BRIEF INTRODUCTION:

This new book is for memory of the development of modern education of Stone Gateway in the past hundred years. Shen Hong, the author, is a Miao scholar of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Miao in its long history of collective migration has been one of the poorest and most marginalized ethnic groups in China. Nevertheless, like the rest of the Chinese population, the Miao has not been immune to modern influences. With the penetration of Western influences in general and Christianity in particular, Stone Gateway, a community of the Flowery Miao located in southwestern China, changed rapidly from an isolated ethnic village to “the cultural center of the Miao.”

The monograph in English is a case study of cultural transformations in the Stone Gateway community in modern times. It focus on the symbolic construction and reconstruction of ethnic and national identity among the Flowery Miao as a consequence of the interactions of local traditions, Christian movements, and interventions from the central government. It attempt to explore various strategies and systems the central government in China has adopted to shape the inter-ethnic integration of the related ethnic groups and to build their national identity. 

The monograph in Chinese is second output in the same community, in which the author moves the focus from identity issues to the modern education issues. Based on the fieldwork in the summer of 2001, the winter of 2002 and 2004, the analysis is to show how the Miao in Stone Gateway went down in education, as well as in sense of modernity.

CONTENTS

Part One Change of the Miao’s Religion in Stone Gateway: Symbolic Construct of Community Identification

Part Two Rise and Fall of Village Education in Stone Gateway: Modernistic Insertion