3. Yi Society in Yunnan
9. The Cold Funeral of the Nisu Yi
Li Yongxiang
The Nisu, whose population exceeds one million, are one of the seventyodd branches of the Yi and are scattered in wide areas of southern Yunnan and some countries in Southeast Asia. The language of the Nisu is a southern dialect of the Yi language, has its own ancient scripts, and is rich in literature (see David Bradley, chapter 12 in this volume). The famous creation myth The Chamu Epic and The Shuangbo Yi Medicinal Gazetteer, which has been praised as “a jewel of the Yi nationality,” were actually translated from ancient Yi documents of the Nisu. Because this Yi branch is concentrated in the Ailao mountain range and the Hong River basin, it is known to scholarship as the Ailao Yi.
Specifically, the Nisu are distributed in Kunming Municipality and nearly thirty counties and cities in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Honghe Hani-Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yuxi Prefecture, and Simao Prefecture of Yunnan. Because of geographic differences and influences from ethnic interaction, there are variations and differences in culture, customs, and language among the Nisu of different areas. This essay examines the Nisu of Zhuyuan Village in Laochang Township of Xinping Yi-Dai Autonomous County in Yuxi Prefecture and analyzes a characteristic ritual sequence called ka-dji-da-le, or “cold funeral,” and related cultural phenomena.
THE CONCEPT OF THE COLD FUNERAL
There are two varieties of funeral rituals among the Nisu: cha-ma-da-le (the warm funeral) and ka-dji-da-le (the cold funeral). In the warm funeral, as soon as a person dies a day is selected for the funeral to send the soul across to Ngomi, the spirit world, back to where the Yi's ancestors used to live. The cold funeral, however, is selected in circumstances where it is not possible
Why do people perform the cold funeral ritual? The Nisu believe that there is only one spirit attached to one's body when one is alive, but that after one's death the one spirit turns into three: one spirit returns home to become an ancestor, one stays in the graveyard to watch the tombstone, and the third is sent by local priests, or bema (equivalent to bimo in Liangshan), to Ngomi, the World to Come, to be reunited with ancestors. There are no human beings in Ngomi, which is inhabited only by ancestors' spirits. But if no funeral rite is performed after one's death, the third spirit will not be reunited with those of the ancestors, and this is a taboo. Therefore, as long as a dead person has not yet undergone the funeral rite, the cold funeral rite will be performed, no matter how long ago he or she died. According to Zhou Juzhang, the bema of Zhuyuan Village, ka-dji means “cold” and da-le means “performing the funeral ritual.” Ka-dji-da-le means a ritual that is “left to be cold,” that is, a “cold funeral.” This name originates in the idea that people think this activity is comparable to eating cold rice and cold dishes.
It is not possible to perform the cold funeral ritual for a dead person who has undergone a funeral rite, because the third spirit has already been sent to the land of the ancestors. What is there to send off? Therefore, bema Zhou said, one dead person cannot experience two funeral rituals, and such a thing has never been heard of. Both warm and cold funerals are funeral activities and they have many things in common. Moreover, the important rituals—ngo-dzo-de, fighting offdemons; dzo-mo, showing the way to Ngomi; lo-she-dzuo duo, trampling the grasses; chi-dza-dzo-chuo, eating a small nighttime meal; and mi-sho, obtaining a grave site—are all performed the same way in both types of funerals. But the cold and the warm funerals are each of a piece and have many different characteristics. First, the site of the ritual is different: the great majority of warm funerals are held in the home of the dead person, and only rarely are they held at the grave site; almost all cold funerals take place beside the mountain grave, and the participants eat and sleep on the mountain, with only one ritual, that of calling the soul, taking place in the home. Second, the numbers and points of emphasis of the rites are different: warm funeral rites are numerous and detailed—there are rites for ablution of the corpse, dressing the corpse and laying it in the coffin, and cremation. During a cold funeral, these rites are not performed because the person has already been dead for some years; but many rites that the warm funeral does not have are added, such as the she-ka-tsi, which re-creates the circumstances of the time of death. Third, when three years have passed since a warm funeral, there is a “three full years” (sa ku de) rite, whose purpose is
There are many reasons for holding a cold funeral—for instance, when a person dies, it may take several years before a funeral can take place because an auspicious day cannot be found. Or the family may be experiencing economic hardship; after having waited for some years, they will have made financial preparations and will perform a cold funeral.
THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN DIMI AND NGOMI, AND THE LAND WHERE THE ANCESTORS LIVED
In the traditional view of the Nisu, the cosmos is divided into two worlds: Dimi and Ngomi. The former is inhabited by living human beings and is where they live and reproduce; the latter is inhabited by spirits, who must go there. This concept is similar to the division of the yin world and the yang world in the Han cosmology. Certainly there are some differences, because the Nisu have a very vague idea about Ngomi, and bema cannot clearly explain what that world is like. But bema know that there is a land in that world, where Yi ancestors used to live. Therefore, the core of funeral activities is the act of escorting the spirit from the place where the dead person lived to the place where the ancestors are said to have lived. The cold funeral is no exception: held at the grave site, it entails sending the spirit from the grave site to the land of ancestors. It is said that the spirit will meet with many difficulties on its journey, and so it is necessary to have the advice and assistance of the bema. And how does the bema know when the spirit has entered Ngomi and reached the land where the ancestors lived? How does the bema know where the boundary is between Dimi and Ngomi and the location of the place where the ancestors lived? The bema has an array of methods and thought models.
On the matter of the boundary, the Yi classical books are full of material. For example, the Ngo-dzo-de Prayer (Fighting the Demons Prayer), which is read during the rite of what is called “fighting off demons,” mentions a place called the Street of the Intermingling of Yin and Yang Forces (she-shu tsi-li-dze). This street is the boundary of the two worlds; beyond it is Ngomi and this side of it is the world of the living. And the two are opposed worlds in the Dzo-mo Prayer (Prayer of Showing the Way). Human life is Dimi and existence after death is Ngomi. Even if the spirit is still at home, it is, according
However, in actuality the boundary perceived by the bema is not too consistent with the one described in the classical texts. They believe that the top of ngo-di-dje, meaning “the tree of entering Ngomi,” an enormous paper tree used in the cold funeral, is the very boundary. Inside the ngo-di-dje, there is a piece of blue cloth (in some places white cloth) hanging vertically, and this provides the way across. The spirit climbs up along this piece of cloth, and when it crosses the top, it has reached Ngomi. The construction of the ngo di-dje is very particular and precise. It is divided into twelve platforms, symbolizing the twelve months of the year. Its “body” is covered with little openings, which are “windows” through which the spirit takes leave of its friends and relatives; as the spirit climbs up the cloth, he or she can see the living world through these windows, but the world of the living cannot see the spirit. And when the spirit has crossed the top, he or she enters Ngomi.
On the matter of the boundary, the shamans have their own set of explanations. They believe that the points of interconnection between the two different worlds are located just below their own ears. Shamans claim that they can call out to spirits to communicate with the human world through themselves, and that the spirits they summon are located just below their ears, so that only they can hear what the spirits say. Similarly, they can relay people's requests and hopes to the spirits.
As for the land where the ancestors once lived, the bema refer to it generally as “the place where the King of the Underworld of the Universe [mu-mi tze-lo-wa] resides.” The path described in the classical Yi Dzo-mo Prayer leads from the grave toward Mount Ailao, to Xinping City,to Mount Lukui, to Eshan City, to Yixi City, to Mount Xi, to Kunming, and on northward. Regardless of who has died, the Yi invariably direct the spirit to take this route back, which dovetails neatly with the belief among scholars that the Yi came from the north. Clearly, the Nisu funeral rites contain much that reflects their history.
As for how the rite of showing the way (dzo-mo) in the cold funeral relates to the place of the ancestors: one takes the head, skin, limbs, and tail of the ox used in the ritual of fighting off demons (ngo-dzo-de) and presents them completely intact at a spot some fifteen meters from the grave; two sticks of incense are stuck into the ox's nostrils, with the whole head facing the sky; the bema, holding a golden-bamboo staff and wearing a bema headdress, and starting in front of the grave, recites the Dzo-mo Prayer while walking slowly toward the ox's head. When the bema reaches the head, the prayer is finished, and the bema pokes the head with the staff so that it faces the ground. This poke signifies that the spirit has reached the land of the ancestors; and then, while calling to the spirit, the bema walks back toward the grave and returns to the world of the living.
The Nisu believe that in Ngomi there are also mountains, waters, a sun, a moon, rice, cows, sheep, chicken, pigs, and so on. The spirits work and produce subsistence materials for their living.
SACRIFICE OF ANIMALS, MONEY, AND OBJECTS
Regardless of who passes away, the Nisu must send that person's spirit back to the land of the ancestors to be reunited with them. The spirit, of course, needs advice and assistance from the bema. But according to etiquette, the bema cannot send back the spirit empty-handed. Furthermore, the Nisu believe that the spirit needs an assortment of things in order to live in the other world, such as livestock, money, and tools, and that if the living do not give them to him or her, there is no way for the spirit to obtain these. Hence people make sacrifices of livestock (such as cattle, goats, pigs, chickens), money (paper money or various paper trees), grain, and tools. Superficially these things are used in sacrifice, but in fact they are given to the spirit.
The question of what things should be given to the spirit is decided by the host family, based on what resources are available; once decided, this cannot be changed, especially with gifts of livestock. It once happened that the host family had decided that a few chickens were to be sacrificed, but then changed their minds; all the chickens died anyway. The bema explained that the spirits of those chickens had been snatched away by the soul. In today's cold funeral, decisions of this kind cannot ordinarily be altered.
In the cold funeral there are two rituals related to gifts of livestock—cattle, goats, pigs, or chickens—that are offered to the spirit. First comes the shu-pu in the second part of the ritual. The expression shu-pu is translated as “handing over alive” by some, as “sacrifice” by others, but in any case the meaning is the same: the livestock are offered to the spirit. The bema recites the Shu-pu Scripture, which must be finished before the animals can be killed. The prayer tells where these livestock came from, where the knife came from, and the difficulties of killing the animals. The other ritual is called dji ti, which is difficult to translate neatly: dji means “everything, all things,” and ti means “to inform”—that is, to inform the spirit about all the activities taking place as part of the cold funeral, including who is taking part and their kinship relation to the dead person, what gifts they have brought (livestock, money, objects, and so on), and such matters.
Money given to the spirit is made of paper; and of the five large paper trees used in the cold funeral activities, four represent money. These four trees are the baitian wang, the ertian wang,
[1] These terms are of Han origin and have no Yi language equivalents. The Han terms are used in the ritual.
the “gold tree” (she-dze), and the “silver tree” (tu-dze). The baitian wang is given to the King of the UnderworldGrain and tools are also a part of the offering to the spirit. First, the bema gives the spirit a pair of chi-che (gourd ladles) as tools for drawing water in Ngomi. The bema also represents the spirit in the “trampling the grasses” (lo she-dzuo-duo) rite and asks for things from the daughter of the dead person—things such as money, towels, clothes, shoes, tobacco, liquor, grain, and meat. She must hand over immediately the gifts she has prepared. Only after the bema has the requested items can the “trampling the grasses” rite begin.
Not only does the bema give things to the spirit on behalf of the host family, he even instructs the spirit in their use. With the gu, for instance, the bema tells him or her, “The gu is important in the Underworld: in hot weather merely put the gu on your head and you won't feel hot, but cool; in the rain, hold up the gu and your clothes will remain dry while other people are getting drenched; in the winter, the gu can be worn as clothing, so that when other people are cold, you will be warm.” The same thing happens with the ngo-di-dje—the bema tells the spirit, “There are seas, rivers, and mountains in Ngomi just as there are here; when you come to the sea, the ngo-di-dje will turn into a boat; when you come to a river, into a bridge; when you come to a mountain, into a ladder; as long as you have it, you can overcome any difficulty.” Of course, the spirit cannot take all the gifts with him or her; a portion is left as inheritance for his or her descendants.
The purpose for holding the cold funeral is to offer paper money, livestock, and objects to the spirit. It seems very normal for the Nisu—things that the spirit needs in Ngomi have to be brought there from Dimi. It is the same with the birth of a person—all he or she needs in the living world, such as money, livestock, grain, and clothes, are brought from Ngomi.
THE RITE OF FIGHTING OFF DEMONS
When the bema escorts the spirit to the land of the ancestors, it is by no means smooth sailing all the way. It is necessary for the spirit to be psychologically prepared in order to complete a successful journey. Aside from having to climb steep inclines, cross seas and rivers, be buffeted by the wind and rain and baked by the sun, the spirit also has to fight off all sorts of demons along the way. These demons include some in human form and some in animal form. They hold areas in the road, and the spirit can reach its destination only if they are fought off.
As in other rites, it is mainly the bema who drives them off, because it is
While fighting off the human demons, the bema chants the Ngo-dzo-de Prayer, which tells of a girl named Gu-dji-ni-pa who could not enter Ngomi because she had not been married in the human world. She does nothing but wait by the road to grab men's spirits and make them marry her, and the bema must drive her off in order to give the spirit free passage. This prayer is not read for the spirit of a dead woman, nor are demons in human form driven off.
It takes two bema to fight off demons; the two represent Aji and Ajuo, who are brothers. They were orphaned as children and grew up together. After they grew up, Aji married and began to change. He forced his younger brother to divide their family property, of which he took eight of the nine parts, leaving the least desirable ninth for his brother. Ajuo sent the goats, cattle, pigs, and chickens that had come to him off into the mountains, sent the ducks into the sea, and then ran off to the Street of the Intermingling of Yin and Yang Forces (she-shu-tsi-li-dze) and indeed to Ngomi itself. When Aji, the elder brother, learned of this, he grieved beyond all reason, but it was too late. Three years later, after Aji eventually died, he still had not entered Ngomi, and his brother, Ajuo, finally came forward to drive off demons, allowing Aji to enter.
The rite of driving off animal demons is necessary because, in addition to the female demon, there are all manner of animal demons on the road to Ngomi, such as the Red-Tailed Tiger (lo-nu-mo), Long-Necked Leopard (tsi-mo), Short-Tailed Dog (tsi-me-du), and Great White Fowl (ji-tu). The only way for the spirit to reach the land of the ancestors in peace is for the bema to make all of them disappear.
When the rite of fighting off demons begins, some people beat gongs and drums and begin doing a dance of offering. One of the two bema holds a beef rib pierced by a sharp-tipped knife: the knife is for killing human demons, and the bone is for the tiger and leopard to eat. The other bema holds the golden-bamboo staff (vu-du). The bema with the knife plays the part of Ajuo, the one with the staff, Aji. The ritual starts at the grave with the bema playing Ajuo saying the Ngo-dzo-de Prayer and then breaking into wild dance. The bema playing Aji immediately starts saying the Ngo-dzo-xo Scripture. While this is going on, the daughter of the deceased pretends to be a tiger trying to seize the beef bone to eat, and the other bema, watching the time closely, does the ritual for driving off demons in animal form. The whole demon-fighting rite goes on for half an hour, and then beside the ox skin the bema breaks a small white bowl that has been offered, signifying that the demons have all been dispersed.
There is another demon-chasing ritual in the funeral ritual, called ni-mi. The ni-mi is different from the ngo-dzo in that it chases away all unpropitiated ghosts not connected with the cold funeral, “sweeping clean” the funeral area. With demons of somewhat greater power or importance, one uses a spirit horse (sa-mo) to escort them away.
PEOPLE'S IDEAS ABOUT THE COLD FUNERAL
In the funeral ritual, various participants—the bema, host family, and members and assistants of different troupes of mourners—all present different states of mind. Here I will discuss two common states of mind in the ritual.
The first of these is found in dancing reverential dances. Ritual dancing is an important constituent of the cold funeral; not only are there sections consisting only of reverential dancing, but many other sections also involve ritual dancing. Rituals made up entirely of dancing generally begin at 7 p.m. or later and last until 3 a.m., with as much as eight hours of continuous dancing. What is more, the mourners compete to see which troupe can dance the longest and most beautifully. According to the custom, the longer and grander the dancing, the more successful the cold funeral ritual.
But why dancing? There are different explanations. The bema believe that reverential dancing shows the King of Ngomi that the world of the living still needs people to go on multiplying. The dancing in a number of specific rituals signifies the greeting or sending off of divine entities—as for instance when the bema protects a god. Ordinary Nisu people say that ceremonial dancing boosts courage for the participants. They believe in the existence of ghosts and spirits, and the idea of ghosts and spirits is constant throughout the ritual. The fear of spirits is so deeply embedded in people's minds that they almost turn pale at the mention of them. In their view, ghosts always follow people—in fields, at the edges of fields, on roads, and so on. Ghosts throw sand in the woods and make one hear the noise; or they make strange howls (they howl only once on a mountain, traveling to a different mountain to howl again; day breaks after they howl three times); or they imitate cries of children or women; or they follow humans or livestock at some distance behind. The Nisu who walk outside at night feel very nervous. They point the flashlight backward and turn the radio on really loud. And they believe that by doing so, ghosts and spirits dare not follow them. Every time someone dies in the village or in a neighboring village, people usually do not go out in the evening, women and children especially. In the ritual, people are involved with ghosts and they get edgy during the night. But after the reverential dancing, their courage is boosted and they feel more relaxed.
The second type of psychological state is found in calling spirits. The bema is the person who communicates between the Dimi and Ngomi worlds. But even with the protection of the bema's spirits, the bema are still in a state of
10. A Valley-House: Remembering a Yi Headmanship
Erik Mueggler
In 1953, a team of ethnographers taking part in the nationwide Nationalities Classification (minzu shibie) project visited the village of Yijichang in Yongren County, Yunnan.
[1] Some of the colloquial terms here are in standard Mandarin or its Yunnan dialect variation. These are rendered in Hanyu pinyin. Many are in a language generally considered a subdialect of the Central dialect of Yi, a Loloish Tibeto-Burman language (Bradley 1979; Chen, Bian, and Li 1985). Following local usage, I call this dialect LòloÑò. For transcriptions of LòloÑò, I have modified the version of the International Phonetic Alphabet employed by Ma Xueliang to transcribe Yi languages (1951, 1992). Acute accents indicate high, level tones; grave accents low, falling tones; and mid-range level tones are unmarked. Underlining of vowels indicates laryngalization. On the Nationalities Classification project, see Fei 1981; Jiang 1985; Lin 1987, 1990; Lin and Jin 1980; Guldin 1994.
Their report analyzed patterns of land use, relations of exploitation, and local government structure in this area before Liberation and classed its people as members of the newly constituted Yinationality.The pre-Liberation local state hierarchy, it stated, had here as elsewhere been an instrument of direct oppression, designed to extract wealth from the people through taxes and corvée labor. In the Qing dynasty and the Republic, the first level of this oppressive hierarchy had been an institution unique to this part of Yunnan. It was called a huotou (
), and it administered a small group of Yi villages. Of the Yijichang huotou the report declared:Grants from the Committee for Scholarly Communications with China and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research supported the field research for this chapter. I am indebted to Professor Liu Yaohan of the Chuxiong Yi Culture Research Institute and Professor He Yaohua of the Yunnan Social Sciences Academy for their indispensable aid in setting up this project, and to Luo Wengao for his patient help in gathering every aspect of this material. I also owe thanks to William Rowe, Emily Martin, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Laury Oaks, Katherine Verdery, Sara Berry, Stevan Harrell, and the participants in the First International Conference on Yi Studies for their comments on earlier drafts.
It is said that in Yijichang in the late Qing and early Republic, the positions of huotou and so forth [in the hierarchy of local government] were dominated by local tyrants and evil gentry. After the county reform [in 1925], corvée and grain tax gradually increased, and the baozhang[the local leader of the community self-policing organization] and huotou seized every opportunity to blackmail the people. After 1935, corvée and grain tax grew ever deeper....The suffering of poor laborers and peasants was extremely heavy. Each change or continuity at this basic level of the puppet state followed its need to oppress and exploit the peasants. (YSB 1986, 109)
In the early 1990s, the view that huotou had been the lowest level of an oppressive administrative hierarchy dominated by “local tyrants and evil gentry” still prevailed among government and Partyofficials in Yongren County. People in the county's minority areas, however, had begun to use a very different vocabulary to speak of the former huotou. In Zhizuo, a long day's walk from Yijichang, an elementary schoolteacher told me, “If you really want to study our nationality's religion, you should begin by studying the ts'ici[the local term for huotou].” “Even though it was discontinued a long time ago,” another Zhizuo resident frequently asserted, “the ts'ici still exists in people's hearts. It is the heart of our nationality.” A budding entrepreneur, who would have made an excellent candidate for the ts'ici, was more explicit: “If the Communist Party were serious about restoring national customs, they would allow us to reinstate the ts'ici, because after all it is our nationality's most important custom.”
In the 1980s, the post-Mao regime had granted such terms as nationality (minzu), nationality religion (minzu zongjiao), and nationality customs (minzu fengsu) new legitimacy. Three decades before, the Nationalities Classification project had assigned 95 percent of Zhizuo's population to the Yi nationality. Zhizuo residents used this label when traveling in the largely Han lowlands or dealing with officials at the county level or above; but among other inhabitants of Zhizuo or the surrounding mountains, most preferred the term Lòlop'ò. By the early 1990s some had begun to assert that their official “nationality” should be Lòlop'ò. These claims were always founded on statements about the old ts'ici. The territory of the “Lòlop'ò nationality” was the region that had been governed by the ts'ici, its language was the language spoken in this area, and its distinguishing “religion” and “customs” were the rituals associated with the ts'ici.
When I took my hosts' advice and began to investigate the Zhizuo ts'ici, I found that these claims were only the most recent development of a prolonged and complex struggle over collective memory,in which recollections of the ts'ici were central. This chapter is part of a history of this struggle. It describes memories of the ts'ici system in the two decades preceding Liberation. In the early 1990s, Zhizuo Lòlop'ò spoke of the ts'ici of the 1930s and 1940s as their ancestors' cleverest invention, designed to protect their community
In speaking of the ts'ici, people in Zhizuo often exhibited a “virtuosity in self description” that, as Keane (1995, 102) has noted, seems to characterize societies where ritual oratory and formal discourse are strongly valued. Much speech about the ts'ici was formalized, consisting of lists of “rules and procedures” (cÍ p e mope), poetic phrases from ritual chants referring to these rules' ancestral origins, and reflexive exegetical commentary. While many people in Zhizuo enthusiastically agreed to talk about general aspects of the ts'ici system and its relation to present concerns about “nationality,” most deferred my more specific questions to a small group of elderly ritual specialists and former members of ts'ici households. Like many anthropologists blessed with highly articulate informants, I often listened to these experts' fluent discourse on “rules and procedures” with a sense of unease. This talk often seemed to refer to a bounded, timeless world that could have had no real existence in the violent, conflict-ridden, and rapidly changing context of early-twentieth-century China. In this talk, the ts'ici system took on a textlike legibility, eminently readable but divorced from the confusion and ambiguity of daily life. I soon learned, however, that its formal qualities were precisely what gave this talk the unifying potential that made it politically potent in the real world. As Keane (ibid., 103) argues, such “expansive selfconsciousness . . . should neither be taken for granted as a straightforward expression of autonomous cultural meanings nor dismissed out of hand as merely the product of ‘officializing strategies’” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]). Talk about the ts'ici system amounted, to the contrary, to a powerful strategy of self-representation, which drew its force from the capacity of formal, reflexive speech to frame a coherent, synchronic world removed from present conflicts and ambiguities. A “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988), this was an effort to seize control of collective self-representation from those who promoted
The aim of this chapter is to re-present the picture of the ts'ici system that ritual experts and former members of ts'ici households presented to me as an outsider.
[2] Published material on huotou systems is thin, consisting in a few scattered references by 1950s investigators (such as the one quoted above) some brief descriptions in local gazetteers (see, e.g., Guo and Xi 1924, 1:16a), and a few articles in local history journals (see Su 1989).
These specialized accounts were at the heart of struggles over memories of the ts'ici after 1950. They gave such memories continuity and coherence, kept alive the possibility that the ts'ici system might be reconstructed should local officials accede, and created a foundation for the politically powerful claim that the area once administrated by the ts'ici should be the territory of a distinct nationality. Much of this systematically ordered knowledge concerned the yearly cycle of rituals sponsored by the ts'ici household (Mueggler 1996). Here, though, I have chosen to organize accounts concerned with the responsibilities, ideal moral character, proscribed activities, and prescribed compensation of the major players in the ts'ici system. I show how these recollections employ procreative metaphor and moral ideas about speech, sexuality, and sociability to create an imagined unity for all who lived in the former ts'ici and claimed to be Lòlop'ò. This talk employed elaborate spatial and temporal homologies to associate the ts'ici with procreative force. In temporal terms, it drew parallels between giving birth and nurturing children and the communal work of farming rice to pay for the ts'ici's social and ritual obligations; in spatial terms, it compared the bounded territory of Zhizuo to the ts'ici's house, with a productive unity of ancestral spouses at its center and a crowd of honored but potentially threatening guests at its margins.As Lévi-Strauss pointed out, house images frequently display the capacity to integrate diverse or mutually contradictory ideas and principles (1983, 1984; cf. Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). Following this suggestion, I argue that recollections of the ts'ici system used a series of interrelated house images—a reliquary box, the ts'ici's house, the houselike valley—to fashion an inclusive unity imagined to embrace all Zhizuo residents and to exclude from internal household matters the powerful outsiders the system ostensively served. From within this domain, people in Zhizuo could expand in apparently contradictory ways the principles of descent and affinity that structured social relations within their own households. People of diverse origins, including many with Han forbears, could speak of each other as descended from a single ancestral couple. People from households that had not experienced intermarriage could speak of each other as linked in a circle of affinal relations and mutually engaged in the intimate processes of household reproduction. This formal and reflexive talk of along-defunct institution could
“THOSE WHO CAN BEAR IT”
In the last two decades of the Republic, about fifteen hundred people lived in Zhizuo's twenty-four villages and hamlets. The largest villages formed a rough oval around a stretch of irrigated rice paddy land on the floor of the biggest valley. A footpath, paved with stone in the steepest places, ran through this valley, linking the two county centers of Dayao and Yongren (or Zuojie).
[3] Before 1925, Dayao County was divided into administrative units called fensi. In 1925, a separate county, Yongren, was formed out of Dayao's northernmost fensi, and both counties were divided into smaller units called qu, or districts. Zhizuo was part of Dayao's Zhonghe qu, controlled by the Xia family of hereditary officials. In 1958, when the political lines of China's rural areas were redrawn to form communes, most of Zhonghe district, including most of Zhizuo, became part of Yongren Commune (which later reverted to Yongren County). This redivision left a few, outlying villages of the Zhizuo ts'ici in Dayao County (YSB 1986, 109; YSRTB 1990).
In the first half of the twentieth century, these mountains were frequently awash with armies, which forcibly recruited soldiers and requisitioned grain, livestock, money, and corvée labor (see Map 10.1). Between 1915 and 1929, warlord armies from Sichuan and Yunnan entered through the tiny county of Yongren on Zhizuo's northern border at least eight times, requisitioning grain worth over eight hundred liang of silver and nearly two million yuan (CYZZ 1993, 148). The People's Liberation Army passed through twice on its long march, attacking and briefly occupying the town of Dayao early in 1935, and returning in 1936 (ibid., 150). In 1938 the Burma road, passing to the south of Zhizuo, became South China's only conduit for supplies from the West to keep alive the Guomindang's resistance against the Japanese. New roads were constructed through Dayao and Yongren Counties to link the Burma road to the Guomindang bases in Sichuan (ibid., 149), and its heavy military, administrative, and civilian traffic on this road often spilled onto the footpath through Zhizuo. In the 1940s, the nationalist government's regime of forced military conscription bore heavily on both counties, as groups of soldiers ranged through their mountains hunting down youths evading the draft. Finally, in 1948 and 1949 the Communist Party underground carried out a series of armed rebellions in the area, and “Communist bandits,” Guomindang regulars, and militia units fought pitched battles in Zhizuo and the surrounding mountains (ibid., 151).In addition to this formidable military traffic, local officials and police stopped in Zhizuo to oversee conscription and tax collection, recruit corvée
Map 10.1. Zhizuo and surrounding area
[4] The ethnically Han Xia family took the title of tusi several decades after the Qing state had replaced previous hereditary officials in this part of Yunnan with ordinary appointed magistrates. On the history of the tusi system see Herman 1997; Hu 1981; Huang 1968; Li Shiyu 1990, 465—94; She 1947; Smith 1970.
The Xia family retained control over this region until 1949. Their district was divided into bao, for which they appointed baozhang to conscript soldiers and collect taxes and levies. Zhizuo formed a single bao, and its baozhang appointed a jiazhang (until1938, luzhang) to take responsibility for each small village or neighborhood of a larger one. The Xia family allowed baozhang to retain about two dan of the tax grain they collected as a yearly salary,[5] Units of measure used in this chapter are as follows: a mu was about one-fifteenth of a hectare, a sheng about 1.08 liters, and a dan about 50 kilograms.
while jiazhang drew pittances of about .26 dan a year for their thankless task of convincing their fellow villagers to pay their taxes (YSB 1986, 109). In the 1940s the power of the Xia family in Zhizuo was rivaled by that of Zhizuo's militia commander, Luo Guotian, a local who sold guns to men in Zhizuo and organized them into a formidable fighting force. Tension with Luo Guotian, the pressing need to keep an eye on revenue collection, and Zhizuo's convenience as a rest stop on the road to the county capital frequently brought members of the Xia family to Zhizuo, along with large retinues of guards, servants, and runners.Each year, Zhizuo residents selected a ts'ici household from among the community's most affluent families. The most expensive and time-consuming obligation of this household was to lodge, feed, and entertain the stream of soldiers, officials, police, merchants, and other influential visitors who walked the stone path through the valley. In addition, the host household and its staff of five maintained a prison cell for locals arrested for crimes and youths held to be forcibly conscripted. They carried letters from the district center to the next group of villages on the route to the county seat, maintained the stone footpath that made this route easier to travel, and buried all outsiders who died within Zhizuo and had no nearby kin. Finally, they organized a yearly cycle of communal rituals intended to draw fertility, wealth, and good health into Zhizuo and drive away poverty and disease.
Unlike baozhang and militia commanders, host households in the ts'ici system were not appointed by the Xia family. Instead, they were elected by a group of the community's most influential or affluent men, who met yearly
The “rules and procedures” of the ts'ici system mandated that the title of ts'ici should rotate around the oval of villages on the slopes of Zhizuo's largest valley “toward the right hand” (counterclockwise). For this reason, households of only one village were considered each year. Zhizuo residents insisted that the ts'ici household should be free of deaths for the year previous to its service (except for miscarriages and deaths of infants without teeth). If the household already selected for the following year had experienced a death, another choice should be made. Households with widows or widowers of any generation were unacceptable. Most important, the household should have a healthy resident elderly couple who could take on the ts'ici's ritual duties. This couple should have raised several children to adulthood and preserved the habit of wearing old-style Lòlop'ò clothing: hemp sandals rather than the more common straw ones, hempen shirts and trousers, and robes that buttoned down the side instead of the front. Finally, and crucially, the household had to be wealthy enough to bear the financial burdens of the ts'ici.
The formula “give it to those who can bear it [on their backs] or carry it [in their hands], b m dù vé k é s u t' f g è , was supposed to guide the ts'ici's selection. Every year, the host household drew an income of about thirty dan of grain from a ten-mu parcel of land that rotated with the ts'ici, but it often expended as much as sixty dan of grain and forty to fifty goats. Zhizuo residents remembered some years in which hundreds of officials and soldiers traveled through the valley, staying days or weeks at a time and plunging the ts'ici household into serious debt. For this reason, most prospective ts'ici were
Though few would willingly take on the burden of the ts'ici, this service compensated a household's members with prestige they could obtain no other way. Selection was public affirmation that a household had attained the most enviable of states. Relations between its eldest married couple were harmonious and fruitful, attended by neither deaths nor quarrels; they had produced several sons and daughters and their fertility had successfully blossomed into wealth. A passage from a mortuary lament, in which a daughter sings of happy times before her parents' deaths, describes this ideal state of fortune.
like rings on a buffalo's horns our fields widened our pastures expanded every kind of livestock grazed for us every kind of grain grew for us our sons raised a sea of wealth our daughters filled the granary our bowls overflowed with grain our cups filled up with broth
Those who selected such a household expected that if it fulfilled its ritual obligations correctly its harmonious productivity would saturate Zhizuo. In addition to this prestige, having served as ts'ici made one a permanent member of the inner circle that controlled the ts'ici system. Finally, many in Zhizuo insisted that though some former ts'ici may have been ruined financially, and though some were persecuted harshly during the Cultural Revolution, with few exceptions they lived long, healthy lives as a result of their year of service.
In some ways Zhizuo's ts'ici system bears comparison to Maya cargo systems. Eric Wolf once suggested that service in such systems tended to impede the mobilization of wealth as capital within the community in comparison to the outside world (1955, 458). This suggestion stimulated a debate about whether cargo service tended to level a community economically by creating the incentive for the most prosperous to expend their wealth within the community or to stratify it socially by creating avenues for the rich to accumulate social prestige (Cancian 1965, 1992; Haviland 1977; Nash 1964; Wolf 1957, 1986). While Zhizuo residents' reminiscences of the 1930s and 1940s do not provide enough evidence to indicate whether the ts'ici system impeded the mobilization of wealth as capital, they do leave room for some informed speculation. Of the four Zhizuo households classified as “landlords” during the Land Reform Movement, one was Han and thus excluded from service. In the mid-1940s, the Han family opened a hostel in Zhizuo for travelers with mule trains. Using profits from this hostel, the family purchased land to farm with hired labor and mules to haul salt, sugar, and opium, expanding its fortunes considerably. The two Lòlop'ò “landlord” families whose location made them eligible for service were those of the militia commander Luo Guotian and of a former baozhang whom Zhizuo residents considered to be “gentry” (shenshi). These were among a very few Lòlop'ò households powerful enough to forestall their own selection as host household. They not only avoided the enormous drain on their resources that service would have entailed but also received flows of bribes from families wishing to evade service. By the end of the 1940s, each of these households was heavily engaged in the salt, sugar, and opium trades, while most Zhizuo residents benefited from this trade only by hiring out as porters or muleteers. One might speculate that the ts'ici system helped free a few of the politically or militarily most influential to make use of Zhizuo's location along a trading route, even as it limited the capacity of prosperous community members to mobilize their wealth for trade.
A PRODUCTIVE EMBRACE
The titles of ts'ici and ts'icimo (ts'ici's wife) were granted the household's eldest married couple. This pair was spared the mundane duties of hosting visitors, carrying baggage and letters, guarding prisoners, and burying dead
Another resting place was on a hilltop behind the village of Tc'emo. Even in the early 1990s, many mountain villages in Líp'ò and Lòlop'ò areas had preserved a patch of old-growth forest on the mountain slope behind and above the houses (cf. CYZZ 1993, 376). One large, old tree was a Misi, said to govern the earth, weather, crops, animals, and all other living things in the area around the village. Others were sometimes called Mitsù (or MitsÌ),
Figure 10.1. The reliquary box, containing the souls of the founding ancestors, shaped like the earth of Lòlop'ò mythology.
The souls of this founding couple's children inhabited other places in the valley. The eldest and his or her spouse (Lòhe) occupied a small round stone beside the ancestral trust fields. In the spring, the host household organized a festival to transplant rice seedlings into the ancestral trust land and to propitiate this spirit. It was said to regulate the sexuality ofwomen, which bloomed to threatening proportions in this season. Another couple (Lçmælòhe) resided in a small stone shaped “like a little person” or fetus, curled up inside a close, stone shelter just below and outside the valley. The host household sponsored propitiations for this spirit when drought threatened the rice crops. A third (Tc'a) rested on a small wooden shelf within the doorway of a private house in Tc'emo and was propitiated yearly in the summer to counter the threat of epidemic disease. A fourth (Mitsù) occupied a giant pine on a hilltop across the valley from Agàmisimo's tree and
In the early 1990s, these spirits were still a live topic of conversation. “Here's what some people say about Agàmisimo,” Qi Degui, a teacher at Zhizuo's elementary school once remarked. Qi and I were sitting outside the school gate, looking out over a ravine toward Agàmisimo's hill and the large village of Tc'emo in front of it, where the ever-diligent Li Zhidong was planting walnut trees. “He has a head, up there near the top of the hill,” said Qi, “a stomach in the center of Tc'emo, arms, legs, and feet down by the river. Families on the head, like the Gu family, produce lots of college students. Those who live on his stomach never go hungry. And people who live on his feet, like Li Zhidong, are always running about, busy, wishing they were on the stomach or the head.” Poking fun at Li Zhidong's industry, Qi Degui imagined Agàmisimo to be like the ox (or tiger) of Lòlop'ò mythology, distributed over the land at the creation of the world, his veins becoming the rivers, his hair the forests, his teeth the cliffs, and his lice the goats. Agàmisimo's body, sprawled out over the village of Tc'emo, could as well be said to cover all of Zhizuo, encompassing its spirit progeny as it encompassed its own head, stomach, and feet.
Qi Haiyun, a man in his late twenties who was soon to become Zhizuo's Party secretary, used a different set of idioms to describe the relationship between Agàmisimo and Mitsù, a second child of Agàmisimo, who occupied a pine tree on the opposite hilltop:
Mitsù is over there on the shady side because he is only a branch of Agàmisimo. Agàmisimo sits where the sun shines first because he is like the king of a country. He governs Mitsù and all the rest, as well as the little h e b e[spirits that watch mountain passes], which are like customs officials guarding the doors: you have to have their permission to pass or things go badly for you.
[But why are they on opposite sides?] It's like in a house, where older and younger generations don't sit together. Spirits are like that, too; if they sat together, they would be equal. Agàmisimo takes the best seat. Analyzing it with modern thought, we could say that Agàmisimo is like a township [xiang] government and Mitsù is a village government [cungongsuo] in the township. Or better, it's as though Mitsù is the land-management office [tudi guanlisuo] of the township government: the territory they govern is the same, but Mitsù has more specific duties. He manages the rain and the insect infestations while Agàmisimo governs everything.
A body divided among head, stomach, and feet, a country with customs officials at the borders, a household where the elder generation takes the upstream seats, a township government organized bureaucratically into departments: each metaphor evokes an entity with a definite boundary, internally differentiated into organs encompassed by, and subordinate to, the
All in Zhizuo who called themselves Lòlop'ò, whether they believed themselves directly descended from Líp'ò immigrants from the Baicaolin Mountains or from Han immigrants from nearby parts of Yunnan or Sichuan, claimed Agàmisimo as their own ancestor. This claim was based not on genealogy but on this principle of spatially encompassing hierarchy. In saying, “It's like in a house, where older and younger generations don't sit together,” Qi Haiyun referred to a spatial hierarchization that informs all Lòlop'ò notions of descent. The mortuary lament quoted above also eulogizes this hierarchy by describing a happy, unified family eating together in a house's upstream room, properly distributed by generation and gender:
mother sat at the bed's head father at the [opposite] bed's head daughters sat on the bed's center sons on the [opposite] bed's center grandchildren and great-grandchildren near the door we ate with laughing faces lifted bowls with smiling faces
The notion of descent evoked here is informed by the spatial disposition of bodies in a house's upstream room, where food is cooked and household members eat together. Authority and responsibility descend the two parallel beds from head to tail, from mothers to “daughters” (including daughters-in-law) to granddaughters, and from fathers to sons to grandsons. The parents' property and burdens descend to their children, as the latter move up to take their places. This is an encompassing hierarchy like that of Agàmisimo and his spirit progeny. The upstream room in which the happy family eats is the sleeping room of the mother and father; the beds on which the family sits are their sleeping beds from which the sons, daughters, and grandchildren are imagined to have sprung. The room enclosing the family is the receptacle for the parents' procreative union, in which all those who sit below them on the beds are imagined to have been generated.
A similar image of an encompassing domain in which titles, property, and
WARDEN, SPEAKER, BEARER
Ritual experts remembered ts'ici and ts'icimo primarily as servants of these ancestral spirits: hosts to the wooden reliquary and sponsors of a cycle of rituals for the Agàmisimo's spirit progeny scattered through the valley. Their union was imagined to enfold all of Agàmisimo's descendants like the skin of that spirit's extended body or the walls of a parental household. Like the still, conjugal, but asexual union of the founding ancestors in Agàmisimo itself, this union was a source of procreative force for all those it embraced. In service of this force, the ts'ici couple was expected strictly to avoid everything associated with their influential visitors from the lowlands. They were to wear only the clothing thought to have been worn by the original ancestors, eat and drink from wooden bowls and clay jugs, rather than factorymade ceramic bowls, and eat no meat of dogs, horses, cattle, or any animals that had died rather than being slaughtered, all associated with lowland Han and considered filthy and insulting to ancestors. They were not to drink anything but homemade wheat beer, and were not to smoke. They were to be restrained in speech, never referring to death, violence, or conflict and to speak no Chinese for their entire year of service. It was understood that as an elderly couple they would not sit or sleep on the same bed or have sex. The ts'icimo should be past menopause so menstrual pollution would not compromise her ritual purity. And they were to be socially restrained, rarely stepping outside of their inner, upstream room and letting their staff and other members of their household serve as intermediaries between them and their important guests.
These proscriptions were intended to seclude the procreative union of ts'ici and ts'icimo from polluting influences associated with Han outsiders, but the household's influential visitors nevertheless concentrated within its walls everything the ts'ici couple was constrained to avoid. A staff of five kin and
Those who described the ts'ici system to me compared the bot se to a prison warden. He helped the household with its least pleasant duties: caring for prisoners arrested by the tusi's guards or by police from the county town. In keeping with its role as host for troublesome guests, the ts'ici household kept, clothed, and fed all such prisoners until they were led out of the valley in chains. Prisoners were kept in a room in the barn's loft, which was furnished with a pair of low beds, strong lock, an iron collar, and chains. Few spent more than a few days in this cell, for all serious cases were tried either at the residence of the Xia tusi or the county seat. However, minor cases such as livestock theft and disputes over boundaries between adjoining fields were handled in the ts'ici's courtyard. In such cases, the offended party made a formal complaint to the baozhang, who forwarded a written report to the tusi, who then decided whether to order a hearing. To conduct a hearing, the tusi traveled to Zhizuo and summoned the baozhang and the militia commander to the ts'ici's house. After eating a full meal at the host household's expense, the tusi sent the warden to bring in both parties to the dispute. These knelt in the courtyard while the tusi and the militia commander, seated on the porch, questioned them and delivered judgment. Zhizuo residents claimed that the host household paid the fees associated with the hearing, although the officials probably also exacted additional fees from the accused party. In contrast to most agents of justice, some in Zhizuo maintained, the warden and ts'ici treated prisoners as guests, feeding them adequately and neither beating nor cursing them. In the last decade of the Republic, many prisoners were local youths arrested to be forcibly conscripted into the Guomindang armies, and most of these would have had ties of kinship with both the warden and the host household.
Zhizuo residents recalled that the ts'ici cell was put to its final use in May 1949, after a battle with a “Communist bandit” named Ding Zhiping. According to official histories, Ding Zhiping was a Party member and a staff officer in the People's Liberation Army's Eighth Route Army. Six years previously, he had returned to his hometown in nearby Huaping County to begin underground work. By 1949, he had gathered an army of several hundred,
Stories of this battle were also the occasion for recollections of the host household's most onerous of duties, burying outsiders who died within Zhizuo's boundaries and who had no kin to care for their corpses. Elderly men and women in Zhizuo remembered that after the battle with Ding Zhiping, over twenty corpses lay in the sun for days while the elderly ts'ici and his son dragged them one by one into a gully near the battlefield and buried them. No one else would touch the corpses, dangerously polluted by their violent deaths. For forty years after this incident, people passing this mass grave reported spotting the ghosts of Ding Zhiping's defeated army wandering headless about the rocks, with bullet holes in their bodies or spears through their chests.
Another member of the staff, the lòr∂ , or speaker, was expected to help the household with its formidable task of feeding and entertaining important visitors. Former members of ts'ici families spoke of enormous trouble and expense. “These days officials come in groups of two or three, stay a day, and leave,” recalled a woman who was twelve when her household was ts'ici,“but back then, they came in groups of twenty or thirty. They came in litters with bearers and someone out front to wave the flies away.” These processions of officials, clerks, and runners would demand meat, bean curd, and alcohol and would stay for days to eat and drink. The worst years in living memory were 1935 and 1949, when soldiers from the People's Liberation Army and the Guomindang armies visited Zhizuo in quick succession. Residents of the large village of Tc'emo recalled that in the summer of 1949,
These powerful outsiders rarely showed the civility that hosts could expect from local guests. Another child of a former ts'ici recalled how on one of his frequent journeys through Zhizuo, the Xia tusi, dissatisfied with the quality of his dinner, beat the ts'ici with a board. The speaker's job was to prevent such incidents by contributing witty conversation to the ts'ici's hospitality. He stayed in the ts'ici household, at its expense, for his entire year of service, eating, drinking, and chatting with the guests. Experts on the ts'ici system maintained that a good speaker should be a gregarious personality, a good drinker, and an accomplished conversationalist. He should be fluent in Chinese, dress fashionably, and have cosmopolitan manners that would not draw scorn from the sophisticated guests. In a well-run ts'ici household, the speaker should greet the guests as they entered the valley, lead them to the host household, seat them, and call for food and drink. The elderly ts'ici and ts'icimo should only have to make a brief appearance to welcome the guests before retiring again.
Another aide was the k'∂l∂ , or bearer, whose primary responsibility was to carry the luggage of visiting officials as they left the valley. As most officials traveled with more belongings than one man could carry, the bearer often pressed his and the ts'ici's kin to help. He and his crew accompanied officials twenty-five kilometers to the next convenient stop on the way to the county seat or twenty kilometers to the residence of the tusi. Once on the road, officials sometimes forced bearer and company into service for the seventy kilometers to the county seat, or even beyond. The bearer was also responsible for carrying letters that arrived in Zhizuo onward to the next group of villages or the tusi's seat. Because he was usually busy with parties of visitors, this task often fell to the younger members of the ts'ici's own household. The youngest son of a former ts'ici recalled that during his father's year of service, he delivered letters after school. He was only nine years old and shoeless, but on the days letters came in, he packed them in his school bag and walked twenty-five kilometers to the next group of villages, returning in the dark.
The bearer also had a ritual obligation: at the new year, he carried the reliquary box from the old to the new ts'ici household. This duty required of the bearer a ritual purity similar to that of the elderly ts'ici couple. Experts on the ts'ici system said that the best candidate for bearer would be unmarried,
In addition to warden, speaker, and bearer, the ts'ici's staff included two assistants (fumo and fuzò, combining the Mandarin word fu, deputy or assistant, with the LòloÑo suffixes mo and zò, big and small). Several villages in Zhizuo selected responsible men to greet and host important people passing through from other villages or regions. Those selected in the ts'ici's village became general assistants to the ts'ici household and helped organize and prepare food for rituals. At most, they expended several days of labor and two chickens, and their only compensation was the prestige of their jobs.
THE “PRICE OF HORSE FEED”
The “rules and procedures” recounted by ritual experts and former members of ts'ici households gave warden, speaker, and bearer rights to collect recompense for their duties. In exercising these rights, they extended the personal qualities associated with their practical duties to participate in the imaginative work of constituting Zhizuo as a house and household. Some of these “rules and procedures” were listed in chants performed during collective rituals for Agàmisimo and his spirit progeny. One chant outlined the warden's right of compensation:
receive from the village's head and tail from all who live in Zhizuo all who live in this ts'ici who breed fine horses who breed horses smoothly . . . from one family take two sheng from three families take six sheng take no more take no less from the sky's creation from the earth's origin fathers and sons have bred horses together thirty generations of fathers thirty generations of sons and grandsons
At the end of his year of service, the warden was said to visit every household in Zhizuo that owned a brood mare to collect the “price of horse feed” (mò tsò s o). Each family with a productive mare was expected to contribute two sheng of grain. In this mountainous region, horses and mules were the sole mode of transport besides human backs. They were especially valuable along the salt-and sugar-trading route that passed through Zhizuo, and their price was very high. Mules were particularly prized as the strongest and most agile of pack animals. Zhizuo residents estimated that just before Liberation a decent horse cost 200 to 300 yuan and a good mule up to 500, while cattle cost only 40 to 50. Raising horses and mules could be lucrative for those who could afford a brood mare, and residents estimated that in the late 1940s Zhizuo had a population of about five hundred to six hundred horses concentrated in the most prosperous households. An enterprising warden might thus collect a thousand to twelve hundred sheng of grain after his year of service. The “price of horse feed” was a sort of tax, people recalled, but unlike the taxes collected by the baozhang, it was levied only against the most prosperous.
As a tax on the fertility of horses, the “price of horse feed” was appropriate remuneration for the warden, whose duties became increasingly associated with compulsory military service in the Guomindang armies. The Republican government instituted a draft system of military conscription in 1933, which targeted men from eighteen to thirty-five years of age. Initially, the military conscription law stipulated that only sons would not be drafted; one son in families with two or three would be drafted; two in families with three to five (CYZZ 1994, 298). As the Guomindang struggled to prosecute the war against the Japanese, military conscription in rural Yunnan expanded dramatically in scope and intensity. Conscription quotas for the neighboring county of Yaoan, for instance, increased from 120 men in 1935 to 800 in 1942.
[6] CYZZ 1994, 299. Similar figures do not exist for Dayao and Yongren Counties.
During the civil war, the military conscription law was revised to
of two sons harvest one of three sons harvest two of five sons harvest three
Youths were drafted from their villages in October and November of each year so their official term of service could begin in January. Each autumn of the Republic's last decade, some in Zhizuo recalled, the baozhang employed two local Lòlop'ò men to capture conscripts. Carrying guns, iron neck bands, and chains, they apprehended youths, secured their necks with chains, and led them to the ts'ici's prison cell, where it was the warden's responsibility to guard them. These two men were roundly despised by their neighbors, who called them “dog's legs” (ánò t c 'i) and sometimes spat on them when passing on the paths. When these police were spotted near their villages, youths from poor households fled or went into hiding. Some ate a certain wild fruit to give themselves a permanent goiter or cut off two joints of their trigger finger. Those who could afford it paid the baozhang a bribe when their sons reached the age of sixteen and followed this up with more bribes each autumn. After being gathered in the ts'ici's house, conscripts were chained together and led from the valley at gunpoint. War and the execrable conditions suffered by ordinary soldiers of the Guomindang armies ensured that few returned. The warden's chanted words, “from the sky's creation, from the earth's origin, fathers and sons have bred horses together, thirty generations of fathers, thirty generations of sons and grandsons” clearly associate a line of agnates with the procreative potential of brood mares. The warden taxed the fertility of horses just as the Guomindang taxed the fertility of fathers and sons with forced conscription.
The warden's price was governed by the same principle of reciprocity that organized the ts'ici's duties as host. Toassociate the “price of horse feed” with the warden's job of smoothing the way for the hated “dog's legs” was to acknowledge that higher powers would always demand tribute. In the case of forced conscription, this price was the sons on which the future procreative potential of any family was supposed to depend. While the burden of forced conscription could not be distributed equitably, the warden's chanted insistence on taking only from the prosperous—those who had mares—was an
THE SPEAKER'S PRICE
The idiom of procreative potential also informed the rules for compensating the speaker and the bearer. The title to about ten mu of Zhizuo's most fertile river-bottom paddy land circulated with the title of ts'ici. These twelve contiguous fields, said to have been granted to the ts'ici by the original ancestors, were farmed communally, and their entire product went to the ts'ici household. A few hundred yards upstream of these fields, where a bend in the river on one side and terraces on the other made a warm, protected corner, was another plot of land, of about one mu. This was the seedbed in which rice that was to be transplanted into the larger fields grew for its first fifty days. Custodianship of this land, too, rotated with the ts'ici, and it too was farmed communally, by workers organized by the ts'ici household. It was called the lòr g mi—the “speaker's field.” A tenth of the rice seedlings grown in this field were transplanted back into it, and the speaker received their harvest.
In many contexts, Zhizuo residents compared growing rice to raising children. Sowing rice was likened to insemination, uprooting and transplanting seedlings to giving birth, hoeing, weeding, and fertilizing the growing plants to feeding and clothing children, harvesting rice plants to the labor of helping people die, and storing rice seeds to keeping ancestral souls in preparation for their rebirth. Men of the ts'ici's and his siblings' households lavished attention on the womblike speaker's field, fertilizing it with ashes from nitrogen-fixing tree species and several applications of manure, and soaking, plowing, and harrowing it repeatedly until the earth blended into a thick, nutritious, uniform mud. After smoothing the bed with a wooden dressing bar, the ts'ici himself chose a time when no women were nearby to hang a bag of seed on his belt and scatter it over this warm, even, sheltered earth. Fifty days later, female kin and friends of the ts'icimo pulled up the seedlings to transplant into the larger fields on a festive occasion in which this work was explicitly associated with giving birth (see Mueggler 1996).
One afternoon Luo Baolin, one of the most loquacious of my sources on the ts'ici's“rules and procedures,” suddenly switched topics from the speaker's right of conversation to the people of nearby Zhenamo. In that group of villages, he said, people do not replant rice seedlings in their seedbeds after the seedlings have been pulled up. Instead, they spend the entire year intermittently plowing and fertilizing their seedbeds to prepare them for the next year's seeds. “Every time a Mátc'Íp'ò [a derogatory term for Zhenamo residents] has spare time, he is out plowing his seedbed,” he laughed. “They
Those listening laughed, as though at an off-color joke. People in Zhizuo do transplant seedlings back into their seedbeds. Not to do so in a place where every inch of irrigable land is precious, one would have to be as stupid as a Mátc'Íp'ò. I never heard anyone explicitly deny that “the seedbed is the mother, the seedling the son,” but to say it out loud disrupted the neat homology Zhizuo residents habitually make between procreation and rice production. As he told how Zhenamo residents extend the logic of procreative metaphor one step further than Lòlop'ò usually care to do, Luo Baolin's implication was clear: by accepting the harvest from seedlings transplanted back into the seedbed as his due, the speaker consumed the issue of a son's sexual relations with his mother.
THE “PRICE OF GRASS”
If someone had to eat this scandalous by-product, the speaker was an appropriate choice. I came to understand this as people who had been members of ts'ici households repeatedly contrasted the offices of speaker and bearer. The speaker had a famous time eating, drinking, and chatting, while the bearer's job was a heavy burden. The speaker should be a sophisticate, while the bearer was best an idiot. The speaker wore stylish “Han” clothing that buttoned down the front, while the bearer dressed in old-style hempen clothes that buttoned down the side. And the speaker accepted every opportunity for social intercourse, while the bearer rarely spoke and ideally was celibate.
In these recollections, speaker's and bearer's opposite orientations toward eating, speaking, sexual activity,and signs of Lòlop'ò ancestry wereof apiece with their opposite relations to the boundaries of the Zhizuo ts'ici. In collecting his compensation, the bearer was a boundary maker. His recompense for his year of service was called “the price of grass” (c í p' ms o). At the end of the year, he undertook a tour of the small high-mountain settlements on the ts'ici borders, collecting money or grain from those living outside who grazed their goats and cattle on land within. There was no common understanding of how much this fee should be, and what the bearer collected depended on his own industry and the thickness of his skin. In negotiating which hamlets should pay for the right to graze their animals on what land, the bearer established the ts'ici's territorial boundaries. As he hauled visitors' baggage out of the valley and carried letters through it, he worked to preserve these
The ideal speaker, on the other hand, specialized in boundary traversals. His job of cultivating and enlivening relations with powerful outsiders was centrifugally oriented. His “Han” clothing, multilingual facility, conversational skills, and indulgence in food and alcohol all directed his person toward promiscuous and facile sociability, especially with outsiders. His task was to take on the qualities of those who most directly threatened the community in order to deflect part of that threat. Indiscriminate in his social relations, the speaker may have been supposed to be indiscriminate sexually as well: his personal qualities fit to a tee the stereotype of a successful adulterer in Zhizuo. And, in Zhizuo as in many places, the forbidden indiscrimination par excellence was incest between mother and son. The speaker too reproduced his boundary-traversing status in his person. To pay him with the issue of an unavoidable sexual relation between mother and son was to recognize the social promiscuity with which he helped preserve Zhizuo's boundaries by continuously transgressing them.
Recollections of the speaker's transgressive character help illuminate the proscriptions Zhizuo residents remembered being applied to the ts'ici couple. At the household's center, in their inner room, the ts'ici couple combined all the most powerful signs of Lòlop'ò ancestry with restricted speech, sociability, sexuality, and abstention from food and drink associated with “Han” outsiders. At its margins (in the courtyard, porch, and outer rooms) the speaker stoked the fires of hospitality with everything the ts'ici and ts'icimo were enjoined to avoid—a specialist in scandalous unrestraint managing the unrestrained speech, sociability, and sexuality that transgressed the house's walls from outside. As designated hosts for the entire territory of Zhizuo, the ts'ici couple made it possible to imagine this territory similarly as a household, sheltering both a powerful productive union and potentially troublesome guests, who must be fed, flattered, and hurried on their way.
Zhizuo residents' insistence on the bearer's contrasting character participated in this imaginative constitution of a houselike territory in a different way. The proscriptions applied to the bearer's diet, speech, clothing, and sexuality were identical to (if not as strict as) those applied to the ts'ici and ts'icimo because of his association with the reliquary box they served. In their relation to this reliquary, the ts'ici couple acted as a conduit through which the procreative power of the ancestral union it represented descended on the entire valley-house of Zhizuo. In his relation to the reliquary,the bearer made this union move, passing it like a bride from one village and one household
CONCLUSION
The ethnographers who in 1953 bravely set out to classify the inhabitants of thousands of mountain villages like Yijichang and Zhizuo learned to be extremely flexible in applying the four criteria of common territory,language, economic base, and psychological makeup that Stalin had declared defined a nationality (Stalin 1956, 294—95). They tempered this definition with the older associations with racial origin and inheritance that the term minzu (nationality) had gathered since its adoption into Chinese around 1900 (Dikötter 1992; Lin 1963). Tothese ethnographers, Zhizuo residents clearly shared a territory,language, economy, and historical origin with the speakers of the Central dialect of Yi who surrounded them (if only more problematically with the far-flung groups also labeled Yiin other parts of the southwest). Even in the 1980s and early 1990s, county and prefectural officials frequently employed these criteria to pass off Zhizuo residents' claims to a separate minzu status as ignorant or delusional.
People in Zhizuo, however, took advantage of associations of minzu with origin, inheritance, and descent to link the problem of “nationality” to a large and systematic body of expert knowledge about the past. Their accounts of the ts'ici system used moral ideas about speech, sociability, and sexuality to create an imagined unity for all those who claimed to be Lòlop'ò. Creating terms of comparison between agricultural cycles and lifetimes, and the spatial arrangements of households and those of the territory of Zhizuo, these recollections compounded mutually contradictory ideas about descent and affinity into a single institutional container (Lévi-Strauss 1983, 185). Zhizuo was a single productive unity, a household descended from a single set of ancestors, or a series of households bound together through marriage exchanges and mutually involved in the intimate processes of household reproduction. From within this imagined unity, Zhizuo residents could deal with powerful outsiders as a household would, flattering them with the honors and privileges of guests while excluding them from internal household affairs.
Ethnographers and administrators could easily pass off this self-consciously formal and reflexive talk about the past as innocuous nostalgia for
11. Native Place and Ethnic Relations in Lunan Yi Autonomous County, Yunnan
Margaret Byrne Swain
Belonging to a native place is an important piece of a person's identity in China. The intersections of this identity with other ways of categorizing people, specifically ethnicity, family, class, and gender, create hierarchies of resource claims and behavioral expectations within regional systems. Nativeplace identity and associations in Chinese urban environments are well-documented sojourners' phenomena (Skinner 1976, 1977; Honig 1992; Goodman 1995), but native place is also a factor within rural areas. This essay looks to the less-studied periphery, exploring issues of rural native-place identity (bendiren, bencun, laojia, guxiang) and ethnicity or nationality (minzu) between Han Chinese and Sani Yi now settled in Lunan Yi Autonomous County in eastern Yunnan (see Map 11.1).
[1] Han Chinese and Sani Yi are respectively the two largest groups, approximately 67 percent and 30 percent, of a total 201,215 population in 1990. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China for field and archive research in Yunnan during 1993.
My goal is to show how native-place and ethnic identities interact in local rural resource competition through time. Throughout China there exist ethnically distinct populations with claims to the same rural place. In rural China, migration over time is a significant factor in identity formation. Two types of population movements can be distinguished: those undertaken by migrants (for resources, in the wake of devastation or for colonization), who perhaps re-create their native-place identity, and those by emigrants, sojourners to urban centers (individuals expected to return to their abode) who maintain their native-place identity (Skinner 1976, 335—36).
[2] With reference to Lunan, in the past migration and sojourning were present in the rural local system, which used to be in the periphery of Kunming (Shih 1944). In the 1990s Lunan is officially located in the Kunming urban metropolitan district, and its resources are incorporated directly into the regional center. The location has been redefined due to transportation, communication, and population shifts.
Throughout China, histories of antagonistic relations between immigrant and native
Map 11.1. Lunan Yi Autonomous County
This essay interrogates the need to distinguish between ancestral origins, local native place, and birthplace, as people in China do among themselves in establishing their composite identities.
[3] For example in the 1990s, a person may have a Lunan native-place identity (Lunanren), despite being born in Kunming and having a Sani ancestral origin “to the west” of Yunnan. The occurrence of ethnically mixed people who may have the same (Lunan) or distinct (Lunan and Nanjing) parental native places also occurs, and it depends on circumstances whether the father or mother's native place is given precedence.
The state's role in contemporary identity issues is particularly relevant to people who carry a state-constructed label, such as the pan-Yi minzu category codified in the early Mao era. The state may confer or limit, conflate or negate, resources based on identity. The formation of Lunan Yi Autonomous County in 1956 marked the occasion of the state mapping of this region as an Yi minority nationality place, while the census recorded a growing Han Chinese majority. Today, contradictory commodification of identities can be seen in the political museumizing of origins by the Lunan government tourism bureau. It promotes Lunan County as the unique Sani heroine Ashima's native place or hometown (guxiang). On the other hand, bureau plans for the “Ashima Cultural Center” negate local group claims of cultural uniqueness by importing many external Yi ethnic groups to participate. Museumizing of local ancient origins ties in with map and census projects that have distinct agendas to define who belongs where (Anderson 1991, 183). Lunan people's practices manipulate their own and others' ideas of who and what they are as local natives, ben cunde (of the local or native village) or bendiren (local or native person), in hierarchies of claims to their local “native place.” The idea of “local” is closely tied to images of the land reflected both in the standard Chinese (difang) and Sani (mitw) gloss, using the word “land” (di and mi mean land or earth; fang means place or location).My study of Lunan looks at native-place identity as it forms in the local community and is used in the distribution and control of resources. I ask where native-place identity comes from and how is it used locally over time in an ethnically mixed region.
[4] So, how is local native-place identity distinct from village community identity? There can be people without a native place—those who are immigrants and who do not fit in the local community or have a specific ancestral native place. These are the test cases—the ones who clarify the distinctness of this identity. Niang jia (mother's household) can be seen as the intersection of gender hierarchy and native place.
Harrell's (1995a) three civilizing projects are all present in Lunan County and provide a framework for understanding local ethnic relations. Lunan
ETHNIC ORIGIN AND MIGRATION STORIES
In the distant past, ethnic origins for both Han and Sani Yi were claimed to have occurred in places far from Lunan. These two peoples' histories mark both as immigrants to the region. In their own stories the idea of being a Lunan native is not based on some autochthonous origin, but rather on having generations of family claims to places in Lunan. Ancestral native place as a site of group origin is part of the distinction made between ethnic groups who are now co-positioned in local space.
Much of Sani early history has been transferred over the generations by bimo, Sani male religious leaders, through their writing system and oral records. By the mid-twentieth century, warfare and some Western missionaries endangered the written records of many Yi groups. One effort to save various Yi texts was made by the renowned linguist Ma Xueliang,
[5] Ma's essay “How Imperialism Destroys Our Brother Nationality's Culture” (1951, 381—85) recounts his efforts in the 1940s to preserve Yi books in the Jinsha area, acting before missionaries destroyed the books. Ma argued that the missionaries had destroyed local culture by creating foreign language alphabets so the natives would learn quickly and convert their souls. Missionary bible myths also took away their history. “Some people even say they are not Chinese now, because of the story of Adam and Eve taught to them by the missionaries. This story which told people that they are all descendants of one family or all the same people is typical of the kind of poison missionaries spread,” wrote Ma.
who shipped documents off to Beijing for safekeeping. Ma subsequently wrote a detailed study of Sani Yi language (1951) and encouraged publication of Sani folklore, such as the flood epic Nimishi that he translated from Sani texts with the Sani scholar Ang Zhiling (Ma 1985). The poem recounts the creation of Sani ancestors, and their relationship to other nationalities, in a story of how three generations of protohuman beings survived various disasters including ice, drought, and floods. Ultimately only a brother and sister, Aher and Ahshe, were left, and they reproduced. The final lines of the[6] The use of the term “Yi,” a PRC state-constructed ethnic-linguistic group, unhooks and elides local manifestations, developments, and expressions often masking political suppression of local names. The choices of Chinese and English translations of Sani writing made by the Sani scholars cited here reflect current state policy rather than the Sani original, written from a Sani (not “Yi”) point of view. If we look at the Sani writing system originals and compare Chinese and English translations, we can see that the character pronounced ni, meaning the selfname of Sani people, is also translated as “Yi.” The Sani character pronounced vi, meaning family (jia in Chinese), is translated as zu (nationality) and “Yi,” while nivi is translated as “Yi Zu” and “Sani” in various English stanzas. There is a parallel of colonial essentializing in nineteenth-century Euro-American reports, including Vial's, that use the gloss “Lolo” to mean both the larger language group in general and specific groups like the Sani (as in “my Lolo”). Vial was aware of derogatory meanings attached to the term but felt its general use, much as “Yi” is used today, was necessary because there was none in the language system itself to indicate linguistic and cultural ties between groups. In this essay, instead of “Lolo” I use the term “Yi” when referring to Vial's and others' writings about the classificatory macro group, and “Sani” when referring to the local “Ni” people in Lunan, whom Vial called “Lolo” or “Gni.”
The sister gave birth to a large flesh ball that the siblings then chopped into pieces and cast into many directions. The flesh of the ball ran down to a flat plain [pingba] where they [sic] became the Han nationality who live there; the blood flowed into a big river and became the Dai nationality who live by the riverside; and the bone of the ball went into the forest where they [sic] became the Yi nationality who live in the forest:
There are six places in the forest. Six places became six villages. One village is for Black Yi, who speak Black Yi language. One village is for White Yi, who speak White Yi language. One place is for Red Yi, who speak Red Yi language. One village is for Gan Yi, who speak Gan Yi language. One village is for Sani, who speak Sani language [as in 1985 Chinese version, no Yi attached to Sani or Axi]. One village is for Axi, who speak Axi language. Year after year, generation [follows] generation. The population has flourished, the world has been lively, and all things on earth have come back to life. [7] In his introduction, Ma (1985, 1) remarks, “So, this poem highlights that all people today come from the same source. Even though there is no theoretical evidence, it is a good wish for humanity's childhood. After all, it is what binds together a union of nationalities.” This sounds like the reverse of his critique of the missionaries. The long narrative “Ashima” has been interpreted by Ma to be a continuation of Sani history since Nimishi times, making them “sister poems” (Ma 1985). In most popular retellings, Sani life is portrayed through this story of a young woman of renown called Ashima, who is stolen away by the evil landlord Rebubala. Her companion Ahei, who is identified as either her brother or her lover, rides to her rescue. After surmounting many trials, tricks, and tigers, they are trapped in a raging flood that sweeps Ashima way from Ahei. She returns as an echo heard in the karst stone forest of Lunan.
The Nimishi can be understood as a metaphor for the beginning of each new family, and in the past it was chanted at Sani weddings (Vial 1898,
Various Sani histories relate how their ancestors descended from three brothers and amalgamated into two groups. Later some descendants of one group migrated over three distinct routes into the Lunan region (Vial 1898, 1—2). In a version collected by Vial in the 1890s, the details are as follows: ancestors of all Yi peoples formed into two major tribes, with the families of the youngest brother mixed into both groups. The second brother's family became the conquerors (the Black, “Na”) of the eldest brother's family (the White, “Tou”), who became their serfs. The Black married only among themselves, controlled all the territory, and as local lords (midzemou) demanded rent from the White, who worked the land. There were many civil wars, as the White Yi peoples' (Vial 1905, 335—36) population grew and they expanded their need for territory. Over time the White subdivided into many groups, becoming the Sani (gni), Axi (ashi), and so on.
In Vial's analysis, little by little each White group has formed a tribe with its ethnographically distinct costume, customs, and dialect, and with territorial claims. Some groups emigrated under the conduct of a “minor chief” to look for new lands. Thus, some Sani recollected to Vial places where they stopped en route from the Dali region to where they are now settled. They migrated to Lunan under the leadership of three powerful men, whose house sites were still memorialized in Vial's day.
[8] “Mais il est vraisemblable qu'ils étaient conduits par les chefs de familles ou tribus; peutêtre méme n'étaient-ils que deux, l'un appelé Blanc (tou), l'autre appelé Noir (na); c'est, pour moi, le seul moyen d'expliquer cette tradition qui divise les Lolos en deux especes, les blancs et les noirs. D'apres une version indigène, ceux-ci seraient descendus de trois frères; mais les descendants du plus jeune se seraient confoundus avec les deux autres frères. Ce qui est constant, c'est que le blanc était l'ainé et le noir le cadet; mais par une inversion inexpliquée, les descendants du noir ont formé la tribu patricienne appelée napou, et les descendants de l'ainé sont devenus les serfs de l'autre, tout en se subdivisant en un grand nombre de tribus (naseu, ko, hotou, gnisou, gni, ashi, adje, etc.).... Les Lolos éraient soumis a dix-huit seigneurs ou midzemou à qui le peuple payait une redevance annuelle; quant au bien foncier il appartenait à celiu qui le cultivait. C'est encore actuellement le régime de la propriété chez cette race; en sorte qu'un seigneur peut aliéner la redevance qui lui est due, mais il ne puet pas aliéner le fond qui ne lui appartient pas. ...Les Chinois, en s'emparant plus tard de ce pays, n'ont fait que mettre des mandarins où habitaient les signeurs; et dans les parties conquises, mais non soumises, ils ont donné le titre de mandarin aux seigneurs indigènes, c'est ce que on applle de les ‘tusiguan.' . . . Les Lolos en se multipliant débordent de leurs anciennes limites et forment de nouveaux noyaux indépendants des seigneurs, mais encoure il se trove au milieu d'eux des hommes audacieux qui les dominent. Ansi, la tribu gni, que j'évangélise, se souvient des étapes qu'elle a du faire pour arriver de Tali jusqu’ici; elle garde la memoire de trois hommes puissants qui se sont fait un nom: Adle, Joke, Dzeshi.”
As we can see, Vial perceived the Sani as an indigenous people who were in the Lunan region first and had claims to the soil that perhaps neither their own Black Yi overlords nor the Chinese rulers could abrogate.Another understanding of Sani history is provided in the late twentieth century by Sani scholars (Ang Ziming 1996, 10) studying local variations in
Who might have been the aboriginal people of Lunan and what happened to them are questions taken up in contemporary government histories. Recent discoveries of Paleolithic artifacts and art in several Lunan sites indicate early human habitation (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1986, 27—29). Cave paintings have been interpreted by He Yaohua (1994, 41) to be the cultural heritage of “primitive Lunan indigenous people” who then mixed with inmigrating non-Han peoples from the northwest and Chinese from central China, creating ancestors of the Sani people. A Lunan County gazetteer (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1996, 120) states that most Sani are descendants of the “Luomengbu,” a tribe who had settled in Lunan (and actively fought and negotiated with the Chinese), but there has also been a blending with immigrant people settling from the outside. Chinese language patronyms used by Sani clans can be linked to specific locations outside of Lunan (including Nanjing, Guizhou, and Kunming) and the routes that their ancestors followed to Lunan before merging into the Sani people.
As early as 109 b.c.e. there are historical records of Han dynasty damand canal-building projects in the region now called Lunan County, according to an official state history (ibid.). By a.d. 225, the famous Han leader from the north, Zhuge Liang, used wealthy local officials to control the area. As war waged in the middle of China, a Luomengbu family named Cuan became very powerful in central Yunnan, including Lunan. During the Dali
Various attempts by government historians to link ancestors of Lunan Yi people to the Luomengbu build on language clues. The Yunnan Sheng Lu nan Yizu zizhixian dimingzhi (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1989) relates that in Sani language, a word that sounds like luo means tiger and a word like meng means very great, powerful. In a.d. 1270 three tribes including the Luomengbu, totaling about thirty thousand households, united in the middle region. One leader of the Luomengbu became the prefecture administrator, and the Yuan government appointed another one the military leader of Lunan. When the three tribes merged, the name “Lunan” came into use. In Sani language this name was pronounced lu, meaning stone, and nai, meaning black. Throughout all of these histories, written down by Sani intellectuals, government officials, and a French missionary, there is a repeated emphasis on the number three to explain local Sani variation: three brothers, three leaders, three routes, three tribes, and three sources of Sani ancestors from other places.
Sani ancestors became incorporated into the state under the Ming, in 1383, when a hereditary land administrator (tusi) was appointed in Lunan (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1989). Meanwhile in 1382, some 2,627 Han soldiers were sent into Lunan with their families to guard the city and cultivate agricultural land. Prisoners from central China were also sent down for agricultural work (He Yaohua 1994, 41). In the Lunan plain, Han people continued to settle, but in Guishan and other remote areas, the tusi system dominated non-Han people, in some cases until liberation in 1949.
Groups called Black Yi and White Yiby the Han were once different strata in one society in various mountain regions (ibid., 30). The County Annals reported that in some places Lunan people called White (Bai) Yi were dominant and owned a lot of land and forest, while Black (Hei) Yi depended on working for landlords.
[9] Of course it could also be argued, as Vial (1908, 22) did, that even if these groups were once one society, they have become separate ethnic groups over time.
Feudalism dominated Lunan, where whole forests, water systems, plants, mountains, and hamlets were owned by landlords. The landlords were tianzhu, masters of the fields, while peasants were dianhu, or tenants. Tenants had freedom and permanent rights to fen, or units of land—for planting, forestry, and housing—that they could sell or rent out. According to government research, before Land Reform some 7 percent of the population were landlords, who rented out 59 percent of the land (ibid., 31). In some areas landlords experimented with improvements in agricultural and working conditions, and elsewhere coal mining developed. The Lunan area has been administered in various districts since Han dynasty times into the present. In 1956 the Lunan Yi Autonomous County was founded,Han and Yi groups in Lunan have moved for water, conquered, rented or purchased lands in areas controlled by another ethnic group, and migrated for cash employment out of their home communities.
[10] Vial interpreted ethnic relations between the Sani and other local groups as being shaped by their sociocultural “character” differences, as well as by the dynamics of political inequalities and their physical proximity to each other. The relationship between Sani and Chinese was his primary emphasis. He rarely noted Sani relations with neighboring indigenous groups such as the Noeso (Nuosu) Lolo, Ashi (Axi) Lolo, or Miao. Muslims allied with various indigenous groups, including the Sani, during their grueling twenty-year revolt, but they often became enemies, according to Vial. He cites Muslim treachery as the reason why there was so much postrevolt enmity between them, despite their common Chinese oppressor (1898, 4).
The oldest Sani communities in Lunan are believed to be in the eastern remote areas of Guishan district, where the Sani subvernacular (one of four) spoken there is the standard for Southeastern Yi (Bradley n.d.). Locally, Lunan Han and bilingual Sani speak a regional variation of Southwestern Mandarin Kunming vernacular called “Hanhua.” Lunan communities have distinct histories that detail when the ancestors arrived and how families became rooted there. As we have seen, in general ethnic enclaves migrated for new resources and/or in response to dominant groups.Ethnic distinctions between Han and Sani societies beyond language and material culture differences were well marked in Lunan. In their relationship to the landscape, Sani ancestors established sacred groves and rocks in each community,venerated immediate family ancestors for two generations, and kept long genealogical chants. While Han have portable ancestor worship and lineage systems, they also have tudigong, local minor deities invested into the local landscape, and practice geomancy (fengshui) to understand the influence of regional natural forces. Sani society is kin based, with rotating community leadership, multicommunity clan affiliations, cross-cousin marriage, and relative gender equality in contrast to hierarchical Han society directly incorporated into the state, as well as regional patrilineage systems and exogamous marriage practices. Sani like Han however were also inserted into the Chinese state political economy with their tenant status, taxation, and cash employment.
What seems critical to note in this discussion of native-place and ethnic identities is that Sani ancestors stopped migrating into the Lunan area and settled there about five hundred years ago. Meanwhile Han people have continued to move from various places into Lunan through time, and the region has been controlled to some degree by a Chinese state system since the Han dynasty. The presence of Han in Lunan County over the centuries was a direct result of the Confucian civilizing project, while French missionaries brought in a competing Christian civilizing project.
THE FRENCH COLONIAL ERA
During Yunnan's mid-nineteenth-century Muslim Revolt, peasants and miners began alocal, multiethnic (primarily Han and Yi) rebellion against their oppressors in Lunan County (He Yaohua 1994, 42—43). With the help of Hui Muslim rebels, the locals took control of Lunan in 1859, but were then defeated by Qing government troops. Containment of the province-wide revolt by the 1870s did little to resolve underlying inequalities and competing resource claims.
In the immediate postrevolt era, European imperialists strengthened their presence in southwest China. French Catholic missionaries with ties to colonial holdings in Indochina established themselves in Yunnan. Père Paul Vial began the first Lunan-region mission in 1888. He learned spoken and written Sani language and immediately began publishing observations of Sani Yisociety,filtered through his religious civilizing project. It was useful to him that the Sani were very different from the Han, as Vial targeted the Sani for conversion into a modern, global Catholic identity.
Foreign influence became a new part of China's regional landscape in the late nineteenth century, affecting class structure, the economy, and concepts of modernity. Sometimes foreigners, such as Vial, were active agents in the construction of these changes (Honig 1992, 15). His writings form a valuable record of thirty years of life in Lunan and provide insights into the motivations and perspective of a European colonizer who purposively inserted himself between Han Chinese and the “indigenous” Yi, specifically in Sani communities.
Vial moved into Lunan as a secondary colonial force, and found that he had to deal with a layered social system crosscut by ethnicity and a cash economy. The Yi hereditary landlord class (midzemou) extracting from communal village tenants had been co-opted by the state-designated tusi system. A Han landlord and “mandarin” government system also controlled various resources. This situation was further complicated by the fact that all landlords could sell their various rights. Some Lunan districts long ago were established as primarily Sani Yi (in Guishan) or Han (in Beidacun) holdings, but control of Lunan land has been fluid over time, shifting between local Yi, Han, and nation-state control.
Almost a hundred years ago, Vial described this region as follows: “The Lunan plain (1650m altitude) is not a plain, but a suite of little and fertile valleys, running in a north-south direction. . . . The [highland] limestone belongs to the Yi and the [lowland] sandstone belongs to the Chinese[,] . . . who spread out where life is easy, and the earth is fertile and well irrigated. The Yiarespread out among the rocky peaks where no river flows, but there are numerous pools and abundant pastures” (1908, 22).
Western Lunan villages were tied to regional market systems near the main
In the 1880s, the Yi began to migrate back west into the lowlands, forming new villages along the eastern border of the plain “that are half Yi and half Chinese and will become all Yi” (Vial 1908). Vial's fellow missionary Alfred Lietard (1904, 105), who worked with neighboring Axi Yi, maintained that indigenous Yi were buying up Lunan land from Han forced to sell due to opium addiction.
[11] In one comparison of Sani and Chinese family life, Vial (1893, 258) portrayed the Chinese as opium sots incapable of productive life, while the Sani were seen as hardworking saints.
Chinese property, Vial noted (1908, 23), “was in very small pieces and the landlords were infinite” due to real estate, financing, and inheritance practices. Furthermore, many Yunnanese tenants were displaced from one region into another by poor and hungry Han Chinese immigrants from Sichuan and Guizhou, who were very bad tenant farmers and soon abandoned the land. According to Vial, the ideal agriculturists in the region were the Yi, who “loved only the land and obeyed only the land,” responsibly paying rent to the landlord (ibid., 17).
The landlord had a great deal of authority in Yi society, but not within village affairs, which were autonomous and closed. Sani villages had two types of nonhereditary leaders, called permanent chiefs and annual chiefs by Vial (1905, 338—39; 1908, 79). Permanent chiefs (boudze in Vial's Sani orthography, translated to guansi in Chinese) became leaders by circumstance and acclaim rather than election. They formed a council that resolved problems by drawing from oral traditions handed down by the elders. Many disputes were about the land: separation of property, limits of fields, or the conservation of woods and prairies. The Sani village council had ultimate authority over its community. When a judgment was made the guilty party had no recourse to Chinese authorities or to other villages, and had to submit to the community will.
Annual chiefs (okotso, meaning headman; jiatou in Chinese) were in charge
There are strong parallels between the duties of the okotso and the rotating huotou (ts'ici) headman among the Lòlop'ò, discussed by Eric Mueggler in chapter 10 of this volume. Among the Sani, in 1939 Fang Ho reported that there was still a monthly rotating village leadership, by clan and household, although this was changing to a system of state-organized leaders. At that time, in a significant distinction between Sani and Han gender roles in village life, if there was no male available a Sani woman would serve the family's turn as headman.
Lunan Landlords, Commoditization, and the French
In Vial's time, control of Lunan land resources and local folk claims to native place were situated in terms of who belonged to which landlord system in what place, as landlords or as tenants.
[12] Sorting out the linguistic distinctions between types of indigenous and Han landlords in Lunan during the last century is not easy. There is a veritable forest of terms. For example, Lietard wrote: “It is improper to give the name tuzhu to those landlords [propriétaires] of the revenue among the indigenous people, as these words in Chinese translate as ‘landlord, master of the ground.’ Here, the Chinese are masters of revenue or rent, not masters of the ground or soil. When they sell to others, they can only sell the rights to revenue” (1904, 105).
Vial asked, “Who is the one called ‘seigneur’? The one Chinese call tusi and the Lolos midze mou? It is only the landlord [propriétaire]. But this title confers on him the right of high and base justice over all his tenants” (1905, 335). In Vial's Sani-French dictionary (1908—09) there are clues to the puzzle confounded by French-Sani-Chinese-English glosses for words: mi in Sani language means earth and is in many related concepts. In summary, the Sani word, over the past hundred years of French, Chinese, and Sani scholarship, has been defined as landowner (propriétaire) and translated into Chinese as tusi, dizhu, or tianzhu. Dzmo has been used to mean Lolo lord, tusi, and later, mandarin, while sep'a means master but was also used for mandarin and lord. I have not found a consistent pattern in Vial's usage of terms propriétaire and maître in reference to the landlord role, using one term for relationship with tenants, the other for relationship with earth, or an ethnic distinction between Han and Yi landlords. Neither is there agreement in other sources as to consistent translations of Sani terms into Chinese. Perhaps the structural position as extractor from the peasants, whether Yi or Han, agent of the state or private businessman, made the landlord's relationship to, if not the effect on, the peasants much the same.
Vial (1893, 237) recounted a popular story of upward mobility and state control that continued to be told in the late twentieth century: During the Yuan dynasty, Chinese armies advanced to the Luliang plain. A mighty indigenous lord ruled the region fromLietard wrote with passion about the actual conditions of landlords and tenants in Lunan in the early 1900s: “The indigenous people are treated as slaves. . . . When the Chinese conquered Yunnan . . . the mandarins, in order to collect taxes, sent into the interior clever, sly men who conferred with the indigenous people [who] . . . believed they had found protection in their intermediaries with the mandarins. . . . Alas, these men without hearts abused their [the villagers'] confidence and greedily charge them 400 percent interest on loans. . . . The Chinese leaders, who are always insatiable, demanded more. This is the situation now in most non-Christian villages” (1904, 105).
The system is typical of a “tribute-paying mode of production” found in many pre-capitalist state societies (Gailey 1987, 32) where the state claimed the land, forcing peasants to pay tax-rents for use of hereditary indigenous lands. Native-place claims in Lunan at that time can be seen to have been based in sentiments about who belonged where, overlaid with external controls and commodification of land resources. According to Vial (1905, 336), the landlord was lord of all his tenants, who owed him rent regardless of their ethnicity (various Yi or Han). Landlords were all-powerful, but when they sold their property rights, they lost this power based on collecting rent. The land itself was inalienable from the tenants. Besides rent, landlords also passed on taxes and demanded forced labor or corvée. The Chinese government registered landlord rights and imposed the taxes that were extracted from the tenants.
Yi“indigenous” lords, or tusi, held hereditary positions and passed on their rights to their heirs. However, the heirs might sell their titles if they were low on resources. Vial lamented (1905, 337) that Yi lords often preferred to sell to Chinese who were looking for a good business deal. The Chinese perceived Yi communities as ideal tenants who paid on time and would host the landlord, and as places where, Vial wrote, they would “have the pleasure of eating their chickens and beating the folk, without fearing the mandarin!”
In Vial's perspective, the Chinese landlords, who demanded more grain and cash payment for taxes and often demanded corvée labor, were much more corrupt than Yi tusi. Furthermore, Chinese landlords ignored community attempts to defend the Yitradition of communal sacred groves (mizhi) belonging to each village, often cutting down the groves and selling the wood. Given the ritual, symbolic importance of the mizhi to Sani communities, embodying
Vial saw himself as the Sani's valiant protector against the Chinese (Swain 1995), even going to prison at one point for interfering with local landlords. He ultimately set about to become a landlord himself, highly aware of the irony. His goal was to create a model village with modern hygiene, kitchen gardens, a safe drinking-water supply, advanced agricultural methods, and educational opportunities. Vial purchased almost three hundred mu of land over a nine-year period, in the borderlands between the “Chinese plain” and the Sani settlements to the east. Despite elaborate plans, Vial had problems persuading many of his converts to join in his experimental community of Qingshankou. In his own analysis, the problem had to do with the Sanis' ties to native place, their communities, and sacred groves and rocks. He noted that young Sani girls, in contrast to Chinese virilocal ideas of gender and native place, often refused to marry if expected to move too far away (twenty or twenty-five km) from home. If acommunity became overcrowded, then some people would migrate as a group to establish a new permanent village. Thus Vial decided that the Sani would take his new village seriously only if he assumed the duties of landlord and assured them that this was a village whose title would pass on to his successor, as should happen (Vial 1908, 23, 26—30).
Within many Sani villages, Vial established schools and long-term links with the Catholic Church. Vial's colleague Père Lietard reported (1904, 106) that many schools for both girls and boys were in place by the 1890s, financed with contributions from France and Sani village “requisitions” (Vial 1917, 547). Students were taught using Catholic religious materials translated into Sani script, as well as materials in Chinese and French. Local mission schools had primarily indigenous students, but the seminaries for advanced religious training recruited both Han and Yi students. In 1939, Fang reported that the Yi students from Lunan worked hard in the seminary. Often, though, there was some tension between Han and Yi in the school over what Han perceived as Yi privileges.
Vial's legacy in shaping Lunan ethnic relations and native-place identities in Lunan was virtually obliterated from local public memory by the 1960s in the revolutionary zeal to blot out old imperialist, foreign ways. In some official histories (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1986, 29) he is vilified as a bad landlord, and in others (He Yaohua 1994) the French presence in Lunan is simply not mentioned. The Sani, French-trained priest Laurent Zhang has responded (1987, 33—34) to criticisms of Vial by noting that he was far from perfect but also did many good deeds. Zhang relates that Vial's relations with Han were often strained because he much preferred working with and for Sani Yi people.
Vial's use of “les indignes” when writing about the Sani codified his position
CONTEMPORARY NATIVE PLACE, ETHNICITY, AND RESOURCES
Resource allocations in Lunan continue to be based on the interlocking categories of ethnicity and native place, affected by local practice and external state and global policies. Variation in migration patterns, settlement, and local history in Lunan can be well illustrated by comparing the rural communities of Danuohei in Guishanxiang, Wukeshu in Shilinzhen, and Ganlongtang in Lumeiyixiang. In these locations some aspects of a Communist civilizing project since 1949 can be seen in the implementation of numerous policies regulating economic and social development, including land use, residence, birth control, education, and registration of ethnic identity.
Danuohei
Danuohei is located in the southeastern quarter of the county at an altitude of 1,985 meters above sea level, in the Guishan district. This is the region thought to have the most ancient Sani settlements, where people speak a distinct subvernacular and are believed by local scholars to be the most authentic. The village name is a Chinese transliteration of a Sani name meaning a pond (hei) where monkeys (nuo) drink. Sani settlement of the area started more than five hundred years ago with waves of migration from the west. In 1754 the Sani peasants of Danuohei were granted a free charter by the imperial court, allocating village lands to peasants in exchange for direct payment to the court rather than to a landlord as in the past. This charter still exists in the keeping of the community.
French Catholic missions opened in the Guishan area during the early twentieth century in a number of neighboring communities, including Haiyi and adjacent Xiaonouhei, but not in Danuohei. Meanwhile by the 1930s Danuohei had become a center of Communist resistance against the Guomindang. A valorized history of Danuohei, combined with its identification as Ashima's real hometown during the state myth-writing project in the 1950s, promises a hyperreal touristic image for the community in the future. Changes in this previously isolated community as a result of tourism development will provide great contrast. Meanwhile in Danuohei, commodification of tobacco production and the introduction of the household responsibility system by the state have accelerated family income growth since 1983. Completion in mid-1993 of an all-weather road linking the village to the main
In Danuohei, land area in cultivation is approximately 2,600 mu, planted in primary food crops of corn and potatoes and, increasingly, in tobacco. Virtually every Danuohei household in 1993 grew tobacco with introduced seed and fertilizer supplies provided by the county tobacco extension service (He Yaohua 1994, 47). He Yaohua believes that under a market economy local differences between Yi and Han in terms of both economy and culture are diminishing. To substantiate this argument, He describes a Sani family situated at midlevel in the village economy. The household head is a forty-year-old man with a first-year middle-school education. His spouse graduated from sixth grade. They have a fifteen-year-old daughter in the first grade of middle school and a twelve-year-old son in primary school. In 1992 this family farmed fourteen mu of land that is allocated by the village in equal shares to all family members and can be leased. Keeping back some crops for seeds and food for domestic animals, they sold 450 kilograms of corn in the market for 360 yuan, 2,700 kilograms of potatoes for 600 yuan, and 650 kilograms of tobacco for 2,500 yuan, for a gross income of 3,460 yuan. They had a total of 883 yuan in agricultural expenses, leaving a net annual income from various crops of 2,577 yuan, or 644.3 yuan per person.
In areas like Danuohei with limited paddy, rice is procured through a twoto-one exchange of corn for rice. He records (ibid.) that in 1992 this family exchanged some 2,000 kilograms of corn for rice. Buckwheat, the old Sani staple, is now consumed only on special occasions, and the preferred staple is rice (that might be cooked with ground corn). While this does indicate an economic change linked with a change in cultural practice, my own observations and interpretive lens would keep me from making any pronouncements of cultural homogenizing. According to He (ibid.) this family earned a typical midlevel, mountain Yi (Sani) rural agricultural income. They were still not rich, because they could not yet replace their old home with a new one or buy an Eastwind or Liberation truck (there were five in Danuohei in 1993), but they had much more income than in the past. The family owned a sewing machine (very useful in handicraft production), a radio, and two watches, and were preparing to buy a color television. Their three-room house was a mixture of old mud construction and new brickwork, with glass windows. Many families in Danuohei had started construction on new houses.
Village population in 1993 was officially 937 people in 203 households, according to village leaders. Four of those households were designated Han, the rest were Sani, although some of the 13 Han residents listed in the household registry lived in Sani households. It is interesting to note that in the county atlas (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1989, 67), population figures for the late 1980s recorded 39 Han residents in Danuohei's population of 884 people
Wukeshu
How many Han were living in a Sani village became a deep concern in Wukeshu, where residents during 1993 would often assert, “We are all Sani here!” Located west of Danuohei, Wukeshu (which means “five trees”) Village sits at 1,763 meters altitude in the karst topography of central Lunan, in the Shilin Township. Wukeshu has clan ties with Sani communities to the east but represents a later wave of Sani migration speaking a distinct subvernacular. The village was founded about five hundred years ago in a region controlled by tusi. Until the recent explosion of tourism development at Shilin (stone forest), this was an agricultural village removed from main transportation routes. In late 1993 the status of this community, next to the entrance of Shilin national park, was changed from peasant village to the “Stone Forest Peasant Industry and Commerce General Corporation” (Shilin nong gongshang maoyi zonggongsi) for tourism. All 760 indigenous villagers—women, men, and children, including several Han women married into Sani families and their offspring—became corporation members. This process had started in 1987 when the village's administrative classification changed from township unit to one under direct control by the Shilin Tourism Bureau. At that moment all the village lanes were unpaved, all livestock roamed freely, and most houses were rammed-earth and thatch. The village population at that time—708 people in 144 households—was all Sani except for 2 Han family members (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1989, 18), and virtually all adults farmed their adjacent lands, which used to include the park itself. Wukeshu was also the site of a regional elementary school (kindergarten through sixth grade). While villagers had enough to eat, they were not considered a rich village by neighboring Sani. Before Liberation, French Catholics from the west visited, but this village has never been missionized.
By 1993, as the surrounding tourism business grew, Wukeshu was regionally known to be “well-off” (you qiande). The village lanes were all paved to benefit the locals and wandering tourists, and an edict from the Shilin Tourism Bureau enforced with fines the confinement of all livestock, even the pigs (sometimes). Almost all houses had tile roofs, and a new housebuilding boom was going on at the village periphery as non-Sani workers rented old buildings in the center. The official village population of 760 people is still almost all Sani, but households have divided into 193 smaller units. The status of 229 people has been reclassified from peasant (nongmin) to Kunming resident, and the village land base has shrunken from 434 mu
The Tourism Bureau has constructed a modern shopping plaza for tourists just outside the park gates, renting out little shops to Wukeshu residents and outsiders (Sani and non-Sani alike) running restaurants and souvenir shops. Economic competition and cooperation across ethnic boundaries have become a factor in the production and sale of Shilin tourism. Han tailors (mostly men) from as far away as Sichuan have moved into Wukeshu during the past few years to craft “Sani” goods to sell themselves or to wholesale to Sani traders. Fourteen emigrant Han families lived in the village in fall 1993, producing vast quantities of piecework bags and children's Ashima costumes for Sani and Han retailers.
In Wukeshu, there is also a plan being promoted by the Shilin Tourism Bureau and local officials to museumify the village, moving all the residents away and setting up a Sani-tized tourism village with beautiful young people in quaint costumes acting as guides to the past. The transformation of the village into a corporation has been seen as a first step, but Wukeshu folk in interviews during late 1993 tended to dismiss the name change of their community as yet another government scheme and were skeptical about rumors that they would have to move out into other communities because their homes would be transformed into an idealized tourist attraction. Talking to the two elected Sani village leaders (cunzhang) also gave me disparate impressions about the village's future. The old farmer—village leader acknowledged the flow of money and the need to change, but saw this as a very gradual process. The younger village leader, a bureaucrat who has been sent all over Southeast Asia by the Tourism Bureau, literally said, “You won't recognize this place in 1995.” As none of these plans has been publicized and the Shilin Tourism Bureau maintained that the future of the village was now strictly Village Corporation business, it was hard to say what the village would be in a few years. Today, economic class distinctions aregrowing; young men and women are finding that their futures, so different from those of their farmer parents, are no easier to negotiate; and the sense of Wukeshu as a community is endangered. In 1995, the village was still very recognizable, with some new houses being built on the periphery and more stores opening up on the village side of the lake. By late 1997, the young village leader had been replaced by another man with close ties to the Tourism Bureau, and the older village leader had consolidated his power base.
With the advent of cultural commodification, local ethnic tourism, and mass tourism in minority-cultural-village theme parks in Kunming, Beijing, Shenzhen, and even Orlando, Florida, there is even a new kind of “Sani sojourners” whose native place in the Stone Forest of Lunan is an important part of their work qualifications and provides a network of ties back home. On the road between Kunming and Shilin Park, outside of Wukeshu, construction
[13] Lack of international funding slowed down construction, and the facility had not yet opened in late 1995.
Ganlongtang
Among the many sources of employees for Stone Forest tourism development are the surrounding villages, including old and new Ganlongtang (meaning “dry dragon pool”). In a landscape of caves and springs in the eastern part of the county, Lumeiyi district, the paired villages of Ganlongtangxinzhai (new dry dragon pool) and Ganlongtang lie at 1,775 meters. The older village is made up of Yi people: primarily Bai Yi who migrated down from the northern Qujing region in search of water more than eighty years ago and settled in with Sani. The newer village is mainly Han. In this area, Han and indigenous villages have developed side by side, often sharing resources and markets that have ties both to the eastern mountains and the western plain.
This area's ties to the Lunan plain are reflected in the mixed ethnic composition of villages. In the late 1980s old Ganlongtang had a population of 88 people, 28 or 31 percent of whom were listed as Han, the rest as Yi (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian 1989, 30—31). Field study in 1993 recorded a population of 117, only 5 (4 percent) of whom were identified as Han, 46 as Sani, and 66 as Bai Yi, distributed in 25 households. No household was designated as Han, but 3 were Han-Yi mixed. This dramatic drop in the Han population does not signify migration of people, but rather a realignment of ethnic identity from a majority status to a minority status with specific rights to resources. In New Ganlongtang, the 1980s population was 215 total, 61 of whom were Yi; the rest, 154 or 74 percent, were Han. The 1993 field study recorded a population of 206, with 158 Han (76 percent), 44 Sani, and 4 Bai Yi listed in the household registry (hukou). Officials designated 4 households out of 44 as Bai Yi (with Sani members), while the registry showed 10 Yi (Sani) households, 2 of mixed Han and Yi composition, and 28 Han
Fluidity in this ethnic classification system is well illustrated by the elected leader (cunzhang) of the new village. He is listed on his state identification card as Han but has said that he thinks of himself as minzu. His relatives are Bai Yi, Hei Yi, and Sani, so it is not too clear which branch (Bu tai qingchu shemma zhi) of the Yi he should be assigned to. When he was younger it was easier to be listed as Han, even though he has the unusual family name of Ba.
The land base of Ganlongtang villages included some 212 mu in the new village and 87 mu in the old, worked in a small valley adjacent to the village sites, which are separated by a small ravine. A small shared elementary school (grades one through four) is located in the new village, which first developed as a settlement about a hundred years ago. As a community, Ganlongtang is oriented toward Lumeiyi due to marriage ties and the settlement of several Lumeiyi Sani Catholics in the new village. Past commune ties from the 1950s through 1970s and future tourism employment pull Ganlongtang people toward Shilin. Improved roads between limestone quarries and the main highway have made it easier for people to find work in the cash economy.
CONCLUSION
Non-Han minorities, targeted over the millennia for colonization and assimilation into the Chinese nation-state, respond to current situations in constructing their local identities. At times such as the Cultural Revolution, ethnic differences strategically had to be suppressed for survival, while at the end of the twentieth century,cultural commodification reinvents ethnic cultural differences within and between ethnic groups. As we have seen in Lunan County, multiethnic regional identities respond to changing political economies that situate relations between groups in hierarchies of influence, value, and cultural forms. Just as origin stories, myths, and historical records are reinterpreted to serve current uses, so are the roles of past actors, such as Paul Vial, in shaping local identities.In the 1990s, one hundred years after he built his mission in Lunan County, Vial is no longer vilified by revolutionary rhetoric, but instead influences various groups within Lunan. For Sani intellectuals he provides tantalizing clues to what the language and culture was like, as well their long-term legitimacy as a distinct group. For the state Tourism Bureau, Vial's history of European activity and his photographs are very useful in marketing Lunan as a unique international destination. For local Catholics, who are no longer “underground” but are building churches in several communities, Vial is revered and remembered for bringing a new heritage to Lunan. Alliances within and across native-place and ethnic identities through marriage, work, and politics are shaping the
Returning to the ethnic composition of the three study villages, the decrease of Han in old Ganlongtang and Danuohei could represent migration. However, the village household registers indicate another, more likely solution: the reidentification of minzu status during the 1990 census and subsequent registration. In these villages, virtually all children of ethnically mixed Han and Yi marriages listed in 1993 household registries were identified as Yi. According to various informants, from at least Vial's time in Lunan until the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, there was virtually no Han-Yi marriage, although marriage across Yi groups such as Sani and Bai Yi did occur. Since the early 1980s a number of strategic advantages to minority status has evolved in Lunan as the state developed new policies, ranging from birth control policies allowing minorities to have at least one more child than Han (this was changed again in 1991 with rules limiting all rural couples to two children), to educational benefits, to economic development projects specifically targeting minority population, including the enormous tourism development surrounding Wukeshu.
While in the past to be a “native” in Lunan often meant subjugation by landlords, native minority status now may confer special advantages due to China's affirmative action policies. Ethnic-class considerations have become factors in marriages in new ways. Some Sani cross-cousin and uxorilocal marriage practices continue, in direct contrast to Han practices; but crosscutting the question of marriage occurring within or across ethnic lines is the issue of economic class. Hypergamy is crossing ethnic boundaries in a new way. While Sani and Han may marry up within their own groups, and Sani women may marryup into a wealthy Han family, there are now cases, as seen in Wukeshu, of Han women marrying up into wealthy Sani families. In general, mixed-ethnic families are choosing to give their children the advantage of a minority, indigenous identity.
Since the founding of the People's Republic, the advantages and disadvantages of ethnic identity and the uses of native place as ethnic territory in Lunan have built on the earlier history described in this essay. Lunan County is now faced with the tensions between modernity promoted by a homogenizing state “Communist civilizing project” and the promotion of ethnic variation and status. A series of Yunnan newspaper stories on development in Lunan county (Li et al. 1993) illustrates this, when the stories
The “Yi” in Lunan Yi Autonomous County are about 95 percent Sani (He Yaohua 1994, 40) and various small populations of Axi, Hei Yi, Bai Yi, and others. Since the county's founding in 1956, there have been at least three attempts by Sani to have their group declared a separate minzu rather than a branch or zhi of the Yi. Would it then be “Lunan Sani Autonomous County”? Such ideas may not occur to Lunan's tourism planners,
[14] Many of these planners are Han from the outside, who take a hierarchical “we know best” stance toward all locals. Local Han tourism administrators are more likely to advocate for all Lunan (Han and Yi). In local government work, Han employees sometimes complain of a “glass ceiling” that reserves all number-one positions for minority, usually Sani, workers.
who both emphasize the “Yi-ness” and national patrimony of the region by promoting a Sani identity of the place with images of Sani folk as the native people of Lunan County, which is “Ashima's Home Town” (guxiang), and ignoring the local Han majority. While it might appear to be more advantageous to have a “Yi” rather than a “Han” Lunan native-place identity at this time, the intersection of ethnic and native-place identities provides local actors with a range of options also shaped by gender, class, national, global, and perhaps justemerging identity hierarchies in contemporary China.In late 1997, claims to Lunan as name and native place took a new turn when the county name was officially changed by state mandate from Lunan to Shilin (Stone Forest). This bold move for tourism marketing was met with vocal disdain by local Han and Sani Lunan people.