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

17. Collecting Mountain Patterns, 1999

17 COLLECTING MOUNTAIN PAT TERNS, 1999 ma lunzy T he exhibit wasn’t conceived overnight. The subject came up in casual conversations on country paths or over meals or tea, after we had spent a long time with Stevan Harrell conducting fieldwork in Nuosu areas in Liangshan, after we had spent a long time creating friendship in the field. The purpose of the exhibit was not only to facilitate continued scholarly exchange but also to contribute to the mutual understanding of folkloric culture. Chinese and American fieldworkers of Liangshan Nuosu culture designed the exhibit together. We went through the process of applying for funding, and collecting clothing , lacquerware, bimo implements, and other artifacts to display and deposit permanently in the Burke Museum. A lot of people previously unacquainted with the culture of the Nuosu of Liangshan appreciated its particular aesthetic charm and joined in. The common good fortune of the Burke Museum and the participants was that, in the process of realizing this dream, we could present it as a gift to humanity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As soon as we got our $8000 funding in 1998, I began thinking of how best to use the limited funds, even though we did not actually begin the collecting work immediately; the exhibit was always floating 248 around in my consciousness. As the Nuosu say, “If there’s not much buckwheat, the pancakes won’t be so thick.” How would we collect things that were both inexpensive and beautiful? Frankly, at the time, when people were thinking in terms of commodities, with such a small amount of money in hand, we were like a couple of old, weak-winged eagles perched on a rock near a roost, unable to descend or ascend, able only to flip around, eyeing their potential prey: Every object would have to go through mentally and emotionally exhausting consideration before we would be able to have it in hand. That was the first important stage in mounting the exhibit. Our collecting started in the beginning of May, 1999, when Bamo Qubumo and I arrived at the jutting peaks and crisscrossing river valleys of the concentrated Nuosu area of Meigu. As soon as we got to the county town, we sought out our many relatives and friends to get information , and on the following days went and mingled on the streets with Nuosu people, examining the clothing they were wearing. Whenever we heard of a remote place where there had been comparatively little outside influence on clothing or lifestyles, we trudged and sweated our way there. Meigu has over 160,000 people, 98 percent of whom are Nuosu who speak the Yynuo dialect. In terms of language, customs, and clothing, traditional Nuosu culture is comparatively well preserved there, but my impressions were completely diªerent from those I had gotten ten years earlier, when I had first collected there for the Liangshan Museum of Yi Slave Society. At that time, all of the young ladies wore Nuosu clothing , and all of the young men grew the traditional hair lock and wore various kinds of vala (capes). You could count on your fingers the number of people wearing sports jackets or Han-style clothing. It was very di‹cult to buy an object that had been passed down in a family, or to buy a used piece of clothing. It was said that family heirlooms reflected the faces of the ancestors, that clothing that had been worn retained the soul of the wearer, and that to buy the ritual tools or books of a bimo would be to ask the tiger to change his colors. The only way to acquire artifacts had been to rely on relatives, and to gradually approach the owner and talk about how important it was to display the piece in collecting mountain patterns 249 a museum; maybe then a few enlightened owners would let you have a piece. The interesting thing was, they would not only not bargain over the price, but would just give it to you. One wouldn’t have thought that ten years later, Nuosu people wearing sport jackets or Han-style clothing would constitute half the crowds on the Meigu streets. Whenever we arrived in a place with the intention of collecting, there would immediately be a big reaction, and everyone would come with big and small bundles of things for us to choose from...