Empire at the margins: Compulsory mobility, hierarchical imaginary, and education in China's ethnic borderland

This paper presents an ethnographic interpretation of education as a social technology of state sovereign power and governing in the borderlands of contemporary China. Illustrated with snapshots from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Pumi (Premi) ethnic village located along China's south-western territorial margins, it is argued that the hierarchical structure of the education system, coupled with the arduous and yet compulsory mobility entailed in educational participation, powerfully shapes the social and political imaginaries of peripheral citizens. Education serves simultaneously as a distance-demolishing technology and a hierarchyestablishing technology that counters the 'frictions of terrain' that traditionally presented a problem to the state for governing such geographically inaccessible borderlands.