Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China, edited by David Fauer and Ho Ts’ui-p’ing

Abstract

Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China, edited by David Fauer and Ho Ts'ui-p'ing. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2013. xii, 254 pp. $34.95 US (paper). Previous approaches to the topic of this book's subtitle have drawn strongly on sources created by the imperial state (such as officials' memorials to the throne, and local gazetteers that were usually sponsored and edited by magistrates). For this reason, they have often told us more about Ming and Qing imperial expansion into Southwest China than indigenous society. As David Faure comments in this volume, records kept by these empires tell us quite a lot about the tusi, the 'native officials' who did most of the actual governing; much less is known about the people they governed (p. 183). Given the well-known lightness of the late imperial an approach that goes beyond the state is overdue. This book adopts a starkly different approach from state-centred histories, with the authors venturing out of archives and libraries to draw on steles, gravestones, temples, ritual performances, and oral history. Each author convincingly shows that such sources offer something very different from texts in state archives. The theoretical approaches here are intelligent, and in most chapters, engaged with anthropological literature: Huang Shu-li, for example, draws on Richard Bauman to argue that egregious mistakes result from interpreting the words of an oral performance as if they were a written text (p. 23). Such approaches will not surprise anthropologists, and there is a sophisticated English-language anthropological literature on Southwest China, but the attempt to connect such sources to pre twentieth-century history is genuinely pioneering. For that reason alone the book deserves a wide audience, and ought to be of interest beyond the relatively small field of Southwest China. Most chapters highlight the volume's distinctive methodology, and emphasize different modes of telling the past and/or different versions of it. Huang Shu-li shows how treating a rite that guides among deceased after death as performance rather than oral 'text' allows a different interpretation of it--as a performance of among identity, rather than a map of among migrations or cosmology, a finding that chimes with the attention to cultural identity in new(ish) scholarship on the Qing Empire. Lian Ruizhi associates different versions of stories about ancestors in Dali with different time periods, concluding that while written genealogies bring lineages progressively nearer the Ming imperial state, the oral traditions do not (p. 106). David Faure and James Wilkerson both use gravestones as a source, to great effect in both cases. Faure discusses the graves set up in the nineteenth century, perhaps by Han militias, for a tusi who probably never existed. Wilkerson shows that in Guangxi members of inspector status households usually married partners of the same status. Kao Ya-ning compares Zhuang representations of an eleventh century chieftain: the male organizers of an officially sanctioned celebration present him as a national and ethnic hero, while the rituals conducted by female ritual specialists associate him with a related but distinct god or spirit of a forest. …