China Off Center

7. Town and Village Naxi Identities in the Lijiang Basin

This chapter, like the one that follows, was written specifically for this volume, as a contribution to readers’ understanding of the relation between national and local cultures. Pulling out information about the setting of her research on plural medical systems, the anthropologist Sydney White describes the seat of the Lijiang Naxi autonomous county, called Dayanzhen (in a Mandarin approximation of the local Naxi pronunciation). This remote area, historically serving as a market for people traveling between Tibet and Kunming, is more prosperous than its marginal position might imply. The Naxi are known for their political astuteness and for being a relatively “advanced” and educated ethnic group. White’s ethnography discloses the many ways in which identities are constructed in Lijiang and calls attention to the subtle movements of class in their determination. Some of these ways will seem very familiar to readers who know about other areas of China; some will seem quite unique, the consequence of the particular mix of environment, history, and ethnicity that obtains in this area. White’s essay also raises very important questions about the relation between ethnic minorities and the Chinese Communist Party while casting light on the political and ideological mechanisms through which the Party center affects the ethnic margins. It is because of the curious politics of longstanding Naxi loyalty to the Party that White’s account may be read quite profitably alongside Mary Erbaugh’s study (chap. 10) of the Hakka contribution to the Chinese Revolution.—Eds. One of the most pervasive issues in contemporary China studies is the nature of the relation between the state and local society. China scholars are very much aware that, in understanding the contours of local histories, it is important not to underestimate the role of the state, whether in its imperial (206 b.c.e.–1911 c.e.), Republican (1912–1949), or Communist (1949–) manifestations . Nonetheless, it is also clear that analyses of local identities—both 131 SYDNEY D. WHITE 7 Town and Village Naxi Identities in the Lijiang Basin ethnographically grounded and historically situated—are critical to understanding the very real diversity of experiences among citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This chapter specifically addresses the experiences of one particular segment of contemporary China, the Naxi residents of the town of Dayanzhen and of the village of Tiger Springs in southwest China’s Lijiang basin, at one particular moment in the last decade of the twentieth century. The chapter begins with an overview that both problematizes and historicizes the distinctive relation between Naxi and the Chinese state. The remainder of the chapter traces the basic contours of basin Naxi identities through an examination of the key statuses through which this identity is constituted, contrasting the lived experiences of Dayanzhen townspeople with those of Tiger Springs villagers. While the town/village distinction is clearly the most salient one affecting the lives of basin Naxi (and the experiences of most PRC residents in general), a variety of other statuses—including gender, generation, economic/occupation status, education, (former) class/family background, and Party membership—are also critical in understanding the contours of Naxi identities in the basin. These are, in essence, the same statuses that inform Han identity on a national scale. Ethnicity, in contrast, which invokes the trope of the Naxi as a “minority nationality,” is a status that informs Naxi identities in ways that are significantly different from Han distinctions of regional identities. CONTEXTUALIZING THE NAXI: HISTORY AND POLITICS While Naxi are officially classified as a minority, they are unquestionably in the majority within the Lijiang area, constituting approximately 250,000 of the 300,000 total population of Lijiang county. Most Naxi live within the bounds of what is now Lijiang Naxi autonomous county, in the northwestern corner of Yunnan province. The county seat is Dayanzhen, usually referred to by outsiders as Lijiang, and it has a population of approximately sixty thousand. Dayanzhen occupies the center of the seventy-four-hundred -foot Lijiang basin, above which towers the more than eighteen-thousand -foot Jade Dragon Snow mountain (Yulong Xueshan). Lijiang county extends mostly to the north and to the west of Dayanzhen, its borders determined by the sideways-S-shaped curve of the Golden Sands river (Jinsha Jiang) on its route to join the Yangzi river from Tibet. Owing to the uplift of the Himalayas, the topography of northwestern Yunnan in general is characterized by numerous snowcapped mountains and deep river gorges, with elevations ranging from approximately four to eighteen thousand...