The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China

Abstract

Erik Mueggler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.Reviewer: Arafaat A. ValianiColumbia UniversityWith close attention paid to contours of healing and violence, Erik Mueggler's textured ethnography of struggles and memories of Zhizuo makes a timely appearance. This book sheds light upon forms and substance of memory, violence and healing. The violence that Mueggler's ethnography discusses pertains to those experiences which members of Zhizuo (or Lipo) underwent; they are a minority community residing Yongren, southwest China. Mueggler's analysis begins roughly at end of 1960s and concludes with 1990s. The experiences of Zhizuoens began with political interventions of Chinese state and included imposition of policies associated with Liberation, land reform, collectivization, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, revival of household cultivation, market reforms and family planning campaigns. The violence of these policies involved famine and death experienced by community during The Great Leap Forward, and revenge killings occurring after Liberation. More generally, these changes brought about regimented ordering of and space, both practice and collective imagination, as imposed on Zhizuo by a weak socialist state.The author seeks to trace manners which people of Zhizuo carve out a habitable place and a historical vision for themselves, at a when regimentation of space and the ordering of time was principle prerogative of state (p. 4). The substance of such views of a Zhizuoen past and place involves countering ineffective state which assumed a magical character due to its disorganization and its tendency to impose only illusory vision of itself on its subjects and spaces. It is community's and poetics which challenge state's illusions. Treating afflictions, performing rituals of fertility, and removing non-human entities from bodies and houses are practices employed by Zhizuoens to escape the grasp of state (p. 5). The author is careful to note that state is not external to daily life but it is: a constitutive force at heart of social world. To envision it is to pose and answer questions about social world, about to this world and objects of which are is its substance, and about social needs and social desires. (p. 5)Stories, and songs too, dot landscape of Zhizuoen resistance. The official of policies is employed by author as devices that translate community's narratives. These narratives are an oppositional practice of time which are meant to undermine the temporality of official history (p. 7); they are not mere stories, they are a means of living. Also, stories included reinterpreting causality for collective loss which state rarely admitted or simply shunned. In short, re-telling of shards from past is a means for this community to question politics and state violence of present and recent past. The stories manifest themselves concrete practices which help Zhizuoens to find means to survive and understand their past and future. They also permit them to articulate longings for reconciliation (p. 9).In one particular set of narratives, Mueggler recounts tale of ts'ici. Officially, it was remembered as institution which circulated among prominent houses of Zhizuoen community. It took responsibility for community's political and ritual duties. This included hosting outsiders, arbitrating disputes, and like. The tale of ts'ici tells of its decay, death and rebirth a ghostly and adulterated form under socialist state. Originally, houses which took on responsibilities of ts'ici were supposed to descend from a single ancestor and bind community in a circle of affinal relations (p. …