Erik Mueggler, The of Wild Ghosts. Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 2001, 360 pp.A revised edition of a doctoral thesis presented at the University of Michigan, The of Wild Ghosts is the result of over a year's field work carried out between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s in Zhizuo, a village in the autonomous Yi prefecture of Chuxiong, in the north of Yunnan in southwest China. The majority of the inhabitants of the village are officially part of the Yi minority nationality, which includes several groups who speak Tibeto- Birman dialects.((1) This official ethnic identity does not, however, replace for that of Lolop'o (in Chinese Luoluopo) which inscribes this group locally in the former territory made up of the twenty-odd hamlets of the village of Zhizuo before the beginning of the Age of Wild Ghosts.This metaphor, which provides the title of the book and of one of its chapters, designates the present time, which began with the famine provoked by the Great Leap Forward in 1958. The of Wild Ghosts was not yet over in the 1990s, when the anthropologist undertook his ethnographic journey through the real and symbolic places infused with the memory of the wounds and suffering inflicted during the two great tragedies of Maoism-the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.Among the vast production in the American field of the anthropology of contemporary China, Eric Mueggler's book stands out through the quality of its writing, which is in the best and noblest tradition of an anthropology not seeking to conceal, behind a screen of post-modern verbiage, the poverty of its ethnographic work or even the banality of its subject. This ethnography of an non- Han population in southwest China is in no way tributary to a culturalism fascinated by the otherness of its minority subject. While concentrating on the study of the cultural and social configurations particular to the Lolop'o, this religious anthropology, which goes to the heart of the political, seeks to understand how the inhabitants of these mountains in Yunnan faced the loss and produced by a predatory state, as well as their own responsibility during those violent events, which also involved the collusion of some who were close to them.Opening with a funeral dirge, the exploration of this geography of pain first passes through the intimate places of dreams where affected individuals express their suffering, such as that which stems, in the case presented, from the violence exerted by the state on individuals during the recent campaigns to sterilise mothers over forty who had given birth to at least two children. The anxiety experienced through the loss of this reproductive capacity takes on its full dimension in light of the consequences attributed to an operation (the tying of the Fallopian tubes) which, by slowing the flow of sexual energy, distorts the woman's capacity for life and work. The power of the state over the intimacy of the family thus has implications which go far beyond the objective of birth control, since, through the body of the woman, it affects the capacity for work she represents in the family economy.The therapy employed is ritual intervention, which calls on the services of a specialist entrusted with identifying the source of evil in the body of the suffering woman, and then eliminating it by exorcism. The study of this ritual pays particular attention to the poetic language used in the ritualised speech of the funeral laments and of the incantations of the exorcist, of which the author carefully reproduces a transcript in the original lolongo, the Lolop'o dialect. However, despite the creativity brought to the analysis by references to authors as inspired as Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty, despite the elegance of the writing, the anthropologist's interpretation, according to which the spirit emanating from a dead domestic animal held to be responsible for the mother's troubles is a metaphor for the state's official threat to attack her reproductive capacities, is not entirely convincing. …