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2. Dongba Culture and the Authenticization of Marginality
- University of Washington Press
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49 Dongba Culture and the Authenticization of Marginality Dongba culture purports to describe a set of practices equated with the culture of the Naxi ethnic group. In the twenty-first century, virtually everyone in Lijiang Town and in the rural villages of Lijiang County is familiar with this term. Naxi children learn about dongba culture in their schools, and it is used in branding an array of goods and performances marked as ethnically Naxi. Most young urban residents who continue to live in Lijiang will be employed in some way that is linked to Lijiang’s tourism-dependent economy. It is the state’s plan to make the tertiary economy (which includes tourism) a pillar of the national economy. Dongba culture has become a central part of the vocabulary identifying Lijiang’s distinctiveness, and references to it can be found on the numerous websites that market tourism to China. Lijiang has become one of the top ten or so destinations featured on almost all China tourism websites, but this was not always the case. This chapter discusses dongba culture in the early 1990s, before it became broadly equated with Naxi culture and before Lijiang developed into a major tourist destination. The articulation of dongba culture may be understood as a consequence of reform-era biopolitics: the way in which the Chinese state created ethnic categories by encouraging and funding the projects of ethnic groups to discover, record, and narrate distinctive ethnic characteristics. Dongba culture was the particular project of Naxi government officials and intellectuals who sought to beneficially define the distinctiveness of the Naxi ethnic group. This project, which sought to empower 2 50 : : : c h a p t e r t w o the Naxi, has also had the unintended consequence, through its interpretation of the past, of legitimizing and naturalizing a hierarchy of difference. From 1990 to 1992, I lived at the Dongba Cultural Research Institute, which is located in Lijiang Town, the capital of Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County. The Institute is a work unit that translates pictographic Naxi ritual texts into Chinese. Foreign scholars who seek to study the Naxi are regularly steered toward the study of dongba culture, which is portrayed as the cultural heritage of the Naxi. Although my interests were in contemporary Naxi gender construction and ritual practice, I was advised that these topics could be sufficiently explored at the institute and that research in the countryside was unnecessary, because the four resident dongba and eleven resident Naxi scholars could provide sufficient information. Gender could be studied through the analysis of female characters in Naxi myth, which is a part of dongba culture. Naxi “culture ” was not the domain of ordinary people but rather was identified with specific practices that were best articulated by the institute’s specialists. Dongba were not part of an organized religious institution but individual practitioners who performed a variety of rituals including exorcisms, healings , funerals, and annual sacrifices. The dongba acquired his skill (women have historically been excluded from this vocation) through a long apprenticeship with a dongba master. In some cases, he was the son of a dongba or even descended from a long line of dongba. Young apprentices often spent years living and laboring on the farm of a dongba master while learning to read and write the pictographic script recited during dongba rituals. While dongba received some compensation for their ritual services, usually in the form of a gift, they were essentially peasants (nongming) who supported themselves by farming and merely acted as ritual specialists on the side. The Cultural Revolution had a devastating effect on the dongba religion.1 Dongba were criticized for practicing “feudal superstition,” and, in some cases, their children were blocked from receiving any education beyond the primary level. The Red Guards roamed the countryside confiscating or burning dongba texts and religious paraphernalia. Many of the texts that survived this period are now housed in the Dongba Cultural Research Institute’s library . The training of new dongba came to a complete halt during the Cultural Revolution, and, given their experiences, former dongba did not encourage their sons to even consider learning dongba ways. By the early 1990s, there remained only about thirty to forty dongba from those trained before 1949, and virtually all were elderly men in their sixties, seventies, and eighties.2 Dongba Culture and the Authenticization of Marginality : : : 51 Even the relaxation of the state’s anti-religion policy during the post-Mao era of the 1980s and 1990s did...