Asian Ethnicity
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Co-producing ethnicity in urban Asia
Clay Eaton, Matthew Reeder & Yang Yang
To cite this article: Clay Eaton, Matthew Reeder & Yang Yang (2023) Co-producing ethnicity in
urban Asia, Asian Ethnicity, 24:4, 495-504, DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2023.2241406
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ASIAN ETHNICITY
2023, VOL. 24, NO. 4, 495–504
https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2023.2241406
Co-producing ethnicity in urban Asia
Clay Eatona, Matthew Reederb and Yang Yangc
a
Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore; bDepartment of History,
National University of Singapore, Singapore; cCollege of Humanities and Sciences, National University of
Singapore, Singapore
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
The articles in this special issue examine engagements across ethnic
boundaries in Asian cities over the past two centuries. We see these
cities as stages for the co-production of ethnicity, where multiple
actors, including but not limited to state authorities, have
attempted to define, manage, and challenge the social boundaries
between their diverse inhabitants. These articles direct our attention to the convergence of three critical themes: the flexibility and
ubiquity of ethnic ascription, the top-down and bottom-up coproduction of social meaning, and Asian cities as crucial sites of
social innovation.
Received 2 July 2023
Accepted 24 July 2023
KEYWORDS
Ethnicity; co-production;
minorities; migration;
administration; empire;
knowledge
Asia’s diverse cities have long been sites of continuous engagement across social boundaries. They have brought together flows of people, goods, and knowledge that have both
benefited, and threatened to destabilize, the administrative projects of colonial rulers and
autochthonous regimes alike. These political authorities, in turn, have attempted to
govern the engagements that constitute urban life, but they have rarely had free rein to
shape interactions as they choose. The articles in this special issue focus on engagements
across ethnic boundaries in Asian cities. We see these cities as stages for the coproduction of ethnicity, where multiple actors, including but not limited to state authorities, have attempted to define, manage, and challenge the social boundaries between
their diverse inhabitants. These articles direct our attention to the convergence of three
critical themes: the flexibility and ubiquity of ethnic ascription, the top-down and
bottom-up co-production of social meaning, and Asian cities as crucial sites of social
innovation.
Ethnic ascription is possibly the most complex of these, as both popular and scholarly
understandings of the concept of ethnicity have shifted dramatically over time. Before the
twentieth century, the terms ‘ethnic group’ and ‘ethnicity’ were rare in English-language
usage. Europeans preferred ‘nations’ and ‘races’ for concepts much more akin to ‘ethnic
groups’ today. This is why terms like ‘nations,’ ‘nationalities,’ and ‘races’ remain the
official English translations for the constituent peoples in countries such as China,
Malaysia, and Myanmar – categories that many Western scholars today would recognize
as ‘ethnic groups.’1 Furthermore, state officials, scholars, writers, and others have long
attempted to impose their own understandings of social categories onto the subjects of
CONTACT Matthew Reeder
mreeder@nus.edu.sg
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Department of History, National University of Singapore
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C. EATON ET AL.
their analysis. These subjects have not always recognized, let alone adopted, the categories assigned to them by ‘experts.’2 So, from the outset, it is instructive to distinguish
categories of analysis—etic categories used by government officials, researchers, and the
like – from categories of practice—emic categories used by people ‘on the ground.’ After
all, ethnic identity is hardly objective – it depends on who is identifying whom.3 But this
is just the beginning. There are many opportunities for categories of practice and
categories of analysis to influence one another. And no community speaks with one
mind: individual members make identification choices differently, based on context,
purpose, or perspective.
The coexistence of different perspectives on categorization shows us that ethnic
categories are neither natural nor objective. Their boundaries are shaped by the discourses and behaviors of myriad actors, and individuals cross these boundaries, and stake
claims to in-between spaces, with surprising regularity.4 Yet ethnic categories are often
perceived to be static, eternal, and impermeable. So how do social ‘fictions’ come to feel
like social ‘facts’? This is, in part, due to the perceived ancientness of the ‘ethnic markers’
evoked to define the boundaries of each category.5 These markers vary substantially. In
some contexts, one’s mother tongue seems to be the deciding factor. Traditional dress,
hairstyle, or deportment are key in others. Some actors call attention to cultural practices,
home-building techniques or livelihoods. Others point to ancestry or homelands. Indeed,
some markers hint that ethnicity is not categorically distinguishable from other forms of
identity. Physical appearance, citizenship papers, and devotional practices mark more
than just race, nationality, and religion. They are often held to define ‘peoples,’ as well.6 It
is in this context that the ‘invention of tradition’ is such a powerful tool: by seeing some
markers as the age-old embodiments of a people, that social group is made to appear
natural, and its internal hierarchy and political autonomy justified.7
To what extent are Asia’s contemporary ethnic divisions the invention of European
colonialism? It is sometimes argued that ethnic groups as everyday categories of practice
only emerged in colonial contexts. This conclusion usually relies on a particular understanding of ethnicity that ties it, by definition, to the ‘scientific’ pursuits of nineteenthcentury European scholar-administrators. Certainly, many of these figures were obsessed
with categorizing colonial subjects by race, ethnicity, caste, and religion.8 And these
identifications came to matter a great deal, as they were both written into policy and
pulled into public discourse.9 But, as historians of Asia’s early modern period have
insisted, the increasing mobilization of ethnic-like or even race-like categories for
political purposes was a trend that preceded the establishment of European colonial
administrations, and the roots of some contemporary social formulations can be traced
before the nineteenth century.10 So, while the papers in this issue shine spotlights on
ethnicity in-the-making, many of these formulations were long in-the-making – sometimes even predating European hegemony.
Probing this deep history allows us to unsettle narratives of racialization and ethnic
categorization that center the colonial or postcolonial state. The essays, taken together,
help to further unsettle these narratives. All focus on specific urban landscapes and
examine how these categories of practice emerge and are subsequently imposed, subverted, and transformed. By taking this granular approach, we may observe that these
lived categories are co-produced by a variety of actors, including but certainly not limited
to agents of the state. The term ‘co-production’ is often used to describe methodological
ASIAN ETHNICITY
497
approaches such as the co-production of knowledge by researchers and research subjects,
or administrative practices such as the co-production of social services.11 As an analytical
category, it has been used in a variety of academic fields, perhaps most prominently in
recent years in the study of science and technology.12 Here, we find co-production to be
a productive framework to understand the complex interactions our contributors have
seen in urban Asia. We use it here, in the words of Sheila Jasanoff, not as a ‘fully fledged
theory,’ but as an ‘idiom – a way of interpreting and accounting for complex phenomena
so as to avoid the strategic deletions and omissions’ of other approaches.13 This lens
allows us to decenter traditional forms of authority and recognize them as one part of
a wider social arena in which ethnicity is produced.
By attending to the co-production of ethnic categories, we build on studies produced
in recent decades that emphasize the importance of native informants, indigenous elites,
and local expertise in the creation of knowledge in colonial and post-colonial Asia. As
Phillip Wagoner has written, many early studies in this vein outlined the ‘epistemological
violence’ inflicted on colonial societies by Western experts in British India.14 While
continuing to acknowledge the grossly unequal power relations of colonial societies,
more recent studies have also demonstrated the importance of colonized peoples in
producing knowledge about history, botany, and, critically for this issue, ethnicity.15 Our
essays demonstrate that, while the degree of co-production may have varied in different
contexts, the participation of multiple actors in the construction of ethnicity is
a persistent feature of life in urban Asia. This co-production occurs in moments of
engagement between administrators, anthropologists, community leaders, inspectors,
teachers, volunteers, craftsmen, students, and members of a crowd – all taking place in
the ‘contact zone’ provided by Asian cities.16
Cities are thus important sites of ethnic co-production. In these contexts of multiculturalism, colonialism, and capitalism, top-down and bottom-up narratives and practices contribute to the meanings of ethnic categories. Studies on ethnicity in
contemporary European and American cities often emphasize issues of colorism, refugees, and migration.17 In these examples, cities are key sites for implementing ethnic
policies on community cohesion and mixed housing with the intention of integrating
new migrants identified with minority ethnic identities. Meanwhile, the everyday lives of
city residents are seen to feature cultural exchanges and encounters between ethnic
majorities and minorities, interactions between different groups of minority populations,
and these groups’ plural and contested senses of belonging. These processes, being
ubiquitous in both Euro-American contexts and beyond, help us to unpack the complexity of ethnicity by showing its intersections with other factors like class and gender.
Likewise, the experiences of ethnic minorities and migrants in Asian cities can help
us to see the complexities of contemporary urban multiculturalism. As these cities
have grown, ethnic policies have shaped the integration of new arrivals into the urban
landscape. For instance, the People’s Republic of China prevents Tibetans from
continuing traditional nomadic practices by forcing them to resettle in urban
housing.18 At the same time, urban plans and architectural designs project minority
communities as symbols of inclusivity and diversity in urban public spaces in order to
attract visitors or secure funding from the central government.19 The top-down
approach of using urban development to endorse nationalism can also be related to
religious dominance, such as in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Islam has become
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C. EATON ET AL.
hyper-visualized in the urban landscape.20 Meanwhile, urban spaces are also actively
engaged by members of ethnic minorities and migrant communities to produce
ethnic meaning as alternatives to top-down state discourses. For instance, migrant
workers in Hong Kong strategically engage in various neighborhood spaces to make
their own systems of care and support, services that are otherwise unavailable to
them.21 Yet, within marginalized minority groups, competition and differentiated
access to public resources may also prompt certain group elites to reinforce topdown structural inequalities. Different religious groups in slum areas in Islamabad,
Pakistan, are a case in point.22 The complex power relations between ethnic majorities
and minorities, as well as between state authorities and grassroots informal organizations, have become entangled in broader global economic, social, and political
processes in urban spaces. Thus, we see Asian cities as especially revealing of the
diverse modalities of ethnic co-production.
Each article in this issue takes ethnicity, or ethnic-like identities known variously as
‘races’ or ‘place of origin’ communities, as its primary focus. And, each one recognizes an
urban area as a key site where such identities are co-produced by traditional figures of
institutional authority on the one hand, and members of certain urban communities on
the other. Out of necessity, this co-production work is most dynamic when communities
of rulers and ruled know little about each other.23 It is no surprise, then, that this issue’s
articles focus on places where new migrant communities have settled, foreign empires
have taken over, or both. We have accordingly arranged the papers in rough sequence,
beginning with a context in which an imperial authority has just arrived (Eaton), to
colonial cities with a foreign ruling class and both local and immigrant communities
(Toivanen, Le, Lee), and, finally, to contemporary sites of mass in-migration
(Sudcharoen, Tan). Moreover, each author has identified a somewhat different mode
of co-production.
In ‘Strategic Races: Understanding Racial Categories in Japanese-Occupied
Singapore,’ Clay Eaton discusses the limits of ethnic co-production in the oppressive
environment of wartime Singapore. In the context of a global war and the total mobilization that it demanded of its belligerents, the Japanese military administration that ruled
this strategically critical city from February 1942 to September 1945 was particularly
inflexible in its approach to local governance. Even so, both planners in Tokyo and
administrators on the ground had a limited understanding of this diverse urban society,
and local Malay and Indian collaborators had some success in defining their communities for the purposes of ethnic governance under the Japanese. This was not the case,
however, for the local Chinese community. Eaton shows that Japanese experts considered
this ‘race’ to be particularly vital to their control of the Southeast Asian economy – and
thus the wider war effort. While they clashed over whether a coercive or conciliatory
approach to the Chinese would be more effective, the boundaries of what was in fact an
internally diverse community were never up for debate within the Japanese administration. This led to an ossification of this ethnic category in wartime Singapore that
prevented local actors from meaningfully participating in its co-production, a situation
that Eaton argues also played out on a smaller scale with the local Jewish community. In
‘Strategic races,’ we acknowledge the extent to which the process of co-production could
be an unequal one that might depend on the tolerance of structures of authority for the
participation of external actors.
ASIAN ETHNICITY
499
In ‘The Colonial City in Motion: Managing Ethnic Diversity through Public
Processions in Singapore and Batavia, 1840–1870,’ Mikko Toivanen brings us to the
heyday of Western colonialism in Southeast Asia, a time when political authorities
rigorously maintained the social distance between themselves and the rest of urban
society. In this article, Toivanen demonstrates that the co-production of ethnicity was
not a simple negotiation between different urban actors, but an uneven and haphazard
process befitting the diversity and frenetic energy of urban centers like British Singapore
and Dutch Batavia (now Jakarta). At times, we see colonial authorities organizing
elaborate ceremonies that reinforced and specialized ethnic communities, even as ‘participants could . . . hope to negotiate the terms of their participation and to extract value
from their cooperation’ (17). At others, however, we see urban residents ‘parad[ing their]
individual and group identities’ independent from colonial controls (16). By redirecting
our focus from the colonial archive to the embodiment of ethnicity in these urban
settings, Toivanen’s article compels us to recognize the multiple forces that shaped ethnic
categories even at the centers of British and Dutch authority in the region.
Anh Sy Huy Le shows us how ethnicity can be co-produced through a dialectic
relation between state efforts to categorize, identify, and exploit a ‘migrant’ population
on the one hand – and efforts to subvert, resist, and maneuver within those controls on
the other. The colonial authorities in Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn, the twin hubs of French
Cochinchina, experimented with an increasingly-intensive arsenal of tools. These
included a police force, an immigration bureau, intelligence agents, Chinese middlemen,
fingerprinting, body measurements, head photos, databases, passports, visas, residency
permits, visitor passes, fines, imprisonment, and deportment. These technologies were
intended to identify Chinese individuals and situate them within specific legal categories,
each treated differently by law: Sino-Vietnamese métis, the descendants of Ming loyalists,
foreign nationals of China, French colonial subjects, the protégés of other colonial
powers, and even (in rare cases) naturalized French citizens of Chinese descent. But
shifting one’s official category was sometimes advantageous, and so the colony’s Chinese
residents deployed an array of tactics to evade French surveillance technologies. They
lodged lawsuits, took on aliases, produced fake documents, pretended to be foreign
nationals in some cases and colonial subjects in others, lobbied (or threatened) their
headmen for policy changes, joined mutual aid or secret societies, launched boycotts,
raised funds, and made alliances with other Chinese and non-Chinese communities. The
result of this dialectic process is a set of ‘Chinese’ categories constantly in flux: how one
was identified was a contested question precisely because it mattered so much to state and
subjects alike.
In ‘Identity Pride and Exclusiveness: Cross-Border Craftsmanship and Chinese Tailors
in Post-War Hong Kong, 1945–1970,’ Katon Lee examines the co-production of ethnicity
through the case of the Shanghainese identity associated with tailors in colonial
Hong Kong. Specifically, Lee presents negotiations between two migrant groups,
Cantonese and Shanghainese, in the context of competition and exclusions in the
occupational community and their specialized segments in the tailoring market. While
both groups were predominantly perceived by their Western clientele as ‘Hong Kong
tailors,’ their supposedly shared ‘Chinese-ness’ was not sufficient to prompt them to
integrate with each other in occupational settings. The Shanghainese tailors migrated to
Hong Kong much later than their Cantonese counterparts, significantly challenging the
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Cantonese dominance in the tailoring industry. Due to their different occupational
practices, both groups developed a place-based sense of belonging that was justified by
the prestige identified with these locations in tailoring. Apart from these two groups’
migration histories and bottom-up articulations of their cultural and place-based belongings, Lee also emphasizes the formal institutional factors that sustained the boundaries
between the Shanghainese and Cantonese tailors. The colonial government’s differentiated migration requirements for obtaining Hong Kong entry permits and the officially
sponsored vocational training programs on technical apprenticeship for factories are
cases in point. Lee’s analyses of the power dynamics between Cantonese and
Shanghainese migrants in colonial Hong Kong thus unpack the co-production of difference between social categories that might be seen as comparable to either ethnic
categories or subgroups of ethnic categories. Hong Kong, as a colonial, cosmopolitan
urban space, shows how occupational practices can shape ethnic co-production.
Addressing the connections between migration and ethnicity in contemporary contexts, Moodjalin Sudcharoen illustrates the performative aspect of co-producing ethnic
categories by examining clothing policies and practices at a school serving migrant
children in the small, industrial city of Samutsakhon, Thailand. Sudcharoen shows that
ethnic clothing styles were appropriated by the local school as symbols of diversity.
Urban settings are especially crucial for understanding the co-production of ethnicity
because ‘labor, capital, and commodities continually flow in and out’ (3). Burmese
migrants’ experiences of being excluded through ‘inclusive’ policies such as diversitybased dress codes in school settings are thus wrapped up in the intersection of the Thai
state’s discourse of multiculturalism and the global capitalist circulation of labor.
Ethnicity is thus co-produced at the intersection of transnational economic processes
and local politics. Instead of simplifying the clothing policy at schools as a top-down state
policy for celebrating cultural diversity, Sudcharoen picks apart the diverse ways
Burmese migrant students engaged with school uniforms and their cultural dress in
accordance with specific audiences and occasions. While a person’s ethnic clothing
signifies them as disposable and illegal in non-school settings, it simultaneously serves
as a marker of the school’s performative inclusivity and diversity. Similarly, school
uniforms, as visual markers of conforming to state authority, were mobilized by migrant
students to bypass constraints associated with their migrant status. Therefore, the discourse of dressing as one’s ethnicity is simultaneously reinforced and challenged by
actors such as schoolteachers and migrant students in everyday urban settings.
Ethnicity may also be co-produced through on-the-ground negotiation, as Rebecca
Tan explains in “Renegotiating Multiculturalism: The Grassroots Integration of New
Migrants’ Ethnic Identities in Singapore.” In contemporary Singapore, would-be citizens
must negotiate the difference between the cultural practices of their homelands and the
practices that serve as racial markers in Singapore, their new home. Before their arrival,
many migrants feel little connection with the official racial category that is assigned to
them in Singapore: Chinese, Malay, Indian, or ‘Other.’ To craft a compelling application
for permanent residency or citizenship, however, applicants must demonstrate
a commitment to Singapore’s brand of poly-racial citizenship. This entails not just
cheerily sampling the cooking, clothing, and dancing of other racial categories, many
of which were ‘invented traditions’ of the sort described by Hobsbawm, but an enthusiasm for sharing their own culture.24 The difficulty, however, is that many new migrants
ASIAN ETHNICITY
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find the cultural markers of the racial category assigned to them in Singapore utterly
unfamiliar, and they struggle to negotiate their own cultures with the ones they are
encouraged to assume. New migrants from North India, for instance, must decide
whether to celebrate the Diwali of their heritage or the Deepavali of the Tamil community which serves as the basis for the category of ‘Indians’ in Singapore. New migrants
from northern China and Indonesia likewise struggle to embody Singaporean
Chineseness and Malayness, respectively. In the end, while adapting to their new ‘racial’
identities, these new migrants incrementally shift the boundaries of Singapore’s racial
categories by putting their own spin on normative cultural performances, adding their
own cultural elements to the mix, or resisting assimilation as they pursue integration.
Each of these contributions helps to demonstrate that ethnicity in Asia’s diverse cities
is co-produced: actors at multiple levels shape how ethnicity is experienced and lived.
State actors may play a critical role in creating ethnic categories and policing their
boundaries. But in each article, we see other institutions and agencies reinforcing or
subverting these categories on the ground. These actors may have developed an adversarial relationship with the state (Le), but they might also be schoolchildren searching for
a sense of safety and belonging (Sudcharoen), new migrants trying to maintain a sense of
cultural identity (Tan), or tailors protecting their business interests (Lee). Even in
instances where state actors are most active, managing public processions in colonial
Southeast Asia (Toivanen) or conducting a military occupation of Singapore (Eaton),
state actors are rarely the sole determinants of ethnicity.
These articles offer empirical and analytical support for the issue’s three interlocking
arguments: that ethnic or ethnic-like categories are contested not only because they are
situationally meaningful, but also because they are, at least to a degree, fluid; that this
fluidity allows for some negotiation, meaning that ethnic categories are co-produced by
the top-down actions of authorities and the bottom-up efforts of everyday, or even
marginalized, residents; and that these dynamics are compounded in Asia’s cities,
primary destinations for migrants, laborers, businesses, empires, and nation-builders
alike. These cities’ hierarchies of rulers and communities of residents have often featured
so many foreign faces, for whom the need to interpret the city’s categorical landscape is
both urgent and fraught. It is in contexts like these that engagements across social
boundaries have opened up space for the negotiation of ethnic boundaries, and it is
here that the special issue’s authors have identified ethnic co-production at work.
Notes
1. Hirschman, ‘The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity’; and Candier, ‘Mapping Ethnicity
in Nineteenth-Century Burma.’
2. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation.
3. Cooper, Colonialism in Question.
4. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making.
5. Barth, ‘Introduction.’
6. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups; and Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation.
7. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction.’
8. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Dirks, Castes of Mind; Manickam, Taming the Wild; and
Sysling, Racial Science and Human Diversity. But see also Prasse-Freeman, ‘Reassessing
Reification.’
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C. EATON ET AL.
9. Kaviraj, ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power’; and Bosma and Raben, Being ‘Dutch’ in
the Indies.
10. Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree; Lieberman, Strange Parallels; Reeder, ‘Royal Brother,
Ethnic Other’; Rogers, ‘Early British Rule and Social Classification’; Crossley et al. Empire at
the Margins; and Baird, Rise of the Brao.
11. Graham and Vergunst, Heritage as Community Research; Acabado and Kuan,
Indigenous Peoples, Heritage and Landscape; and Loeffler, Co-Production of Public
Services.
12. Jasanoff, States of Knowledge.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals,’ 784, and citations within, especially Cohn, Colonialism
and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories and Native Informants’; and Dirks,
Castes of Mind.
15. See, respectively, Wagoner, ‘Precolonial Intellectuals’; Mueggler, The Paper Road; and
Manickam, Taming the Wild.
16. Raj, Relocating Modern Science, 11.
17. Amin, ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City’; Lymperopoulou and Finney, ‘Socio-Spatial
Factors’; and Nielsen and Andersen, ‘Ethnic School Segregation.’
18. Yeh, Taming Tibet.
19. Oakes, ‘Villagizing the City’; and Grant, ‘Hyperbuilding the Civilized City.’
20. Moser, ‘Circulating Visions of “High Islam.”’
21. Chan and Latham, ‘Working and Dwelling in a Global City.’
22. Samuel and Nisar, ‘Inequalities and Opportunity Gaps.’
23. Calhoun, Nationalism, 40–42.
24. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction.’
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistical support of the Asia
Research Institute, and particularly Valerie Yeo, without whose help we would not have been able
to hold the conference at which early versions of this issue’s articles were presented. We would also
like to thank Asian Ethnicity’s peer reviewers and editors—especially Ian Baird—who made this
special issue possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Clay Eaton is a lecturer in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of
Singapore. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Yale-NUS College. He is a historian of
empire with a particular interest in the social and political effects of imperial policy. He received
his doctorate from Columbia University and his dissertation, Governing Shōnan: The Japanese
Administration of Wartime Singapore, analyzed the relationships between Japanese administrators
and the various local figures they compelled to help them govern this occupied city.
Matthew Reeder is an assistant professor at the Department of History, National University of
Singapore. He earned his doctorate at Cornell University, and held previous appointments at the
Asia Research Institute and Yale-NUS College. With a particular focus on Thailand, his research
looks at identity, ethnicity, and the ways marginalized peoples make history. His book manuscript,
“Telling Apart: The Politics of Ethnic Claims in Early Modern Siam,” shows how ethnic labels were
ASIAN ETHNICITY
503
increasingly mobilized for political purposes, and “peoples” increasingly understood as abstract
social concepts, over the course of the early modern period.
Yang Yang is a lecturer in Asian Studies at the College of Humanities and Sciences and the
Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Human
Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on transnational
religious networks and the politics of ethno-religious identity in northwestern China. Her dissertation adopted an ethnographic approach to analysing the impacts of Hui Muslims’ grass-roots
connections with non-Chinese Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East on
Hui’s everyday lives in Xi’an, China. Her current research examines transnational cultural heritage-based diplomacy between China and Southeast Asia under the discourses of the Silk Road.
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