Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, the first scholarly study in a Western language on the Yi in four decades, brings this little-known part of the world to life. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China is a remarkable collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes.
In addition to being valuable as an ethnographic study, this book is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. This book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.
CONTENTS
List of Tables, Maps, and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Stevan Harrell
PART ONE: The Yi in History
1. Reconstructing Yi History from Yi Records, by Wu Gu
2. Nzymo as Seen in Some Yi Classical Books, by Wu Jingzhong
PART TWO: Nuosu Society in Liangshan
3. A Comparative Approach to Lineages among the Xiao Liangshan Nuosu and Han, by Ann Maxwell Hill and Eric Diehl
4. Preferential Bilateral-Cross-Cousin Marriage among the Nuosu in Liangshan, by Lu Hui
5. Names and Genealogies among the Nuosu of Liangshan, by Ma Erzi
6. Homicide and Homicide Cases in Old Liangshan, by Qubi Shimei and Ma Erzi
7. Searching for the Heroic Age of the Yi People of Liangshan, by Liu Yu
8. On the Nature and Transmission of Bimo Knowledge in Liangshan, by Bamo Ayi
PART THREE: Yi Society in Yunnan
9. The Cold Funeral of the Nisu Yi, by Li Yongxiang
10. A Valley-House: Remembering a Yi Headmanship by Erik Mueggler
11. Native Place and Ethnic Relations in Lunan Yi Autonomous County, Yunnan, by Margaret Byrne Swain
PART FOUR: The Yi Today
12. Language Policy for the Yi, by David Bradley
13. Nationalities Conflict and Ethnicity in the People's Republic of China, with Special Reference to the Yi in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, by Thomas Heberer
14. Education and Ethnicity among the Liangshan Yi, by Martin Schoenhals
15. Nuosu Women's Economic Role in Ninglang, Yunnan, under the Reforms, by Wu Ga (Vugashynyumo Luovu)
16. The Yi Health Care System in Liangshan and Chuxiong, by Xiaoxing Liu
References
List of Contributors
Index
2. Mountain Patterns :The Survival of the Nuosu Culture in China
Stevan Harrell, Bamo Qubumo, and Ma Erzi
Nestled against the Tibetan highlands in the remote mountains of Liangshan in southwest China, the land of the Nuosu people was until the 1950s beyond the easy reach of the Chinese government, and the culture of the Nuosu (a branch of the Yi group) developed with little Chinese influence. In the 1960s China's Cultural Revolution suppressed and eroded Nuosu culture, but since the 1980s there has been a resurgence of Nuosu ethnic identity and culture, and a revival of traditional arts.
An introductory chapter presents the history and culture of the Nuosu, and essays illustrate each of the traditional visual arts: wooden house architecture, featuring intricate post-and-beam construction and carved decoration; clothing and textiles, including elaborate needlework; red-yellow-black lacquerware, seen in both traditional village-made and modern factory-made versions; silversmithing and jewelry; musical instruments and their use; and two aspects of the ritual culture of the bimo priests - ceremonies for the souls of deceased ancestors and rituals to expel and exorcise ghosts.
Mountain Patterns includes photographs representing every corner of Nuosu territory and displaying a wide variety of regional styles. The book is designed to accompany an exhibit at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington.
Stevan Harrell is professor of anthropology at the University of Washington and curator of Asian ethnology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Bamo Qubumo is assistant professor in the Institute for Minority Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. Ma Erzi (Mgebbu Lunze) is associate director of the Liangshan Nationalities Research Institute, Xichang, Sichuan.
Pub Date:
2000
ISBN:
Paper: 0-295-97937-2
Price:
Paper: $20.00s
Subject Listing:
Asian Studies - Anthropology, Asian, African, Oceanic Art
Bibliographic information:
88 pp.,105 illus., 28 in color, 8-1/2 x 11
3. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China
Series: Studies on Ethnic Groups in China
Univsersity of Washington Press 2001
Stevan Harrell
Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Sichuan, this pathbreaking study examines the nature of ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations among local communities, focusing on the Nuosu (classified as Yi by the Chinese government), Prmi, Naze, and Han. It argues that even within the same regional social system, ethnic identity is formulated, perceived, and promoted differently by different communities at different times.
Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China exemplifies a model in which ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations consist of drawing boundaries between one's own group and others, crossing those boundaries, and promoting internal unity within a group. Leaders and members of ethnic groups use commonalities and differences in history, culture, and kinship to promote internal unity and to strengthen or cross external boundaries. Superimposed on the structure of competing and cooperating local groups is a state system of ethnic classification and administration; members and leaders of local groups incorporate this system into their own ethnic consciousness, co-opting or resisting it situationally.
The heart of the book consists of detailed case studies of three Nuosu village communities, along with studies of Prmi and Naze communities, smaller groups such as the Yala and Nasu, and Han Chinese who live in minority areas. These are followed by a synthesis that compares different configurations of ethnic identity in different communities and discusses the implications of these examples for our understanding of ethnicity and for the near future of China. This lively description and analysis of the region's complex ethnic identities and relationships constitutes an original and important contribution to the study of ethnic identity.
Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China will be of interest to social scientists concerned with issues of ethnicity and state-building.
Pub Date:
November 2001
ISBN:
Cloth: 0-295-98122-9
Subject Listing:
Anthropology - Asian Studies
Bibliographic information:
382 pp., 36 photos, maps, tables, line drawings, notes, glossary, bibliog., index, LC 00-68319, 6" x 9"
4. The Age of Wild Ghosts:Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
Erik Mueggler
Publication Date: April 2001
375 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 15 line illustrations, 3 tables, 3 maps.
Subjects: Anthropology; Cultural Anthropology; Asian Studies; China; Ethnic Studies
Rights: World
Description| About the Author | Related Books
"In terms of its richness of data, this is one of the best ethnographies I have read about any locale anywhere. It is also exemplary in its novel and creative synthesis of literary analysis and more conventional social science-oriented anthropology. . . .
The book has a consistent focus, both disturbing and riveting, on the ways that pain, loss, and social upheaval are woven into people's attempts to reconstitute new lives over some fifty years of rapid social change."--P. Steven Sangren, author of Chinese Sociologics
"Mueggler writes with uncommon grace, elegance, and charm. . . . Readers will come away from this book with lasting memories of various aspects of these peoples' lives--death, hunger, fear, sex, humor--and with an understanding of their all-too-powerful humanity as well as their genius for adapting their lives to the often-changing demands of the communist state." Robert B. Edgerton, author of Death or Glory "A rare work that really gives us a new way of thinking about what modernity (or one version of it, anyway) means to people who have had it thrust upon them involuntarily." Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence DESCRIPTION (back to top) In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community--a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (back to top)Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. RELATED BOOKS (back to top)Chen Village under Mao and Deng, Expanded and Updated edition, by Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan UngerIn One's Own Shadow, by Liu Xin
55.00 0-520-21988-0 £36.50