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Last updated: January 22, 2001

• Introduction
• Table of Contents
• Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION: This site is very much a work-in-progress and visitors use it at their own peril. However, I do ask that any materials quoted from this site, or research done in them, to be properly cited, including the URL and also including the update date of the relevant files. This is very important as these files are updated from time to time.

  This site represents research conducted over many years in Taiwan, Guangxi (P.R.C.) and to a minimal extent, in Vietnam. The original MSS is in more than one thousand pages and was unpublishable in hard copy, in my judgement, for several reasons:

  • Its sheer size would make it a very expensive publication to market.
  • Its analysis does not fit comfortably into the current state of viewing enthicity as represented by postmodernist interpretations. By those standards, much of this research would be condemned as representing a "primordialist" interpretation of Zhuang ethnicity. This issue is discussed at some length below.

  I am, however, pleased to publish these materials electronically and to make them freely available to all interested readers. These materials are not without merit, however limited it may be, and I speak with some authority on the issues discussed below. Portions of these materials have been published in peer-reviewed journals (See vita below) and the acceptance that they have received has been gratifying. But my academic interests have moved on and I do not care to update the materials and to seek a hard-copy publisher. The work that I have done on the web has been so gratifying and the audience so extensive that, in fact, I now regard hard-copy publication as inferior to electronic publication. This is particularly true, I feel, in the case of these materials.

  As not a great deal of work had been done on the Zhuang at the time I began my work, I found that organizing these findings was inordinately complex; it seemed at times that each conclusion depended upon an understanding of every other conclusion, and I found myself working very hard to present a coherent argument that did not require frequent references to materials not yet put forward. I believe that a hyperlinked structure is ulimately the best environment in which to present these materials because it permits a much more sophisticated mode of organization than a linear page-bound progression.

  I am also uninterested in hard-copy publication because I am, fortunately, at a stage in my career when I can safely ignore matters of prestige and professional status. Too, I have found the latter stages of the process of hard-copy publication of my previous works to be a tedious distraction from additional research and subsequent publication. I do welcome communications from interested parties and stand ready to discuss the positions taken below....

  I am pleased that these files have found an audience of sorts, as indicated by various conversations I have had with scholars interested in these and related fields.

Jeffrey Barlow
Matsushita Chair of East Asian Studies
Pacific University.
(My vita can be found at: < http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/faculty/Fullvita.HTML>
(barlowj@pacificu.edu)

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