The new year's eve dinner and wormwood meal: Festival foodways as ethnic markers in Enshi Prefecture

The pattern of local people's self-consciousness in Enshi prefecture has two important aspects: regional identity and lineage identity. At the local level, an inclusive regional identity often contains several exclusive lineage identities. The customs related to the expression of lineage identity are highly resistant to change and cannot be shared even by neighboring lineages that officially belong to the same ethnic group, while the commonly shared customs related to the expression of regional identity cannot be assigned to any specific ethnic group. The analysis suggests that since the officially recognized ethnic boundaries cover people belonging to different regions and unrelated lineages, the official ethnic categories are not the proper analytic units for cultural studies of areas like Enshi.