Riddle of the Desert Mummies

These are some of the pictures from the movie we watched in class. Enjoy!!

Assimilation of Chinese Traditions

             “Myth is a very important tool for constructing ethnicity, especially in traditional societies”. To my understanding the actual meaning of myth is basically a traditional story, concerning early history of people, which have been lead on from one generation to another.  When I was young, my Grandmother used to tell me many myths, which included supernatural beings and events that marked history.

It amuses me how people before our time used to believe things so easily without any solid evidence. Let us start of by talking about; Bret Hinsch’s essay “ Myth and the Construction of Foreign Ethnic Identity”. Here he talks about how early Historians categorized myths into to different version, which are native and Sinicised. His main focus was the manipulation of ethnic identity of the distinctive people of Xiong-nu, Xianbei, and Chaoxian for political and military reasons. The Chinese used this against foreign people to divert their thoughts psychologically and to control others. Using myths they mastered the manipulation of ethnic identities.

Through reading this I figured that Chinese people at that time were really sophisticated. Like, many Chinese would Sinicise the myths for foreign people and endowed them with primitive Chinese identity. This was their attempt to incorporate foreign people into their culture. One of the other reasons was to keep their enemies distant by asserting the scare factor. The cultural differences made China’s enemies seem incomprehensible and threatening.  One reaction to this subject was to tell stories that disparaged their opponents. These myths helped enforce Chinese supremacy. Sometimes they would assert myths that would actually do the opposite. Like they would tell myths that would cancel out the vast cultural difference, which helped to reduce the psychological pressure.

This reading was quite interesting and aroused many questions in my mind. It interests me in knowing, that how Chinese people used several techniques to assimilate their message to their audience. It was quite effective at that time as many people were not educated and sophisticated enough to judge the truthfulness of the message, received.