Writings on the wall: powerful inscriptions in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands

Abstract

This article investigates public textual inscriptions in China’s Naxi minority region and the role they play in projecting power. Cliff inscriptions in Chinese minority areas may be an attempt to enforce the hegemonic project of the “civilizing centre,” which sees Han culture as a civilizing force on the “barbarians” that live in China’s border provinces. Despite the nominal equality of China’s ethnic minority groups, the language and writing system of the Han majority occupy an undeniably privileged position in the country’s linguistic hierarchy. But powerful writing does not necessarily have to emanate from the centre of political control, and I argue that there are examples of graphic pluralism where the hierarchy is upturned. One such example of powerful, informal public text acts are the graffiti found on the walls of a cave in an ethnically Naxi township of Baidi in Yunnan province. The most powerful and prestigious graffiti inscriptions are those that are written in the native Naxi logographic script. An analysis of these inscriptions may help to reveal the social implications of writing in heterographic situations, showing how the ritual act of writing Naxi inscriptions on the wall inculcates Naxi values and suggests that China’s linguistic hierarchy is not immutable.