CONTRIBUTORS
BAMO AYIis a Nuosu from Liangshan, born in Zhaojue. She received her B.A. in political science and her Ph.D. in minority languages and literatures, both from Central Nationalities Institute (now University). She is Associate Professor of Comparative Religion, as well as Director of the Division of International Exchanges at Central Nationalities University. She has done field research on the bimo and their role in Nuosu society, on women and development in Liangshan, and on Protestant Christianity and the social gospel in Seattle. She is author of Yizu zuling xinyang yanjiu (Researches into the Ancestral Spirit Beliefs of the Yi) and coauthor of Yizu wenhua shi (The History of Yi Culture).
DAVID BRADLEY is an Australian linguist who has been working on Yi Group languages for nearly thirty years. He is the author of Proto-Loloish (Curzon Press, 1979), which also appeared in Chinese, as Yiyuzhi yuanliu (Sichuan Nationalities Press, 1993), and of the Lonely Planet Burmese Phrasebook and Lonely Planet Hill Tribes Phrasebook, among numerous other works. Bradley is one of the editors for a variety of language atlas projects, including the Language Atlas of China (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Longmans, 1987). His main interest is sociohistorical linguistics of the Yi Group and related languages.
ERIC S. DIEHL is a graduate of the Department of East Asian Studies at Dickinson College. He is currently a Henry M. Jackson China Studies Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. His research interests include medical anthropology,rural health care in China, and marginalized identities.
STEVAN HARRELL is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle, and curator of Asian Ethnology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. He has conducted field research in Liangshan and Panzhihua intermittently since 1988. He is the author of Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China and cocurator (with Bamo Qubumo and Ma Erzi) of the exhibit Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China. He is now working on a multimedia CD-ROM ethnography titled Liangshan Journeys.
T HOMAS H EBERER is Professor of East Asian Politics and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Gerhard-Mercator University at Duisburg, Germany. He studied social anthropology, political science, and sinology at the universities of Frankfurt, Goettingen, and Mainz, and at Heidelberg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977. From 1977 to 1981 he worked as a lector and translator at the Foreign Language Press in Beijing. From 1981 to 1982 he carried out field research in Liangshan, publishing Nationalities Policy and Development Policies in Minority Areas in China. Since then he has conducted field research on various aspects of East Asian development and social change. He is the author of China and Its National Minorities: Autonomy or Assimilation, as well as coauthor or editor of books on corruption in China, Chinese rock music, Mao Zedong, political participation of women in East Asia, and most recently, the transformation of China's rural society.
A NN M AXWELL H ILL is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Dickinson College. She recently published Merchants and Migrants: Ethnicity and Trade among Yunnanese Chinese in Southeast Asia (Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1998). Her current research centers on Nuosu social stratification in Ninglang County, Yunnan Province.
LI YONGXIANG is a Nisu Yi from Xinping County, Yunnan. He was educated at Yuxi Teachers' College and the Central Nationalities University.He is now Assistant Researcher at the Institute for Minority Literature in the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences and a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Washington. He is the author of two books, Azhi and Azuo, Funeral Rites, and Documents of the Nisu, and The Lady Bimo and Her Family Stories, along with numerous articles on Nisu ritual, bilingual education, and Yi linguistics. Most recently, he collaborated with David Bradley on a survey of Yi dialects in Yunnan.
L IU X IAOXING received her Ph.D. in social cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 1998. She is currently teaching Chinese language at Northeastern Illinois University. Liu has been studying the Yi and other ethnic groups in China since 1985, and has published investigative reports, research papers, a book, and some translated works. Her research interests include medical systems and practices, rituals,
LIU YU comes from a Yi background in Yunnan. She was educated at People's University and Central Nationalities Institute, both in Beijing. From 1985 to 1996 she was a researcher in the Division of Antiquities of the National Museum of Chinese Ethnology in Beijing. She has published articles on a variety of ethnological themes and has recently completed a monograph on the heroic age of the Liangshan Yi.
LU HUIwas born in 1962 in Kunming, China, and is Yion her father's side and Han on her mother's. She graduated in 1982 from Yunnan University, with a B.A. in French language and literature. From 1982 to 1986 she worked at Yunnan Nationalities Institute, before leaving to study in France. She received an M.A. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1994 in social anthropology and ethnology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, under the direction of Professor Georges Condominas. She was a postdoctoral research fellow in the French institutions ORSTOM and CNRS from 1994 to 1997, and is now a consultant in the Unit of Intangible Heritage at UNESCO, in Paris.
MA ERZI (MGEBBU LUNZY) was born in Yangjuan Village, Yanyuan County, Liangshan. He was an elementary and high school Yi-language and physical education teacher and a translator for the Language Bureau of Yanyuan County before he went to Beijing to study Yidocuments at the Central Nationalities Institute. Ma was a curator at the Liangshan Museum of Slave Society before becoming a researcher at Liangshan Nationalities Research Institute, where he is now Associate Director. He is also the managing editor of Liangshan minzu yanjiu and cocurator of the exhibit Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China at the Burke Museum, Seattle.
E RIK M UEGGLER is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He conducted fieldwork in Yicommunities in Yunnan in 1989, 1990, and 1991—93, when he lived in a Lolopo village in Yongren County for over a year. His work on memory, grieving, poetics, and politics has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History,Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Cultural Anthropology, andModern China. He is now completing a book on ritual and memory of violence in a Yi community, and plans to return for more fieldwork in 2000.
Q UBI S HIMEI is a Nuosu from Mabian County, born in 1936. He comes from a bimo clan. He began studying Yi classical books in childhood. After 1950 he began studying Chinese and participated in field research organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which resulted in publication of the
M AR TIN S CHOENHALS is Chair of the Anthropology Department at Dowling College in Long Island, New York. He conducted field research on education in a large Chinese city in 1988—89, resulting in the book The Paradox of Power in a Chinese Middle School, which deals with the concept of face and the micropolitics of interaction. Based on his second extended period of fieldwork, in Xichang in 1994—95, he has just completed a book on ethnicity, caste, and race in an ethnic educational setting.
MARGARET BYRNE SWAIN, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, began her conversations with Sani women handicraft peddlers in Kunming during 1987. She subsequently studied the commodification of Lunan County for tourism, engaging her desire to understand what this statemandated “development” meant to the local Han and Sani, the “Yi” in “Lunan Yi Autonomous County.” The writings of French missionary Paul Vial became an important historical resource in her project, augmenting a year of fieldwork in 1993 and continued site visits. Her ethnography of tourism, globalization, and modernity, as they intersect local gender and ethnic hierarchies in Lunan, is forthcoming.
W U G A (Luovu Vugashynyumo) was born in Puge, Sichuan. She was a “sentdown youth” in Zhaojue in 1974, after which she worked as a reporter for Sichuan Daily, from 1975 to 1977. In 1982, she received her B.A. in philosophy at the Central Institution of Nationalities in Beijing. For the next two years she worked as a research scholar at the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute and then spent about a year at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, where she earned a master's degree in history.She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1998, conducting field research in Ninglang County, Yunnan. From 1994 to 1997, she was a visiting scholar at Tulsa University, Oklahoma. From 1998 to 1999, she was one of the principal advisors for the Chinese Society for Women Studies (CSWS) workshop, “Poverty, Ethnic Minority, and Development in Chengdu.” Since 1993, she has worked as a researcher and a China adoption program director for the Family Resource Center in Chicago.
WU GU is a member of the Big Black Yi group from Luxi, Yunnan. He is Chair of the Yunnan Office for the Editing of Minority Classics, the editorin-chief of the Collected Works of Yunnan Minorities, and Vice Secretary-General of the Chinese Association for the Study of Minority Literature. He
W U J INGZHONG is a Nuosu from Mianning. He was educated at Beijing Normal University and is a former Director of the Sichuan Provincial Nationalities Research Institute. He is the author of Liangshan Yizu fengsu (Customs of the Yi of Liangshan) and many articles about society, culture, and development in Liangshan and other regions.