Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America

12. Getting Further Implicated, 1994 -

12 GET TING FURTHER IMPLICATED, 1994 stevan harrell M y next field season did not begin in January 1994, as I had hoped. The Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute was refusing to sponsor my application for a visa, since they felt I had so far not held up my end of the bargain—there was no largescale grant, and I had brought none of the leaders to the United States. When I talked to my American China Studies associates about it, they were outraged, though not surprised, at the perfidy of the Chinese, but I had to admit that the folks in Chengdu were right. I had as yet done nothing in return. So, instead of going to Liangshan again, I sat home and wrote proposals for a conference on Yi studies, which would be held in Seattle in early 1995, and to which I would invite at least the two Nuosu of the four leaders to whom I owed trips. I wrote proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. I also asked for some money from the China Studies Program at the University of Washington. I figured that if I got a couple of these grants, I could at least have a small conference, which would allow me to fulfill half of my reciprocal obligations. By May I was notified that all but the National Science Foundation had awarded me money. When 162 I wrote to Chengdu, they said fine, they’d love to come, and, sure, I could come and do my fieldwork in the fall. And so I was in Chengdu at the beginning of October 1994, and again the formalities went fast, so I quickly proceeded to Xichang, the increasing casualness of the interaction indicated by the fact that the institute sent only a junior researcher1 along with me this time. Vurryr and some other friends met me at the train, and I asked what plans had been made for this year’s fieldwork. None. I had been in touch with the Liangshan institute about my plans for several months, and had also been in communication with Bamo Ayi, a young Nuosu scholar who taught at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing and also had a research organization of her own in Xichang, and whom I had invited to the conference planned for the following spring. But Director Qubi was out of town, and nobody know where Bamo Ayi was. We could not go to Yanyuan, because Vurryr had a writing deadline, and we could not go to the field site in the original Nuosu homeland in Old Liangshan, because the central counties were quarantined on account of a cholera epidemic. It looked like I would be in Xichang for awhile, though I might be able to go with one of the junior researchers to Yuehua to study the lowland Nuosu who had adopted Han customs and lifestyles. That, at least, did not require a police permit. In the meantime , we went to look up Martin Schoenhals, a young American professor with whom I had corresponded, who was doing a study of the Ethnic Middle School in Xichang City. He was a nice young fellow, I thought, very serious. The following evening, Vurryr and I were sitting in his apartment, trying to put together some kind of dinner in his wife’s absence, when a messenger came to tell him that he had a phone call. It was Bamo Ayi’s younger sister, Bamo Qubumo, inviting us to dinner at the Liangshan Hotel, the classiest place in town. She and her older sister, Ayi, had been in Zhaojue County, where the cholera epidemic was, and had not been able to get out until the county police chief had escorted them back to Xichang in his own car. We turned oª the stove, got the driver getting further implicated 163 1. Yuan Xiaowen, a young Tibetan scholar who became the institute’s director in 2003. (since Vurryr had been promoted to associate professor, he had access to the driver without asking the leaders), and headed for the hotel. Standing in the driveway was a young woman with long hair and thick glasses, smiling and waving to us to park the car; she introduced another, thinner , woman as her...