Cultural Identity and Clothing!

Adrian Holliday"Intercultural Communication"(2004)

"Chinese Teacher
Jant is American and got to know Zhang and Ming, who are Chinese, when they were doing their master's course together. She found that Zhang talked a lot both in class and at other times about Confucianism and how it was the basis of Chinese culture......He (Zhang) said that because of Confucianism, just as it was impolite for children to question their parents, it was impolite for students to question their teachers. This meant that all sorts of things which happened in classrooms in the West, like discovery learning and classroom discussions, were culturally inappropriate in China.......but when Janet told him (Ming) what Zhang had told her about the student having to obey their teachers in China, Ming said that this was not strictly true-that he knew lots of teachers who prepared to be engaged in discussion by this students, that students were certainly not always prepared to submit to teachers who would not listen to them, and that in modern China many parents no longer held the sort of authority that Zhang was talking about.

Janet then read an article which said that people in the developing world had tended to exaggerate their own cultural identity in order to counter the powerful influence of the West.When she put this idea to Ming he said that there was no need to read too much into Zhing's statement about Confucianism.......He (Ming) had seen so many American people in China who had seemed far more 'American' than anyone he had seen here.Surely was it not the case that all people drew more heavily in certain cultural resources when they felt culturally threatened by strange behaviour. So does that mean that Confucianism is a 'cultural resource' she wondered."

看過巔兄的穿唐服讓我想起了上面那篇文章，
Cultural Identity是一個民族的中心定位，
只有肯定了自身的價值才能夠讓我們面對"自己"，
但在尋找自我Identity的同時，
人們往往會把民族文化中某些特性擴大，
從而產生一些不真實的表面狀況。
雖然現今中國國力有所提昇，
但相比於漢唐盛世，
中國還是處於一個"發展中"的階段。
曾經聽過有人提倡穿漢服、唐服，
但未有聽過要穿宋服、明服、清服，
因為這幾個朝代都不是中國最興盛的年代吧?
也許康熙皇帝曾帶領國民進駐世界舞台頂端，
但晚清的割地賠款、八國聯軍、火燒圓明苑卻令國人感到無限屈辱，
所以要選擇一個代表自己cultural identity的服裝時，
自然會傾向漢唐裏看了。
另外，
中山裝顧名思義是代表了孫中山先生的服裝，
它象徵了新中國從腐敗的清朝中復生，
我們時常看民初片時，
那些把外國洋人和日本鬼子打得落花流水的英雄不是都穿中山裝嗎?
這可以說是一種自我滿足和陶醉，
但也是從新把民族形象定位的理念!