WHO ARE THE YI?
The nearly seven million Yi constitute one of the fifty-six minzu (variously translated as “nationalities” or “ethnic groups,” but best left untranslated here) into which the People's Republic of China divides its population. Like all the minzu but the Han, who constitute about 91 percent of the whole country's population, the Yi are one of the shaoshu minzu, or “minorities.” About four and a half million Yi live in Yunnan, two million in Sichuan, half a million in Guizhou, and a few thousand in Guangxi (see map 12.1). The Yi are quite diverse linguistically: Chinese linguists have officially classified their languages into six fangyan, or “dialects,” which are closely related but not mutually intelligible (see David Bradley, chapter 12 in this volume). Similarly, they are quite diverse culturally. None but the Nuosu of Liangshan have a caste system (though others, specifically the Nasu, most closely related to the Nuosu, may have traces of something like it). Other Yigroups, especially in Yunnan, have had much closer contact with surrounding Han society and culture than the Nuosu have had, particularly since the reunification of the Southwest with China by the Yuan rulers in the 1250s, and the massive immigration of Han military and civil colonies to the area that has gone on ever since—and that accelerated when the gaitu guiliu (replacement of local rulers by appointed bureaucrats) of the Yongzheng era (1722—36) incorporated most of their communities into the regular civil administration. And in fact, many sources attribute the divergence of language, custom, and social practices specifically to the differential influences of the larger Han environment. For example, Chen Tianjun writes that the slave-feudal transition occurred at three different times in the three different areas of Yi settlement. In Yunnan, it came earliest, at the time Nanzhao was taken over by Dali in the tenth century,whereas it persisted in Guizhou and northeast Yunnan until the Ming, and in Liangshan, in modified form at least, into the 1950s (Chen Tianjun 1987, 114—17).
This great linguistic and cultural diversity raises the question of what makes the Yi a people a minzu. The shortest answer to this is that they were so classified in the minzu shibie of the 1950s, which was undertaken according to “scientific” principles of classification first outlined by Stalin (Fei 1981). And the classification certainly could have been done otherwise. The Central and Western dialects of Yi, for example, are more closely related to Lisu and Lahu (languages of separate minzu) than they are to the Northern, Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern branches of Yi (Bradley 1990a). Earlier Western sources have often drawn the boundaries differently as well, incorporating Lisu, for example, or Woni (now officially classified as a branch of Hani) into the old category “Lolo,” a pejorative term referring to the people we now refer to as Yi. And there is no commonly used term in all the Yi languages
Today, however, the question of whether the categories correspond to the previous reality of ethnic consciousness is unimportant in most areas, because for at least forty years the Yi have been the Yi, and ethnic consciousness, which distinguishes the local group from its neighbors, is intermixed with minzu consciousness, which distinguishes the Yi from the Han, the Tibetans, the Hani, the Miao, and so on. Diverse cultures exist, and the chapters in parts 1 and 2 of this book treat local customs and local differences in great detail. But it is clear that the Yi peoples are all related to each other historically, and that they retain greater or lesser amounts of cultural similarities in the present day. In other words, the slightly longer answer to the question of “Who are the Yi” is that they are the people who partake in Yi history, or the people whose history has culminated in those groups, culturally diverse as they may be, who are today classified as part of the Yi minzu.
Part 1 of this book explores aspects of this history and this historical relatedness. As might be expected, there is a lot of controversy about Yi history. For example, there are at least two major (and two or three minor) hypotheses about the earliest origins of the Yi ancestors. It is generally agreed that the ancestors of the present-day Yi fanned out from an original location somewhere in central Yunnan. But where they came from before that is a matter of dispute. Some maintain that they, like other Tibeto-Burman peoples, are the descendants of the Qiang peoples mentioned in classical historical sources as living to the northwest of China, who migrated to the Sichuan-Yunnan-Tibet-Burma-Himalaya region in the second and first millennia b.c.e. (Chen Tianjun 1987). Others maintain that they originated in Yunnan, perhaps as descendants of early humans whose remains from the Paleolithic have been found in Yunnan in abundance (see Wu Gu, chapter1 in this volume).
Two chapters in part 1—by Wu Gu on traditional Yihistorical records and Wu Jingzhong on the place of nzymo, or “royalty,” in Liangshan history—draw primarily from Yi-language documentation to understand history, particularly social and cultural history, but in doing so they focus at quite different levels. Wu Gu offers a comprehensive survey of the kinds of materials other than traditional Han-language historiographical works that can be used as sources for writing Yi history, and in doing so, he stakes out the parameters of a unified history of the Yi as a whole. He makes a strong claim that the use of such sources (in his original draft, guji, which I have translated as “historical records”) not only enriches our view of Yi history, extending it backward in time and adding cultural and social elements invisible in Han-language records, but also forces us to think differently about what is important
Wu Jingzhong, in his explorations of the role of nzymo, also draws entirely on Yisources, in this case, Nuosu-language versions of several Yiclassics that have recently been edited and published by minzu publishing houses, to reconstruct the possible origins and much of the cultural history of Liangshan before the Yuan dynasty.His account, unlike Wu Gu's, focuses on Liangshan Nuosu society exclusively and does not address the question of connections between Nuosu and other Yi. He finds his Nuosu-language sources to be particularly rich in descriptions of the kinship system, including strategies and behaviors people employ when arranging marriages among clans; descriptions of the relations between the nzymo and their servants, subjects, and retainers; of the role of certain rituals that we can easily recognize as ancestral to ceremonies being performed by bimo in Liangshan today; of the importance of certain subsistence pursuits, such as hunting, and of certain crops, such as tea, which lost their importance in Nuosu society in recent centuries; and particularly of warfare and military culture, something also taken up in chapter 7, Liu Yu's essay on the Heroic Age.