A Research On Historical Memory And Ethnic Group Reconstruction

China is a unified multi-ethnic country jointly created by the people of all nationalities.According to the objective characteristics of our national reality,the "nation" has three levels,"the first layer is the unity of the Chinese nation","the second layer is the 56 nationalities,which is now composed of the Chinese nation "," the third layer is the part within the various nationalities composed of the Chinese nation,which owns their characteristics and is called the various 'people' ".The Northwestern National Corridor of our country has many minorities together such as the Tibetan,Hui and Dongxiang,etc..The Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu Province is located in the Corridor,which is an important settlement of Hui,Dongxiang,Baoan and other Muslim nationalities.The research object of this paper is " the Tangwang people",who is a multi-ethnic and regional group living in Linxia.From the Yuan Dynasty,the people whose family name were Tang,Wang,Zhang,Ma,Zhao were immigrating into Tangwang gradually.After that,Tangwang's ethnic identity experienced three times of important changes and constructions.The first time was from the Yuan Dynasty to the Republic of China,some Tangwang people altered from the Han immigrants into Muslim groups.The ethnic cultural diversity began to appear within Tangwang people.The second,after the PRC was founded,the Ethnic Identification Policies accelerate the groups of people in Tangwang into the "nationalization." Tangwang people became a multiple ethnic composed by the Han,Hui,Dongxiang.The third,after the reform and opening up,in the pursuit of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and modernization,Tangwang people started to construct regional groups and dispose local affairs by all nationalities.With the variation of ethnic identity,Tangwang people gradually formed the group into "a family,multiple national".From the perspective of the Han's family structure,Tangwang people are in the situation of"separating but not left".The Muslim ?clan? is their own "family? who is gradually far away in the process of history's changing,national policies' executing,religious' communicating and intermarriaging.From the perspective of the Hui and Dongxiang identity,muslims of Tangwang were a special group of "melting but not fused",and they were in the transitional stage of transforming the Han into minorities.In the viewpoint of Dongxiang outside Tangwang,Dongxiang of Tangwang are the kind of "people" within the nation and have own characteristics.They can not speak Dongxiang language,have "different" ancestral memory,whose environment and cultural traditions are different.These situations led Tangwang people to meet a dilemma in identity and cultural heritaging.The various groups within the Tangwang people had to frequently "crossing border and integrating".With a phenomenon of "heavy family,light national",they gradually formed a "composite" ethnic identity and cultural traditions.These situations make Tangwang people to face more severe predicament in life practice and identity.In fact,Tangwang people are in the Northwest National Corridor and ethnic border,the phenomenon of ethnic differentiation reflects the the diversiform choice of group identity in multicultural space.However,in the past,the research on ethnic paid more attention to internal identity construction and external boundary delineation,and less attention was paid to the cross-border phenomenon such as Tangwang people.This formed the gap of traditional theories.How do we clearly define the various nationalities when we face ambiguous ethnic boundaries and frequent cross-border behavior of Tangwang people? How do they establish national identity? How to regard this particular ethnic group by ethnology and anthropology? The researchers need to answer these question.In order to know how Tangwang people interpret their legitimacy and the creation logic of the discourse,we need to return to the "historical" origin of the ethnic construction.Therefore,this article uses the historical anthropology research paradigm,tries to use the historical ethnography method,observe the living space,the economic life,the cultural education,the religious belief,the folk life and so on in the "historical scene" of different time.In the reconstruction process of Tangwang people's identity,historical memory has many functions such as emotional connection,identity recognition,identity construction,relationship adjustment and so on,which has been rewritten as a historical fact under the influence of ethnic reconstruction.Historical memory has sometimes become a "glue" for ethnic integration,and sometimes a "separation agent" that hinders ethnic integration.Tangwang people deal with various identity problems by the operation of ancestral memory and communication memory and other collective memory.Ancestral origin memory has become the psychological foundation of ethnic identity,and has become the basis of ethnic differentiation.Communication memory has become the public cultural resources in ethnic construction,and traumatic memory has become the explaination evidence of ethnic construction.The "particularity" of historical memory has been transformed into cultural capital and social capital to promote the local social and economic development.Tangwang people reflect social reality of ethnic differentiation and cultural conflict by genealogy,rituals,architecture,legends and other memory representations.They explored a reasonable mode of interpretation about ethnic change by imitating,transforming,sanctifying,structural forgetting and other writing techniques.The text structure of "heroic ancestors" and "brothers ancestors" metaphor the groups' competition relationship and relationship in sharing social resources."The immigrant mind" from the history of their own has become the logic of history reconstruction.Their settlements for own historical memory are full of popular wisdom to explain the ambiguity of identification and alternative identity.This kind of local text of national historical inspires us to rethink the writing patterns of history in the Northwest National Corridor,rethink significance for the central historical concept,which originate from time and space perspective transformation of cultural and geographical.By the immigrants memory in the Tang and Yuan dynasties,by the memory of changes in the Republic of China and in the Qing Dynasty,by the development events of family,religious,educational and memory capitalization practice,we can see that identity changes of Tangwang people reflect the grand identity change narrative of Chinese Muslim,of which Dongxiang is a representative.From the perspective of the history for development,Dongxiang is a minority rebuild continuingly by different immigration group such as Tangwang people.After the National Identity Project of China,Dongxiang and Hui,Baoan and other ethnic groups experienced a more political reconstruction process.They have to face the relationship problem between the historical memory and ethnic reconstruction.At this time,the historical memory has become the explanatory tool of the national identity construction,has become the fundamental reference to deal with ethnic relations.The memory of the historical mind also provides a way for minorities in China to deal with relations under the conditions of multiple identities.