The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Places in Southwest China (review)

This book, based on author Erik Mueggler's Ph.D. thesis, is an anthropological study of the villagers of Zhizuo in the Baicaolin Mountains in Daoyao and Yingren counties in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, north of Yunnan. These villagers are officially classified as one group of the Yi national minority, which currently has a population of more than six million, scatted throughout Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi Provinces. To conduct this in-depth study the author lived in the area for thirteen months after repeated visits to Yunnan and many months of negotiations.

After the introductory chapter 1, chapter 2 discusses how the local people cope with the effects of state family-planning policies by employing ritual and divination as a way of healing. Chapter 3 discusses how the structure and layout of the traditional house represents social relations and how social and economic change in socialist China in turn affects these relations. Chapter 4 details how the ts'ici system (huotou in Mandarin Chinese), by which one household from one village is selected on a rotational basis to perform public duties, works with songs and rituals and how the system is employed by the local residents as a way of self-definition. Chapter 5 presents rituals, chants, and words related to ts'ici that are used as a way of representation of the community and preserving local memory. Chapter 6 describes how the villagers were affected by the Liberation, collectivization, and the devastating consequences of the Great Leap Forward, which left long-lasting memories of "wild ghosts" among the local people. Chapter 7 describes the practices and significance of exorcisms, which are interpreted as being used by the villagers for healing purposes, as the "foundation for a subversive practice of time" (p. 200), and as a way to defeat the state's "efforts to leave past injustices behind along a linear "socialist road" toward the future" (p. 201). Chapter 8 traces the destruction of the ts'ici system during the Cultural Revolution and how its "death" (the author uses that word to imply its organic connection to the structure of the community) is related to life in the community afterwards. Finally, chapter 9 returns to the issue of family planning. In this chapter the author discusses population control in China in terms of official implementation, and details local resistance to state policy and to the state's local agents.

In this book Mueggler aims to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a unified Chinese culture, by following the lines of recent anthropological scholarship both within and outside China¹ and by challenging the standard approaches that stress either ethnic difference as an exotic Other (in the manner of ethnic studies in the West and minzuxue in China) or "Chinese culture" as a unity "belonging to a Han people engaged in a long historical process of converting to this culture each of the various non-Han peoples with their realm" (p. 19). Nor are there isolated ethnic cultures within China's territory. Instead, there is "an open and flexible field of cultural practices, fashioned in the interaction of many different peoples" (p. 19). Indeed, the people of Zhizuo "see themselves as no less 'Chinese' than any of their neighbours, yet they also believe themselves to occupy a unique and troubled place within the Chinese nation" (p. 19). For this reviewer, this is a laudable aim for this study, and the author succeeds brilliantly.

The book is a gold mine of information on the practice of what the author terms "popular beliefs"—for the most part seen as "superstitions" by the Chinese official discourse—which include folk chants, songs, and poems in the local language. A short review here cannot do justice to the richness of detail on local custom in this volume.

Another striking feature of the book is the approach that it...