Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China by Megan Bryson (review)

The Bai people, some 3.5 million of them, currently inhabit the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, which lies toward the northwest in China’s Yunnan province.

Their language, in as many as nine dialects, defies categorization as a type. Is it Sino-Tibetan? Tibeto-Burman? Or sui generis? Who knows? And is Bai religion mainly autochthonous? Or a variant of Buddhism? Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhism all have a place in it, but some elements seem purely local.

The Bai enter history in the form of the Dian Kingdom of the last centuries B.C.E. Better known is the Nanzhao Kingdom, coincident in time with China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907). The Dali Kingdom, founded later, was annexed by Khubilai Khan and his Mongols in 1253. There was never again an independent Bai state, nor any serious attempt to resurrect one. Yet from that day to this one, the Bai have managed to survive, indeed even prosper.

Bryson’s is a study in identity and taxonomy. Just who are the Bai? She places their Yunnan home in a region that some scholars call Zomia, or “highlander” country, a frontier where “India, Burma, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand,” along with Tibet, converge (12). China itself is ringed by other frontier peoples who, like the Bai, mingle with Han Chinese and other ethnicities in a cultural palimpsest that simply cannot be easily unscrambled.

Bryson thinks that one way to explore, but never to solve, the Bai identity is to offer a kind of biography of their leading deity, a goddess, or perhaps several of them, who share similar names. Whether these deities are one entity with different faces, or imperfectly merged but separate figures is impossible to tell. The goddess, or goddesses, can be traced in Chinese-language sources to the Nanzhao and Dali eras. She or they survive to the present day. As a single “goddess,” she is a figure to whom lower-class women pray for the blessings that she is believed to be able to bestow. But for upper-class men, with an educated understanding of Chinese culture, and an idea of where the Bai stand in relation to the Chinese state, she is no goddess but an emblem of ethical values that override all connotations of barbarism and help to label the Bai as acceptably civilized. The chapters of Bryson’s book are devoted to recounting all of the maddeningly complicated roles assumed throughout a long span of time by the benzhu Baijie, Baijie Shengfei, Baijie Amei, and Baijie Furen.

Bryson has seen firsthand some of the Bai’s present-day observances. She has interviewed some of the women, and read widely about what the men have written about Baijie, singular or plural. There are apparently are no Bai intellectuals active as scholars or nationalists with as much interest in Baijie as Bryson. In their absence, she supplies the concepts and the language, only occasionally slipping into academic jargon, through which to understand the matter. She appears to place a Western way of thinking alongside the Confucian, as well as the Indian and Chinese Buddhist ideas, that entered the precincts of Bai religion long ago. Indeed, her book could even influence how the people of Yunnan themselves view Baijie, if they were to read it.

Bryson hits her target well, even if the word goddess is not apt in every context. The scholarship is excellent, the sources well researched, and the ancillary references useful. The only disappointment are her interviews, which seem minimal in number and shallow in depth. More interviews and greater detail would have been welcome. But Bryson has given us grounds for thinking that hers is a good way to approach a topic, in this case a religion, and/or a mode of worshipful respect, with a long, intricate, and, in many ways, obscure history behind it.