Stories of Tin City: Narrative Identity and the Histories of Gejiu, Yunnan Province
Item
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Title
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Stories of Tin City: Narrative Identity and the Histories of Gejiu, Yunnan Province
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:72d88e9ed626:11046
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identifier
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11376
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Creator
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Kusnetzky, Lara R.,
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Contributor
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Jane Schneider
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | Asian history | Asian studies | Anthropology | China | Communism | Ideology | Life History | Narrative
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Abstract
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"Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," the experiment with a socialist market economy, has brought unprecedented affluence, opportunities, and political freedom in the People's Republic of China, but also unprecedented unemployment, corruption, poverty, and crime. Retirees in Gejiu, a tin mining town in southwest China, narrate their life histories in this uncertain context, as they try to determine their place in the shifting present by means of the political concepts, historical narratives, and institutional locations they have acquired in the course of the decades. They frame their individual experiences within institutional constraints, such as work units, education, membership of the Communist Party, and class status, and make idiosyncratic use of the cumulative vocabulary of government policies and mass campaigns, and of the assembled storylines of official history. This dissertation examines the relationship between ideology and subject formation through a reconsideration of Communist discourse. The first four chapters of the dissertation analyze materials of successive national campaigns---a feature film about a miner who becomes a revolutionary, histories of the tin industry, biographies and autobiographies of miners, exhibitions about class struggle, and local gazetteers---to demonstrate how the Chinese Communist Party used the local landscape and details of local life to substantiate the universal truth of Marxist historiography and to confirm the legitimacy of the Communist government. The fifth chapter shows how Gejiu retirees today make selective use of this cumulative vocabulary of government policies and mass campaigns, and of the storylines of successive official histories of Gejiu, to give shape and meaning to their lives in the present. The analysis of the narrative identities of Gejiu retirees demonstrates not only that local residents take up Communist conceptions of self and society, as well as current and abandoned storylines of Communist discourse, but also that they produce diverse, alternative histories of the present in words and narratives intended by the Party to universalize individual experience.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
