Juwen Zhang, "Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation" (Lexington Books, 2022)
New Books in East Asian Studies
00:00
Core and Arbitrary Identity Markers in China
The idea of identity is also the idea of, or maybe it's a sub idea of this folkloric identity where you talk about core and arbitrary identity markers. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Well, as you said, I tried to build this kind of framework with several pairs of ideas. Regarding the identity marker, I find that there are markers that are arbitrary, some are core. So through these examples, I feel that if we can identify some call markers in the construction of identity and differentiate that from arbitrary markers then that is the essence of identity.
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