Anthropological Research on Indigenization and Creolization of the Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia

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This project intended to re-examine critically the preceding researches and discourses on the Chinese living abroad in the humanities and the social science, especially, the discourse which have defined identity of any kind of Chinese living abroad homogenously and essentially. Instead we aimed at opening new perspectives on varied socio-cultural actualities and ethnic identities of them. In this project, the Chinese living abroad means the Chinese who moved out of China in the geopolitical sense, regardless of their identities. Specifically, we clarified the following aspects :a) The actual condition of the societies and cultures of the various Chinese living abroad, including Chinese having kept strong Chinese identity, Creolized Chinese, and people who had originally been Chinese and assimilated into indigenous society.b) The process in which identities of those Chinese mentioned above has been constructed.c) Transformation of identities of the Chinese who re-immigrated from one place to another place.We published many papers and made presentations at various international conferences. For example, we organized two panels in the International Conference of Asia Scholars 5 and presented papers on the process of Indigenization of the Chinese living abroad, on the process of generation of sub-ethnic identities through the process of re-migration, and on the relationship between the transformation of the ethnic categories and the change of belief and practice of their religion. We also held several workshops inviting local scholars with whom we proceeded our fieldwork to share our research results.