The Tang is widely characterized as having a confidently inclusive approach to non-Chinese peoples and practices that permitted membership of the Tang oikumene to any who sufficiently embraced Chinese culture. Marc Abramson questions this consensus view by seeking out a discourse of ethnic difference that he believes to be pervasive through Tang society, among elites but also commoners. Despite some positive aspects, this discourse expressed in its ambiguities some fundamental anxieties about identity that were engendered by continual exposure to foreigners and reinforced by the political turmoil of the latter half of the dynasty. Accordingly, “there was a whole realm of social, political, and cultural interactions … where ethnicity was the key, though often implicit, factor in determining the course of events…” (p. viii).
Ethnicity is a notoriously slippery subject and, especially in the pre-modern period, its study requires the clearest thinking and the most careful argumentation for anything meaningful to result. Abramson first has to establish what made the Chinese Chinese, by elucidating what elements placed an individual in or barred them from the categories “Han” and, crucially, “non-Han”. He carefully distinguishes ethnic identity (Han or non-Han) from culture (Chinese or non-Chinese), to clarify situations where, say, an ethnically non-Han steppe nomad engages in a culturally Chinese practice such as filial piety. In a wide-ranging trawl of official, unofficial, literary and archaeological materials he locates little positive definition of Han and Chinese traits: these, like whiteness in the United States, emerge chiefly by contrast with that which is non-Han and non-Chinese.
In the introduction, Abramson posits a chronology in which evolving combinations of four themes – genealogy, culture, the body and politics – succeeded each other as prime shapers of the Tang discourse of ethnic identity. To the mid-eighth century ethnicity was held to predict behaviour; after that ethnicity was derived from behaviour and so became a less effective predictor. The following chapters then offer tantalizing discussions of jokes and stereotypes, the foreignness of Buddhism, the characteristics of the non-Han body, conceptual and political geographies, and different kinds of ethnic change. The conclusion analyses two tenth-century documents as showing political loyalty becoming the prime indicator of identity, crushing ethnic/cultural criteria and indicia and reflecting literati panic about the relationship of people to state. It is not until then that behaviour became the primary indicator, finally allowing non-Han to be considered better Chinese than some Han.
Abramson's methods find ethnicity almost everywhere in Tang China, for if certain traits have ethnic associations, then any mention of those traits – or even of the theme from which the traits are drawn – becomes evidence of ethnic thinking. Yet his material repeatedly shows that contemporaries frequently, if not usually, used categories other than ethnicity as the determining factors in their decisions. For instance, polemics against Buddhism criticized its foreign character but dwelt mostly on its social and economic impacts. Abramson's discussion of the body (sadly deprived of illustrations) notes occasional massacres of those of hu (non-Han) appearance, but that Tang physiognomical analysis generally emphasized individual character rather than group membership. Ethnic motives are imputed to the provisions of the Tang Code while recognizing that tax relief, for instance, was chiefly determined by practicalities. The repeated qualifications about the size of the role played by ethnicity convey a sense of mismatch between evidence and argument that would make the book a confusing read for undergraduates, and leaves the specialist pondering the alternative interpretations that could be drawn from the same evidence.
Thus, a vocabulary or a rhetoric of ethnicity may be identifiable in numerous places, but a discourse must define the framework within which choices may be made, and it is not demonstrated here that ethnicity was the primary determinant of actions or choices, nor that the Tang state deliberately established a “self-consciously Chinese framework” (p. 178). To claim the latter confers an authority, effectiveness and coherence of thought on the Tang establishment that Abramson's examples show it did not have. And since his evidence is, unavoidably, largely about and produced by the literate classes, the extension of their views to the masses rests too heavily upon assumptions, such as the inevitability of interethnic tension between different groups living adjacent to each other. We can see, however, that the Tang situation was complex, and that there was considerable capacity for subtle and sophisticated approaches to diversity. This would have worked better as the overall point of the book.
This is Abramson's first monograph, and it is unfortunate that in cutting down the dissertation too much evidence has been lost, for few readers can be convinced when they are referred to other works for the specific examples that build a sustainable argument. The author has examined, with some sophistication, material sufficient to produce a shelf of books, but here he attempts to deal with too many topics in too short a space. Far more effective to have offered more detailed analysis of less material to determine which were the discourses in operation at any given time and which won out in particular cases. Most of all, it is a pity that Abramson did not follow through on his chronological sketch to provide a substantiating narrative of change through the body of the book.
Thus, as sometimes happens, the book's contribution is other than the author may have intended, for it does raise worthwhile questions about exactly what categories shaped the Tang world in various periods. What discourses framed what was possible, and how did they interact? Were there not emic discourses about ritual, filiality or the wen-wu relationship, about loyalty, orthodoxy or rulership? It is in analysing the relative impact of these, and doubtless many other, competing discourses – not just one – that we will find fuller characterizations of the Tang, and better understandings of its connections to both earlier and later times.
