Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China "ss1.30"

I. THE HEROIC AGE—ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE YI, SEEN THROUGH THEIR SAYINGS

Toynbee wrote:

From the scientific standpoint, it is a mere accident of no scientific significance that the material tools which Man has made for himself should have a greater capacity to survive, after they have been thrown on the scrap-heap, than Man's psychic artifacts: his institutions and feelings and ideas. Actually, while this mental apparatus is in use, it plays a vastly more important part than any material apparatus can ever play in human lives; yet because of the accident that a discarded material apparatus leaves, and a discarded psychic apparatus does not leave, a tangible detritus, and because it is the métier of the archaeologist to deal with human detritus in the hope of extracting from it a knowledge of human history,the archaeological mind tends to picture Homo Sapiens as Homo Faber par excellence. (1939, 156)

In the case of the Liangshan Yi, it is merely a result of certain historical circumstances that their transition from a clan society to a political society was especially drawn out. It is exactly for this reason that the psychic artifacts of the Heroic Age—institutions and feelings and ideas—are not only preserved by Liangshan Yi society but also, as Toynbee said, play a more important role than any material tool in the society. The great numbers of proverbs in the Yi language, along with the patriclan system, are the psychic artifacts of the Liangshan Yi Heroic Age that do remain. The Yi people are a nationality with aprofound culture, and the Liangshan Yidemonstrate this profundity in their corpus of proverbs, full of wisdom, experience, and customs. These proverbs are the crystallized life experience of the Yi, the flower of the Yi language, the very measure of their life and deportment. Many proverbs fairly overflow with heroic sentiments.

[1] Translator's note: These proverbs are all translated from the Chinese shown in the author's draft, not from the original Yi.

In battle one thinks not of life; in the field one thinks not of death.
One thinks not of thrift when entertaining a guest; one thinks not of one's life when fighting or killing enemies.
No one gives way when wrestling; no one flees when caught in a hold.
There is no boy that does not wish to be brave; there is no girl that does not wish to be beautiful.
When one goes into the forest one does not fear leopards; when one guards the crops one does not fear bears.
When one climbs high cliffs one does not fear vultures; on the battlefield one does not fear sacrifice.
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Yi men from the mountains are brave; Yi women from the mountains are beautiful.
To wrestle is to want to win; to win is to want to be famous.
If I am not strong, other people are not weak.

What these deceptively simple expressions of heroism show is the very soul of the Yi. Once you remove the pettiness and degradation of the people involved in the slave society, what are revealed are the value and pursuit of life.

Scholars in the past have paid attention only to certain particular features of this slave society,have researched only the four castes of this society within the framework of class oppression; naturally, what they have seen is the misery of the gaxy and the overbearing character of the nuoho nobility. But if we take the Yi clan system as our viewpoint, we will see that within clan society the nuoho and qunuo are actually living in a society of egalitarian competition, and that within their clans not only does oppression not exist, but there is no personal authority above that of the clan as a whole. In fact, up until the beginning of the 1950s, there were no administrative divisions equivalent to the township (xiang), district (qu), or county (xian) among the Yi; much less had they evolved a unified regime. Of the Lolo Xuanwei Authority set up under Mongol rule—and even the Jianchang tusi (local ruler) who was the highest authority in Ming-era Liangshan—it was said that “although in name he is the administrator in chief, he doesn't even have fixed fortified village sites” (Gu 1831, chap. 65, 26a). That is to say, the famous Lili tusi who served as Jianchang headman did not even supervise property and people by zhai (village) territorial units; he imposed levies and exacted tribute not by geography but by the traditional system of clans. For instance, he exacted tax and tribute according to the social position of the various nzymo and nuoho clans of Adu tusi, Azhuo tusi, Jiejue tumu (local government officers), Alu, Aho, Ezha, Hma, Ga, and so on. If even the Lili tusi did things this way, then there is no question about the other tusi and tumu. Actually, the titles tusi and tumu applied only to the people who lived near Han areas, the so-called familiar, or cooked, barbarians (shouyi). As for the uncontrollable Nuosu in the heart of Liangshan, the so-called alien or raw barbarians (shengfan), the Annals of Mabian Sub-prefecture written during the Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty has this to say: “Although the Black-Bones [heigutou] family belongs to the same clan as the tubaihu[local government officers], it looks to the strength of its own people, it has its own subdivisions, and it governs its own clansmen; the tubaihu cannot give it orders.”

[2] Tubaihu means a low-ranking tusi or native official.

Again, “those that live in the Han area and are under the administration of the tusi and tushe[local government officers] are the friendly barbarians, numbering some three or four thousand households; those in [the heart of] Liangshan are alien barbarians,

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and number in the tens of thousands of households” (Leibo 1796—1820). For the members of the Yi clans, it is absolutely true that “as eggs are all the same in size, every nuoho is equally important.” For other clans, “horsemen are all of one clan, infantry are all of one clan, farmers are all of one clan, those who hold the golden staff are all of one clan, those who hold the wooden staff are all of one clan; and the farmers' clan is not afraid of the clan with golden staves.” The Chinese feudal dynasties enfeoffed local officials in Yi society with the idea of “raising up the best men and ruling all the others,” with the purpose of “ruling Barbarians by means of Barbarians,” but this ran exactly counter to the Yi principle of “every nuoho is equally important.” And so the officials chosen by the Chinese court often met with united resistance by nuoho clans.

For example, two hundred years ago, the Alu and Hma clans joined forces to defeat the Jiejue tumu, driving the Shama tusi from Meigu district to Wagang and dividing the land and slaves they captured. Only a generation before this, the Aho clan had crushed the Xinji tusi (Sichuan Sheng bianji zu 1987, 67). That the nuoho dared to rebel and attack the tusi and tumu was no doubt because they could not bear the heavy taxation and because they were greedy for the slaves and land of the tusi and tumu. This illustrates even more fully the true feeling of the Yithat “Nuoho have no masters; they speak and act of their own will.” This feeling is a psychological portrait of a heroic age.

The experiences of the Yithrough history have taught them that “a strong clan can defeat a strong enemy.” Indeed, their strong clans, linked by blood bonds, became the “hundred-armed giants” of Greek myth. In the face of these hundred-armed giants, the 93 percent of the population that was ruled (including ordinary quho and true slaves) had no means of resistance. One nuoho has described things this way: “If a gaxy belonging to a nuoho household ran away or did something serious, the household merely got in touch with the head of their branch of the clan, and the news quickly reached the heads of all the individual families of relatives. All the branches could get in touch with each other to coordinate or research means of dealing with the problem. No matter where the gaxy was sold, just like a frog that has fallen into a basin he or she would have great difficulty going back.” Imagine if the Nuosu clans had not had this clan blood bond—it would have been much easier for slaves to abscond, and the nuoho would have lost their mighty network of rule. By governing separately, using only the chain and the whip, it would have been impossible for the minority nuo (nuo means noble; nuoho indicates a specific group of nobles) nobility to rule the slave majority. That is why the Yiproverb says “The horse's strength is in its waist, the ox's strength is in its neck; the nuoho's strength is in his clan.”

Nuoho clans, linked by blood ties, could not only deal with slaves who were ideologically shackled, whose clans had dispersed, or who lacked a clan altogether,

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but even the Kuomintang (KMT) army was once routed abjectly before them, as when the old KMT Twenty-fourth Division sent heavily armed troops to attack Puxiong. The Aho clan called a meeting of family heads and through consultation managed to stop internal feuds and squabbling among the branches. Next, the Aho and Guoji clan heads held a meeting and stopped the armed feud between those two clans. Finally, separate clans convened and mobilized their respective members to fight. In the end, a whole regiment of the Twenty-fourth Division was destroyed by the combined fighting strength of the Aho and Guoji clans, the KMT army was driven out of Puxiong, and hundreds of its troops fell into slavery (became gaxy) (Sichuan Sheng bianji zu 1987, 69).

It was precisely this summoning of clan power that allowed the nuoho to rule within and resist attack without. The clan system was a powerful social organizing force for them, whether politically, economically, or militarily. Under the flag of one's own blood clan, everyone had a common enemy and everything was directed outward. And so a Yi saying compares the clan to indispensable necessities of life like food and clothing: “What you must own are cattle and sheep; what you must eat is food, what you must have is your clan.”

The clan could also make a stand for the sake of one member or for the benefit of one family. For instance, when the Ssehxo subclan of the Vulie clan killed Aho Sseha, Sseha's elder brother sought help from the subclan to take revenge for the dead. At the clan meeting, it was agreed that if one person's murder were not taken seriously, then the safety of the whole clan could not be guaranteed, and so they launched a revenge party. In another example, Aho Degie was so poor that he didn't have enough to eat. People in the clan pooled grain to give him, while others invited him to eat with them. After he died, all his burial expenses were paid by people in the clan (Sichuan Sheng bianji zu 1987, 68). Conversely, the clan demanded the willing sacrifice of individuals for the benefit of the whole clan. Take the example of the Suxie and Ashy branches of the Jjidi clan, which were having a feud. For the sake of peace negotiations, the Suxie forfeited the lives of two of its own members, which put an end to the feud (ibid., 152). By doing so, the Suxie branch preserved itself from the brink of destruction and upheld the entire clan's rule of the qunuo and the castes below them. A proverb says “If you fail to protect one household, the whole clan is in danger; if you fail to protect the clan, the whole thing will be picked bare.” On this basis stood both the protection of an individual and the demand for sacrifice of an individual—both were done for the sake of the whole. Otherwise, both the clan and its individual members would have been weaker; they were bound together, sharing whatever life brought, for better or for worse. Because every Nuosu grasped this, there were countless souls willing to volunteer to die for the good of the clan. In autumn 1931, for example,

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Ssenra Mushu, head of the Ssenra branch of the Luohxo clan, willingly offered his head to the KMT warlord Deng Xiuting in order to preserve the collective of his own branch (ibid.). Bronislaw Malinowski said that one of the duties of culture is to ensure the safety of humanity: “Safety refers to the prevention of bodily injuries by mechanical accident, attack from animals or other human beings. . . . Under conditions where most organisms are not protected from bodily injury the culture and its group will not survive” (1942, 91—92).

It is true that the clan system of the Nuosu of Liangshan offered protection to each member; therefore Liangshan people sigh, “For Yi to have kin is more important than anything; lack anything, but do not lack kin” (Sichuan Sheng bianji zu 1987, 69). In Liangshan, clan heads merely attended to common activities of the society when required or at the request of clan members. In daily life, Liangshan people attended to their own affairs—nuoho ruled their slaves of different classes, using the power of their blood bonds within the district where they lived. And so the saying goes: “The nuoho have no master; the clan is their master.” Indeed, one single phrase sums up the true meaning of Liangshan society—the individual belongs to the clan.