Making majorities : constituting the nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States / edited by Dru C. Gladney.

Based on a conference at the East-West Center"--Pref.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-340) and index.

Introduction: making and marking majorities / Dru C. Gladney -- Culturalism, racialism, and internationalism in the discourse on Japanese identity / Kosaku Yoshino -- A conceptual model for the historical relationship between the self and the internal and external others : the agrarian Japanese, the Ainu, and the special-status people / Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney -- Who speaks for Korean shamans when shamans speak of the nation? / Laurel Kendall -- Constructing and deconstructing "Koreanness" / Cho Hae-joang -- On three definitions of Han Ren : images of the majority people in Taiwan / Hsieh Shih-chung -- Clashed civilizations? : Muslim and Chinese identities in the PRC / Dru C. Gladney -- Bureaucratic management of identity in a modern state : "Malayness" in postwar Malaysia / Shamsul A.B. -- Ideological work in constructing the Malay majority / Anthony Milner -- Aspiring to minority and other tactics against violence / John D. Kelly -- When 8,870 -- 850 = 1 : discourses against democracy in Fiji, past and present / Martha Kaplan -- From Ottoman to Turk : self-image and social engineering in Turkey / Selim Deringil -- Minority/majority discourse : the case of the Kurds in Turkey / Kemal Kirişci -- Studying mainstreams and minorities in North America : some epistemological and ethical dilemmas / Richard Handler -- The illusion of paradise : privileging multiculturalism in Hawaiʻi / Jonathan Y. Okamura.

Majorities are made, not born. This book argues that there are no pure majorities in the Asia-Pacific region, broadly defined, nor in the West. Numerically, ethnically, politically, and culturally, societies make and mark their majorities under specific historical, political, and social circumstances. This position challenges Samuel Huntington's influential thesis that civilizations are composed of more or less homogeneous cultures, suggesting instead that culture is as malleable as the politics that informs it.