined communities" the key to the process that permitted the emergence of the modern nation-state in which people of quite diverse circumstances transcend their old identities and come to identify themselves with a widely encompassing new national identity. In contrast, ethnic or culturally based nationalism calls upon those elements of identity that we have limited ability to deny or alter, such as language, religion, place of origin or residence, skin color, and gender. It also asserts the claim of certain cultural characteristics and traditions, almost always containing a strong primordialist element. Charles Keyes (1981) has proposed, however, that ethnicity, as it figures in both the identity and politics of our present-day world, is quite similar to what Ernest Gellner (1983) sees behind the growth of nationalism. Both are responses to radical changes in social circumstances in which the content and purposes of identity undergo considerable alteration. Keyes shows how these ethnic and cultural elements typically begin as forms of self-praise to prove the truth of some identity, such as "the bio-moral nature of Hindu nationalism," "Chinese cultural uniqueness," or "Japanese racial purity." In most cases, it is not clear if leaders are cynically manipulating these aspects of identity to attain power, or merely articulating widely felt popular needs. It remains my own bias—based particularly on reading the work of John Breuilly (1985) and Walker Conner (1994) and reflected in the all too-horrible consequences of present-day ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and India—that ethnic and cultural differences, along with religion (Juergensmeyer 1993), are increasingly being used by political leaders as a means to assert power against existing nation-states and outside interests, such as Western culture or international economic penetration. Fear can drive us to find others with whom we can create a bond for defense of common interests; and it is much easier to create those bonds along the lines of involuntarily shared characteristics such as race, place of origin, religion, or skin color. The potential for fissiparous division within nation-states seems, at times, almost limitless. If the history of another Western world-organizing tradition, Christianity, is any guide to the future course of nationalism, we can only expect the decline of dominant centralizing authority—in the history of Christianity represented by the Roman church—to produce not the end of the tradition, but only its continuing importance along new lines that incorporate ever finer and more determinedly asserted lines of identity as the best possible form of Christianity or nationalism.

l\s DAWA NORBU POINTS OUT, "the structure of nationalism consists of two equally powerful components: traditional data (such as race, language, literature, tradition, territoriality) and egalitarian ideology (such as freedom, equality and fraternity)" (1992:1). The five articles within this issue do an excellent job of showing how traditional elements can be incorporated in particular expressions of nationalism in Asia. Yet, while the importance of egalitarian ideology is mentioned or implied in these articles, the underlying significance of egalitarianism is not thoroughly explored. As obvious as that point may seem, it may be helpful in this introduction to take up that question briefly. Liah Greenfeld, both in her presentation at our February 1993 conference and in her recent history of European nationalism, argues that in the five cases she studied—England, France, Russia, Germany, and North America—that other

outcomes were possible in each case and thus ''the choice of nationalism was not inevitable" (1992, p. 487). She continues by noting that, once adopted, nationalism carries with it certain characteristics, including the acceleration of change and channeling of energies into specific directions, while it also rules out other avenues for development and takes away some existing characteristics. Yet at some point in time, as this European system of nationalism developed and spread, the choice of nationalism did become inevitable for other states and societies. The world and its ways had become so deeply colored by the concept of nationalism that alternative ways of organizing societies and states were no longer feasible. The best nationalist leaders in Asia could do was to reduce some previous conception of society or the state—such as the Muslim conception of the state or the Buddhist notion of kingship—to a cultural trait that provided distinctive coloration to their new national identity. In the new states created by the anticolonial and antiimperialist national leaders of this century, the functions the states needed to perform, the expectations of the leaders themselves, the standards by which these new states were judged by their neighbors, and the organs of opinion within the new states were all strongly shaped by Western notions of the modern nation-state. Some variety of egalitarianism is one of those common characteristics of the Western nation-state and it, in turn, rests on the bedrock notion that the authority of the nation-state embodies and represents the consent of the governed. The required correspondence between the nature of the state and those it governs is one of the most powerful and defining aspects of Western nationalism as a political system. The fact that the Western nation-state is said to embody the character of a people, represent their interests on all sorts of issues, and even help them define the salient characteristics of a shared national identity results in a clear set of limiting consequences for any nation-state, in Asia or elsewhere, following the Western model. As John Breuilly puts it, "First, there is the notion of a unique national community. Second, there is the idea of the nation as a society which should have its own state. Finally, the nation is thought of as a body of citizens—that is a wholly political conception—and nationalism is justified in terms of universal political principles" (1985, p. 342). The acceptance of this logic in the existing nation-states of Asia and among the various nationalistic movements throughout that broad region shows that they have accepted certain defining characteristics of what is a universal and Western-derived set of ideas about society and the state. Without denying the ability of Asian leaders and peoples to adapt and modify Western notions, I am reminded of the insight of Arthur Waldron (1990) about how the fascination of the Chinese with the Great Wall as a defining and unique characteristic of their own society can be interpreted as acceptance by the Chinese of what really began as a Western notion of one of China's unique characteristics. Partha Chatterjee (1993) may want to see these Western-derived nations dissolve into fragments that lose all the essential qualities of nations, but equally plausible is an outcome in which fission creates only more and smaller nations, each containing cross-class, cross-gender, multiregional alliances.

.FINALLY, IT is NOT REALLY PROPER to devote most of an issue to the topic of nationalism without at least touching on the issue of national identity. The amount of material about national identity produced by historians, political scientists, sociologists, novelists, philosophers, and critics is so vast and diverse that any remarks

in this introduction are no more than marginal comments. Still, national identities do exist, at least in our minds, and are used by people to shape their response to a broad spectrum of topics running from government policies to personal dealings with other individuals. Dawa Norbu, in his wide-ranging and challenging book, Culture and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (1992), argues that states should be understood as means for producing self-identity through increasing social differentiation between social groups (pp. 210—11). Thus, for him, politics, the state, and identity are inevitably linked. While this is certainly true in the present, it is quite difficult to argue that identities in the past were usually so closely tied together around political questions or connected with the state. Furthermore, even today, many people consciously or unconsciously opt out of such forms of identity if the circumstances permit. We need to be careful about overemphasizing the role of nationalism in identity, for there is strong evidence that all of us possess multiple identities. Identity is such a multifaceted component of human personality that we never know exactly what elements are in play in many situations. Norbu continues in his effort to find the nature of national identity in the Third World by taking up the role of religion. "Since the core of any national identity in the Third World is religious-induced culture, we can trace its origins to a world religion or a national tradition ..." (p. 213). Yet religious traditions, in particular, always contain elements that are clearly in conflict with some requirements of the modern state. So some enduring differences remain between religion and the secular aims of the modern state (Juergensmeyer 1993). Although all of our contributors take up religion or a national tradition as an important element in ethnic and cultural nationalism, they avoid asserting that a particular religion or national tradition yields a certain type of national identity. In fact, all of them suggest in one way or another that national identities are constantly evolving and appearing in altered shapes. Again, John Rogers leads the way on this question as he specifically argues for the notion of constant change in the content and implications of national identity in Sri Lanka. Edward Friedman, on the other hand, shows how there are competing concepts of national identity in China today, and he suggests that radical shifts in national identity are both possible and probable in China. Harumi Befu suggests that national identities are prone to such changes because "[these] manifestations of cultural nationalism [are] discursive. Here, representation of national identity is verbal rather than physical" (1993, p- 3). It is this potential for change that is the most puzzling quality for those who try to fix, from whatever critical perspective, the phenomena of nationalism in Asia or elsewhere. As always, we welcome correspondence or additional contributions about the issues raised in this symposium.

List of References

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