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Chapter 12. Being a Kam in China

Ethnic identity in narratives
  • Wei Wang , Lisong Jiang and Meishu He
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Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse
This chapter is in the book Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse

Abstract

In light of the growing interest in investigating the ethnic minority Kam people in China, this paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis to explore how Kam people’s identity is represented and negotiated in spoken narratives with outside researchers. Drawing on sociolinguistic approaches to identity analysis (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006; Blommaert 2005) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1972a & b, 1992; Baker 2004; Fitzgerald and Housley 2015), this paper explores the relationships between Kam people’s sense of membership in their ethnic community and social practices that define this sense of membership. It focuses on the self-representation of a former Kam village head in a remote village in Southern China, Guizhou Province, and explores his way of conceptualizing being a Kam with a view to examining the relationship between his representation of the ethnic identity and the sociocultural impacts on this identity construction process.

Abstract

In light of the growing interest in investigating the ethnic minority Kam people in China, this paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis to explore how Kam people’s identity is represented and negotiated in spoken narratives with outside researchers. Drawing on sociolinguistic approaches to identity analysis (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006; Blommaert 2005) and membership categorisation analysis (Sacks 1972a & b, 1992; Baker 2004; Fitzgerald and Housley 2015), this paper explores the relationships between Kam people’s sense of membership in their ethnic community and social practices that define this sense of membership. It focuses on the self-representation of a former Kam village head in a remote village in Southern China, Guizhou Province, and explores his way of conceptualizing being a Kam with a view to examining the relationship between his representation of the ethnic identity and the sociocultural impacts on this identity construction process.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors vii
  4. Chapter 1. Chinese discourse from diverse perspectives 1
  5. Chapter 2. New words in contemporary Chinese language use 5
  6. Chapter 3. Usage based language change and exemplar representations in Beijing Mandarin Chinese 27
  7. Chapter 4. Contextual variations of internal and external modifications in Chinese requests 57
  8. Chapter 5. Some interactional functions of Yinwei -clauses in Mandarin Chinese conversation 81
  9. Chapter 6. Preliminaries to delicate matters 105
  10. Chapter 7. Chinese near-synonyms jian (建), zao (造), gai (蓋) ‘to build’ revisited 137
  11. Chapter 8. Constraints on the collocational behaviors of Chinese near-synonyms 155
  12. Chapter 9. Genericity and sentences with an AP state complement in Mandarin Chinese 177
  13. Chapter 10. Kinship metaphors in the Chinese construction A shi B zhi fu/mu 199
  14. Chapter 11. The classification of Chinese time expressions from Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspectives 221
  15. Chapter 12. Being a Kam in China 245
  16. Chapter 13. Specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore 265
  17. Index 297
https://doi.org/10.1075/scld.10.12wan

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors vii
  4. Chapter 1. Chinese discourse from diverse perspectives 1
  5. Chapter 2. New words in contemporary Chinese language use 5
  6. Chapter 3. Usage based language change and exemplar representations in Beijing Mandarin Chinese 27
  7. Chapter 4. Contextual variations of internal and external modifications in Chinese requests 57
  8. Chapter 5. Some interactional functions of Yinwei -clauses in Mandarin Chinese conversation 81
  9. Chapter 6. Preliminaries to delicate matters 105
  10. Chapter 7. Chinese near-synonyms jian (建), zao (造), gai (蓋) ‘to build’ revisited 137
  11. Chapter 8. Constraints on the collocational behaviors of Chinese near-synonyms 155
  12. Chapter 9. Genericity and sentences with an AP state complement in Mandarin Chinese 177
  13. Chapter 10. Kinship metaphors in the Chinese construction A shi B zhi fu/mu 199
  14. Chapter 11. The classification of Chinese time expressions from Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspectives 221
  15. Chapter 12. Being a Kam in China 245
  16. Chapter 13. Specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore 265
  17. Index 297
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