纳若敢啸:足球、族群性与丽江男性气质的建构

Naruo Ganxiao:Football,Ethnicity and the Construction of Masculinities in Lijiang

通过对丽江当地青年的足球生活进行田野考察,分析少数族裔男性的个体行为与集体经验,揭示在地族群的男性气质在市场经济形态下赛事转型中的建构过程。首先,丽江足球青年借“纳若”的话语诠释,策略性地表达了族群身份,实践了“另类”男性气质及其主体性的彰显。其次,非支配地位的族群内部,生产了以“敢啸”为核心、以身体化的极致表达为途径的男性气质,再现了丽江地方性族群在市场经济进程中,过往的历史根基与现代性生活方式之间结构性的张力。

Drawing upon in-depth fieldwork,this article observes the football lives of ethnic young males in Lijiang,and explores how individual practices and collective experiences articulate elements of local masculinity in a market economy and socio-cultural transformations.The choice of field site is based on both theoretical and practical considerations,as the touristic Lijiang has witnessed profound effects of both marketization andethnicization.An investigation to further contextualize the actual experiences of the younger generation of ethnic men then sheds light on one major anthropological topic that the author endeavors to reveal in the article:masculinity.Specifically,this article provides a“thick”understanding of constructions and reconstructions of local masculinities.Firstly,the author argues on a naruo(literally translated as ethnic Naxi men)discourse through which alternative masculinities are constructed and maintained.More precisely,ethnic young men strategically employ a Naxi way of playing football.Ethnic Naxi traits or the expressions of“Naxi-ness”then have been rediscovered by local footballers and practitioners,in promoting a local masculine ideal.Secondly,in order to project an alternative masculine image,unlike their counterparts in the coastal China,ethnic minority groups and in this case ethnic Lijiangers,have produced extensive ganxiao(literally translated as fight for it)work centered around the idea of embodied practices and the sheer physicality.Within the context of a rapid-changing market economy especially after the“reform and opening up”,however,these ethnic men can only represent themselves living fraught with a structural tension between its imagined historical pasts and aspiring modern lifestyles.The bulk of ethnographies on southwest China have discussed gender and ethnicity for quite a long time.Yet few have dealt with the masculinization of ethnic identities.In order to explore the exact mechanisms through which masculinities in southwest China have been produced,it is important to re-evaluate different phases and aspects of gendered activities.Seeing football as a hypermasculine culture when entering Lijiang,its gendered manifestations can be revealed in the lived experiences of ethnic minority footballers.This article considers the notion of masculinity as an ongoing process of construction that is contextualized in a historically and spatial specific situation.The argument cuts in two ways:On the one hand,the concept shall be seen as an ideological or discursive construct.On the other hand,it is a set of gendered practices.Firstly,this research shows that the interaction between football and ethnicity should not be merely understood as another implication of the theory of hegemonic masculinity.Rather,it looks to be a discourse that football practitioners strategically employ,in hyper-promoting“Naxi-ness.”Football shows itself to be an institution that is vital in the production of masculinity,yet it fails to deliver on a hegemonic form of masculinity in Lijiang.Secondly,in the Lijiang ethnic world,especially in Naxi communities,football appears to play a vital role not only in forming and identifying a unique male bonding but also in illustrating the intricacies of their embodied daily lives with a modern lifestyle.