An ethnography of a Chinese people known as the Miao, a group long consigned to the remote highlands and considered backward by other Chinese. Combining methods from both anthropology and cultural studies, Louisa Schein examines the ways in which Miao ethnicity is constructed and reworked by the state, by non-state elites, and by the Miao themselves, all in the context of China’s post-socialist reforms and its increasing exchange and fascination with the West. She offers argued interventions into debates over nationalism, ethnic subjectivity, and the ethnography of the state.