Introduction

The No. 2 tourist attraction in the Xi'an area is Banpo neolithic village, the earliest architectural remains of Yangshao culture (dated back to 4500-3750 BCE). Archeologists have unearthed the moat which surrounded the village, a cluster of houses, burial grounds and the kiln in which the highly decorated Yangshao style pottery was produced. Dioramas of neolithic life show the inhabitants fully dressed in colorful tunics with embroidered edges; classical Chinese pipa and flute music is piped throughout the entire site. The relative value of burial objects placed in the grave sites of several women has led to speculation that this earliest strand of Chinese culture was matriarchal. This theory inspired the construction of the Banpo Matriarchal Clan Village, a state-run, feminist-inspired theme park that is quickly falling into disrepair.

In an exhibition hall associated with the matriarchal village was a photographic display showing the lives and values of primitive peoples. Few pictures provided any information about their geographic provenance and almost all showed dark-skinned people from Africa and Australia. Many of the photographs seem framed in the worst National Geographic style in the ways they highlight the primitive (read uncivilized) nature of the societies depicted, rather than showing any degree of cultural or technological sophistication. One photo of "Primitive Arts" entitled "Tribesmen performing 'How babies are made'" shows a couple copulating. The eyes of everyone in the audience are averted from the "play" except for one little boy who looks at the camera. The section on herding practices featured a picture of a group of boys sticking their face in a bull's anus as if to lick it, while another showed a young boy bathing his head in a stream of cow urine. The section on decorative practices contained graphic photographs of bodily marking including scarring, tattooing and neck and lip elongation. (With the exception of foot-binding, Han Chinese culture looks upon bodily marking as anathema-even though early Chinese cultures and many Chinese minority peoples continue to tattoo.) Only two photographs in the entire exhibition show cultures that are recognizably Asian-but rather than representing peoples that are geographically and culturally close to Han Chinese, such as the Tai, Miao or Tibetans, these peoples are from remote regions of South East Asia. The "color coding" of the exhibit follows the racism of early imperialist anthropology; darker peoples are framed as being closer to the animalism of nature, while fairer cultures have advanced to a higher level of culture. Within this color scheme, the Han Chinese belong to the advanced "white" cultures.

The most obvious lesson taught by the exhibit is the highly civilized nature of the roots of Chinese culture (as demonstrated by the high degree of cultural and technological sophistication of the Banpo people, proven by their architectural remains and constructed dress). A second lesson apparent only to those who read the texts accompanying each of the sections concerns the naturalization of appropriate gender roles even in these primitive cultures. Under the "Herding" section, the text explains that since animal husbandry is such physically demanding work and requires physical strength, it is accomplished by men. A text in the "Matriarchal Tribes" section describes how "the women are making lunch for their hard-working men."

This aggregation of exhibits, the neolithic remains, the imagined Matriarchal Village, and the collection of photographs of primitive cultures, serves a nationalist goal in contextualizing the Chinese primitives as technologically advanced and already showing the Han Chinese preference for abstract rather than embodied markers of culture. The contradictory meanings projected onto gender within these three exhibits share the widespread reaction against Maoist attempts to erase gender differences. The Matriarchal Village imagines a culture where women's status and difference is based on a hypersexualized body, while the accompanying anthropological display reifies and naturalizes gendered social roles by situating them in the roots of human culture. The naturalized differences between the women who nurture and ornament themselves and the men who use their superior strength to provide for and protect the women and children is the only aspect of these primitive cultures immediately familiar to contemporary urban viewers.