The Nanai, Hezhe and mobilized loyalties along the Amur

ABSTRACT

As communities of the once broadly unified indigenous Nanai/Hezhe people were incorporated into separate Russian/Soviet and Chinese states during the twentieth century, official portrayals of their ‘loyalty’ became a powerful index of their separation. Authorities in both countries cast the Nanai (Russia) and Hezhe (China) both as inherently loyal, ‘noble’ but naïve beneficiaries of state-promoted civilisational uplift, and as specifically loyal to the respective ‘homelands’ which they now inhabited. This paper shows how loyalty has been ‘mobilised’ by state centres demanding Nanai/Hezhe fealty through military service, and how this has been represented in narrative accounts of their heroism. Balancing this top-down perspective with ethnographic cross-border examination of the role of ‘loyalty’ as a contemporary discursive category among each group, I shed light on an under-considered narrative-based dimension to the relations of minority peoples with larger states.

KEYWORDS:

• Nanai
• Hezhe
• indigenous
• Amur
• tungusic
• loyalty
• mobilization
• oath

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ed Pulford http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7949-9331

Notes

1. I shall use the Russian names throughout this paper.

2. For example: Goldi, Hejin, ‘Fishskin Tatars’ (yupi dazi).

3. Source: 2010 Census. http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/Documents/Vol4/pub-04-01.pdf (accessed July 1, 2014).

4. Source: 2010 Census. http://baike.baidu.com/view/4420.htm (accessed July 1, 2014).

5. I do not seek here directly to confront debates about Nanai/Hezhe ‘oneness’.

6. The paper is based on 2013–2015 fieldwork in Tongjiang, Jiejinkou, Khabarovsk and Daerga, and on extensive reading of ethnography, historiography, fictional prose and poetry pertaining to the Nanai/Hezhe over the past two centuries.

7. Source: http://russianarmya.my1.ru/index/0-8

8. Despite narratives of being ‘on different banks’ (which I reproduce here), the Nanai and Hezhe actually live on the same side of the Amur (see Figure 1).

9. This entitles Nanai to claim benefits (l’goty) in Khabarovsk, such as early retirement, to which they were previously only entitled if they lived downriver in Nanaiskii raion areas deemed ‘territories of compact habitation’.

10. In one particularly outrageous episode Leonid threatened to curse the regional head Vyacheslav Shport via a mass Nanai shamanic ritual in Khabarosvsk's Lenin Square after derogatory comments made by the Governor. The incident attracted considerable local media attention.

11. Which, in a development indicative in Leonid's view of his ongoing struggles, has disbanded since my 2015 visit.

12. A reference to Varangians, medieval warriors who wandered, plundered and ruled ancient Rus.

13. Russian: Korennye malochislennye narody severa or KMNS.

14. wei renmin fuwu.

15. A highly productive Russian colloquialism: see Safonova and Santa (2013).

16. Then mostly known as ‘Goldy’.

17. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Dersu Uzala (1975) won the 1976 Oscar for a foreign language film.

18. Taiga and Tundra, no. 2 1930: 142 (Slezkine 1994, 131). http://natpopova.livejournal.com/349240.html

19. In appealing to the notion of zemlia [land/earth] through the term zemliak, Soviet propagandists evoke a similar notion of telluric loyalty to a vast primal homeland to that preferred by Chinese historians.

20. Having been knocked unconscious by an explosion, Beldy's life was apparently saved by some fleeing Japanese residents who took his ‘Asian’ appearance to mean he was one of their own (conversation with Beldy's widow, Olga, 2015).

21. The genre includes works such as Li Di’s 1979 work The Valley of Wild Bees (Yefeng chumo de shangu), which describes spy-catching activities by Hani minority people on China's Southeast Asian borders.

22. Antu met with success sufficient to see it published later as a two-part comic book entitled Hezhe Falcons (Jun, Gao, and Yi 1983, 1984).

23. Available at: https://www.proza.ru/2009/08/17/815.

24. Source: http://www.hab.kp.ru/daily/26159.3/3046005/.