This paper re-examines the development of separatism in Hong Kong and Catalonia and the accompanying center-periphery confrontations in China and Spain. These two cases, with similar conditions in the economy, geography, political status, and the timeline of contemporary separatist movements, caused state-local conflicts in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Such comparability motivates the author to adopt the peripheral society as the protagonist and combine the theoretical framework constructed by anthropological concepts of enculturation and acculturation, to dissect separatism from a cultural perspective. Utilizing the process tracing method highlighting the transformative events, this paper aims to find the evolution process of separatist thoughts and the decisive factors impacting the outcomes of separatist movements under entre-periphery interactions. The author argues that there is a three-stage enculturation paradigm of nationalistic separatism from shaping subjectivities to building identities and eventually constructing nationalistic separatist thoughts. Firstly, people find their subjectivity through socio-psychological projection and introjection procedures. Then languages, the basic tool of the figuration procedure from subjectivity to identity, transform intangible consciousness into tangible cultural symbols. Finally, with the efforts of scholars and social activists, identity is theorized into nationalistic separatism under the processing of ideology. While reviewing Hong Kong and Catalonia, the high similarity between the two lies in their historical development, which fostered experiences of self-reliance, unique language tools, and ensuing nationalist thought, concerning the social evolution process from subjectivity to identity and then nationalism and nativism. Such a symmetrical trajectory illustrates the internal and external explanatory power of the author's three-stage paradigm hypothesis.

Authors:
Zhen Zhang, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Mr. Zhen Zhang is currently a Doctoral Student of Economic and Social History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Mr. Zhang's research area focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese history.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhang-zhen-0215011a6

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