ABSTRACT
When asking, or exploring indirectly, how one’s ethnic background can be expressed in a basically Han environment in China, a visitor may encounter all kinds of answers. They can range from Lishui’s She villagers emphasizing She mountain songs; Shenyang’s Koreans extolling their Korean-language education; Litong’s Muslims focusing on daily mosque activities; Beining’s Man carrying the memory of a unique dynastic history; Ali Mountain’s Zou concentrating on cohabitation with gufish; Xishuangbanna’s Dai having as their central concern the schooling of boy-monks; Lijiang’s Naxi being obsessed with matrilineal traces; and so on. 1 These answers can be simply social constructions to meet visitors’ curiosity, or they can carry implicit inferences from sporadic remarks that do not consciously respond to any specific inquiries. My three visits to Yongshuen County in the Tujia–Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Western Hunan yielded a completely different impression, to the extent that cadres I interviewed did not once speak of ethnic traits, even indirectly, nor did they appear to care about them.
