SCHOLARLY DISCOURSES AND THE YI
There are nearly seven million Yi people, almost all of them in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou Provinces, with a few in Guangxi Province and Vietnam and a very small number of emigrants overseas. There are, in all, more Yi than there are Danes or Israelis or Cambodians. Yet it is quite probable that most educated people outside China have never even heard the name, let alone learned anything about the Yi. One goal of this book is thus to begin the establishment of a field of scholarship within today's cosmopolitan social-studies discourses: to inform scholars and students of China, of Southeast Asia, and of ethnic relations generally about a large part of the world that has remained largely inaccessible in European languages.
At the same time, there is no dearth of written materials dealing with Yi history, society, culture, and literature. These materials, however, belong to two widely divergent discourses,
[1] In this introduction, “discourse” bears both its linguistic sense of a conversation among a group of people using an agreed-upon, somewhat specialized vocabulary, and something of its Foucauldian sense of a set of linguistic categories that define a regime of power (see Foucault 1984).
both of them quite far removed in their assumptions, concepts, and methods of argument from the cosmopolitan discourses to which scholarship in European languages is usually addressed. One of these is Chinese language scholarship, encompassing the fields of ethnology (minzu xue) and ethnohistory (minzu shi), which seek to locate Yi society and culture in a temporal and spatial framework of relation and interaction with other peoples in the region and with peoples in China generally. The other is traditional Yi-language scholarship, concerned withIn the eyes of the contributors to this book, however, these two goals remain little more than means toward a third and more important goal: establishment of a dialogue between the three scholarly traditions. Not only do the works of cosmopolitan ethnologists need to be circulated and discussed in Chinese scholarly circles, both national and Yi, but the concepts and results of scholarship from within China need to be taken into account by participants in the cosmopolitan conversations about China and about ethnicity and ethnic relations. We are missing a lot if we continue to have two different conversations about the same thing, one Chinese and one cosmopolitan, and we miss even more if we do not take the Yi-language materials into account either.
For this reason, I gathered twenty scholars with interests in Yi studies for what I rather grandiosely called the “First International Conference on Yi Studies,” held in Seattle in March 1995. Eleven of the participants were themselves Yi: eight came from China, two from the United States, where they were already discourse-mixing as graduate students, and one from France, where she had recently mixed discourses in a Paris Ph.D. Others were American, German, Australian, and Chinese scholars who had conducted research on the Yi or neighboring peoples. We met for four days, using Chinese (the only language we all had in common) to discuss the papers that were the predecessors of most of the chapters in this book. Our conversations were, I think, inspiring to all participants as they realized that by recognizing the parameters of contrasting discourses, and by speaking about and against those parameters, we open up a wider field of view that cannot help but enrich and broaden our individual scholarly inquiries.
Our reasons for emphasizing the importance of, and committing ourselves to, a cross-discourse conversation all stem from the initial confrontations between our respective scholarly discourses. Anyone who doubts the utility of such a concept as a scholarly discourse need only observe the vast gulf across which Western and Chinese ethnologists and ethnohistorians confronted each other when they first started to interact again in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after thirty years of enforced separation. Westerners were debating the primordial versus instrumental basis of ethnicity and ethnic conflict (Keyes 1976; Bentley 1987; and others), speculating on the nature of state power in Chinese socialism and its immediate successors (Oi 1989; Shue 1988; and others), and writing from the assumption that state-society relations in China's “minority regions” consisted of state oppression and assimilation of local indigenous peoples (Dreyer 1976; Heberer 1989; and others). Chinese, by contrast, were writing about the success of ethnic identification (Fei 1981)
In this atmosphere, attitudes of mutual contempt, condescension, and sometimes just plain wonderment quickly evolved. Western researchers, eager for “access” to remote and previously forbidden regions and peoples, dampened their public criticisms of an ethnological paradigm dating from Lewis Henry Morgan, which they considered to have been blown to insignificance before 1930 by the works of such as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski; they certainly took the Chinese ethnological and ethnohistorical paradigms seriously, but as objects of analysis, not as contributions to knowledge. An ethnological work about the formation of slave society in Liangshan, for example (Hu 1981), was a datum, just like an interview with a bimo (priest) or a photograph of a historical stela. On the other side, Chinese ethnologists and ethnohistorians were flabbergasted at the ignorance, narrowness, and arrogance of their Western counterparts. Often unfamiliar with classical Chinese, certainly unfamiliar with the local histories of the areas where they worked, the Westerners nevertheless brought the possibility of material support, access to sources that had been forbidden during the reign of radical totalitarianism, and even chances for these people to study and research abroad. Within a few years of the opening of China to Western ethnologists and historians, we had settled into a comfortable system of mutual back-scratching. Chinese provided the Westerners with access to the field and the archive; Westerners provided the Chinese with money and the opportunity to go abroad. Wecould remain mutually contemptuous of each other's concepts; the two discourses interacted hardly at all.
Almost as wide was the gulf between the Chinese national discourses of ethnology and ethnohistory, on the one hand, and the local discourse embodied in Yi-language materials, on the other. They had, of course, no enforced period of isolation from each other, but most scholars participating in the national discourse considered the Yi-language materials in the same way that Westerners considered ethnohistory in the Morganian paradigm—as data rather than analysis, and as data that could only be made sensible by insertion into that Morganian paradigm of the stages of history. At the same time, authors and transmitters of Yi-language materials were mostly unable to read the Chinese materials, and if they had been able to read them they would have shown little interest, because the goal of these materials was to synthesize, which was irrelevant to the local purposes of the Yi indigenous scholars.
This book is an indication that we have begun to grow out of that unfortunate situation. There are several reasons for the change. Probably first and foremost is the gradual but real liberalization of control over scholarship in
In our own particular field, this has left the way open for attacks on the Morgan-Engels paradigm from two sides: a local-particularistic one led almost entirely by Yi scholars, and a cosmopolitan one in which Yi, other Chinese, and Western scholars have all had a hand. From the Yi side, what has been at issue is the “standard interpretation” of Nuosu (Yi) society in Liangshan and, by analogy or implication, of other Yi societies in other areas in earlier times. This interpretation took Liangshan before 1956 as the paradigm case of the “slave society,” the second of the five universal stages of history, coming after the end of primitive society (sometimes referred to as “primitive communism” in the West) and before the development of feudalism. Field research on the Nuosu in the 1950s, a time when social class was held to be the most important factor in human society, had led to a paradigm in which the most important relations of Nuosu society were the relations of production between slaves and slave owners (Hu 1981; Sichuan Sheng bianji zu 1985, 1987). In the more political sections of these works, the cruelty of the system was also emphasized.
There was no other way to write about Yi society in the 1970s and early 1980s, but in the more open and tolerant atmosphere of the last few years, it has been possible to come forth with different models, and Nuosu scholars in particular have responded with a series of very different interpretations of social stratification and the caste system in Liangshan (Ma Erzi 1993; Pan Wenchao 1994). In another example, that aspect of the Morgan-Engels historical paradigm that enshrined the Han as the leading nationality and big brother to the backward minorities has also been challenged. Yi scholars, led by Liu Yaohan, have set forth a series of books and articles that places the ancestors of the Yi at the center and forefront of the development of early Chinese civilization and portrays them as having been pushed to the periphery only in the last thousand years (Liu Yaohan 1985).
But the weakening of the Morgan-Engels paradigm has stemmed not only from local pride and the resentment of outsiders less knowledgeable about local history but also from the increasing interpenetration of Chinese and cosmopolitan ethnological and ethnohistorical discourses. Within China, this perhaps had its strongest beginnings in mid-1980s self-critiques by those who had participated in the “ethnic identification” (minzu shibie) project of the
The cosmopolitan attacks were, of course, more straightforward and less constrained. Western scholars earned many cheap points by pointing out the discrepancies between the paradigm and more interesting ways to view local realities (see the articles in the edited volume Harrell 1995 for examples). More significant was the effect these analyses had on Chinese scholars, both Yi and non-Yi, in their own analyses of ethnic relations. It is now common enough to hear arguments between an older generation of ethnologists, who insist that minzu categories are not, as overseas and Taiwan colleagues maintain, “invented,” and younger scholars who are respectfully contrary in public and broadly dismissive in private of this “old thinking.”
At the same time, the beginning of paradigm chaos in China has caused Western scholars, formerly contemptuous of Chinese counterparts as hopelessly brainwashed if admirably knowledgeable, to reconsider their Chinese colleagues as partners in dialogue with a depth of experience and local knowledge that almost no outsider can hope to match. And, in concert with the “indigenization” of anthropology and history in the “non-Western” world generally, the study of ethnicity and ethnic relations in China now seems destined to become a true transnational conversation that locals and outsiders can share in, and in which they can argue about the implications of local knowledge.
We are, however, still at the beginning stages of this process. Most Chinese scholars, Yi included, who are working out the possibilities of new paradigms for understanding their own history and current situation are doing so with only fragmentary knowledge of and exposure to the theoretical formulations that have so long been argued about in waiguo (foreign countries). There is the real danger that they will reinvent the wheel. Also, there are too many anthropologists and not enough historians studying ethnic relations in China (but see Lipman 1998); anthropologists tend not to be respectful of written sources in the Chinese and Yi languages because they do not have time to read enough of them. Further exposure to each other's work, and further collaborative work, is absolutely necessary before we can build a truly open transnational dialogue about these questions.
[2] Why we need a transnational dialogue about, for example, Yi social stratification and not about American inner-city social disintegration is not immediately clear, but is at any rate outside the scope of this book, which for better or for worse is about Yi society and culture.
Not only must there be more mutual exposure of Chinese and foreign scholars to each other's work and each other's thinking, there must also be conscious efforts made toward developing a viable translinguistic vocabulary for speaking about matters such as ethnic relations and Yi history. In order for us to keep the dialogue viable, we must write in Chinese and in English and, hopefully, in at least some kinds of Yi. More than that, we need to be aware of what changes when we move from one language to another, to develop what Lydia Liu (1993) has referred to as “translingual practice.” Some of the papers from the 1995 conference have already been published in Chinese (Liangshan minzu yanjiu, 1995 issue), and versions of two of them in Japanese (Bamo 1996; Ma and Qubi 1996); they appear here in English. Are they saying the same thing to audiences who customarily read these three very different languages? What would they say if they were translated into Nuosu, Nisu, or Sani? Could they be? If not, why not; why have those languages not developed an ethnological and ethnohistoric vocabulary?
The 1995 conference and this volume derived from it represent the results of some of the first-stage efforts to wrestle with these problems, to resolve these contradictions. There are chapters written in the present-day versions of both the cosmopolitan and the Chinese scholarly paradigms (divided not by the ethnicity of the authors but by their place of scholarly training), and it is still easy, despite the beginnings of dialogue described above, to tell the difference. All those written in the Chinese paradigm (all by Yi scholars) are influenced by, and to some degree located in, the national discourse, but they take varied account of and put to varied uses the documents of the local, Yi-language discourse.
This book is thus an inevitable hybrid. But readers can approach the hybrid in more than one way. We can simply mine it for knowledge, for there is a lot here that is brand-new to the English-reading fields of ethnic relations, social structure, and particularly China studies. Or we can examine it as a concrete demonstration of the different ways in which participants in different scholarly discourses approach the same field of facts and data. Or, most interestingly, we can look at the interaction of discourses itself and hope to gain two kinds of insights from this interaction. First, we can gain a richer understanding of the material itself. We get a much better idea of Yi society, culture, and especially history if we synthesize the findings from different scholarly traditions. Second, we can learn about an example of the processes of transnationalization that must perforce reshape much social and cultural scholarship in the increasingly connected world of the twenty-first century. The remainder of this introduction will attempt to guide readers toward an approach to this material that may enable them to look for these kinds of insights.