Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

8 Chineseness as a Moving Target
vernaculars. This unification has a long and complex history, dating back to the third
century BC when Qinshihuang, the first Chinese emperor passed a series of major
economic, political and cultural reforms, including the unification of the Chinese
writing system (DeFrancis, 1984). Further, since 1913, considerable means have been
invested by the Guoming and PRC governments in creating a standard or common
spoken language.
Concurrently, the term ‘Chinese’ is used to refer to Classical Chinese, the language
of the Mandarins, the modern standard spoken variety, the written language, or as an
umbrella term for a whole cluster of Chinese language varieties (Coblin, 2000; Ramsey,
1987). DeFrancis (1984) explained the situation of Chinese and its internal diversity,
translating it to the European context with the hypothetical situation of the greater part
of the European continent, from Italy to the Iberian peninsula and France with their
many language varieties (Italian, French, Catalan, Corsican, etc.) being united in single
state and having only Old Latin as a common language of literacy and of education,
despite the differences and unintelligibility that exists between the language varieties
spoken in such places as Rome, Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, and Milan.
Identity is not something people have, but is constructed in social practice. We
don’t have identities, but we identify with particular identity positions and disidentify
with others. Identity here is seen as a repertoire of identities, which suggests that
people perform highly complex and ambiguous identities. They do so on shifting ground:
the main foci of orientation – the normative ‘centers’ of their identity work – are shifting
and changing from moment to moment, from space to space. Moreover, in our
everyday routines we don’t just have or inhabit identities but (re)produce, (re)construct
or (re)invent them. There is a large body of sociolinguistic, sociological and anthropological
theory that has made this point (see e.g., Brubaker, 2002; Kulick, 2003; Møller &
Jørgensen, 2009; Street, 1993, for differently disciplined but accessible introductions
into such a science of identification). In the diasporic context, negotiation of identities
often occurs in encounters where identity is ascribed by others. Such encounters are
deeply influenced by the social, political, cultural and historical contexts in which they
occur (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004).
Social arenas for identity work are by definition polycentric, in the sense that at any
moment, actors in communicative events are facing more than one ‘center’ from which
norms can be derived. Such ‘centers’ can be institutions of a formal as well as of an
informal kind. Formal ones could include, for instance, the school, church, the state;
informal ones can include peer groups, role models, popular culture icons and so forth.
In any act of communication, participants can orient towards any of those centers for
templates of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ forms of communication. Thus, in a classroom, both
the teacher and the classmates can be seen as ‘centers’, and what counts as a ‘good’
answer in relation to the teacher can be simultaneously understood as a ‘bad’ one by
the classmates.
The ‘norms’ emanating from such centers have varying degrees of solidity – the
norms of a formal institution typically being more solid than those of, e.g., a peer
group. And norms need to be understood here as orders of indexicality: social and
cultural values attached to specific resources in an ordered, non-random way, so that
they begin to structure communication in relation to specific emblematic templates for
social action (Agha, 2007; Blommaert, 2005). The choice of resources – or the use of