"We do not eat their stuff”. White Food and Identity in Inner Mongolia

Abstract

In Inner Mongolia, where Mongols and Han Chinese live as cultural neighbours in close and long-term social and cultural interrelations, \‘white food\’, that is dairy products, is conceived as a boundary marker. the (non-) shared use of one and the same product and the product´s characteristics itself can be ignored, reinterpreted or stressed differently. Minor differences or imagined differences can become extremely important because these differences (imagined or real) are the basis for the feeling of the own otherness (generally perceived as positive) as well as the basis for the feeling of the strangeness of the others (generally perceived as negative). that is how an exaggerated perception regarding the consumption or non-consumption of milk products occurs. This process allows the construction and emphasis of Mongolian and Chinese identity in Inner Mongolia in the process of demarcation despite all proximity and cultural neighbourhood.