Chieftains into Ancestors
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Edited by:
David Faure
About this book
Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, largely ignoring the local histories that were preserved for generations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious ritual.
Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture. Observing local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, it focuses on examples from the southwestern Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new history of China’s southwestern region – one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China’s nation-building process.
Author / Editor information
David Faure is Wei Lun Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Ho Ts'ui-p'ing is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica and an adjunct associate professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University. She is the co-editor of State, Market and Ethnic Groups Contextualized.
Contributors: Lian Ruizhi, Huang Shu-li, James Wilkerson, He Xi, Xie Xiaohui, Kao Ya-ning, and Zhang Yingqiang.
Reviews
This is a fantastic and first-class collection, highly original in its combination of anthropological with historical approaches and marking a real contribution to understandings of social and cultural processes in southern China. Authored by some of the leading scholars in the field with an unparalleled knowledge of this subject, Chieftains into Ancestors is original and enlightening.
John E. Herman, author of Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200-1700:
We need to examine state expansion from the perspective of local societies and, with Chieftains into Ancestors, we now have the conceptual and methodological tools to do this. This is historical anthropology and micro-history at its best.
Topics
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Front Matter
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Contents
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Figures and Table
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Acknowledgments
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Preface
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Introduction
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Reciting the Words as Doing the Rite: Language Ideology and Its Social Consequences in the Hmong’s Qhuab Kev (Showing the Way)
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Chief, God, or National Hero? Representing Nong Zhigao in Chinese Ethnic Minority Society
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The Venerable Flying Mountain: Patron Deity on the Border of Hunan and Guizhou
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Surviving Conquest in Dali: Chiefs, Deities, and Ancestors
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From Woman’s Fertility to Masculine Authority: The Story of the White Emperor Heavenly Kings in Western Hunan
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The Past Tells It Differently: The Myth of Native Subjugation in the Creation of Lineage Society in South China
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The Tusi That Never Was: Find an Ancestor, Connect to the State
171 -
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The Wancheng Native Officialdom: Social Production and Social Reproduction
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Gendering Ritual Community across the Chinese Southwest Borderland
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Contributors
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Index
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Contemporary Chinese Studies
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