Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (review)

Since the publication of his edited volume, Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers,¹ Stevan Harrell has been justly regarded as one of the foremost experts on ethnic minorities in China, especially those in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. This new work consolidates that position. While its insights into ethnic identity will probably not transcend Chinese specificities, the work offers new insights into long-standing debates within Chinese studies, and is a treasure trove of data on the region.

Southwest China and neighboring regions of upland Southeast Asia boast a tremendous ethnic diversity that is only partially described by China's post-1949 ethnic categories. Until now, most Chinese and foreign ethnographers working in the region, including Harrell himself, have restrained themselves to trying to grasp the language, culture, history, and politics of one ethnic group. In this work Harrell ambitiously tackles several, and thinks about the ways in which they individually position themselves and relate to each other. In mountain regions like these, where the nearest neighbors of a village calling itself Naxi minority may be villages calling themselves Lisu, Tibetan, Lahu, or something else, this approach is sensible and overdue. As Harrell himself concedes, it is also a perilous road to walk, and in the hands of a less careful and serious scholar we could end up with something slipshod and superficial.

Here, Harrell's sensitive accounts of individual Nuosu, Prmi, and Naze villages are nicely interwoven with convincing data on agriculture, education, kinship, clothing, and housing. While early on this can seem like slow going, the book winds up, ultimately, a magisterial survey of a diverse region. And while some poststructuralists may chafe at wading through tables and kinship charts, they may be won over again by affectionate accounts interspersed throughout, such as this one of a struggling, backwoods Nuosu school-room:

At the primary school, the first-grade class has nearly fifty students crowded into desk space for about forty, so that some of the desks have three grubby, unwashed little tykes (the thirty-four boys sharing some desks and the sixteen girls sharing others), who thus fill up the desks intended for two. (p. 110)

The author goes on to describe vividly classes taught in this bare room by a dedicated and energetic teacher, paying close attention to the important role played by code-switching between Chinese and Nuosu language throughout the day. He shows us intent young scholars doing math problems on their fingers and shouting "laoshi zaijian" (good day, teacher) while dashing for the door, leaving behind "four or five little punkins" who are too heavily swaddled and small to do much except sit, blinking.

Harrell is at his best among these Nuosu, whom he has studied for decades, as he tracks the minutiae that make up the radically different textures of village life in three towns. The book moves from a remote mountain hamlet down into the valleys where Nuosu daily mix with and borrow from majority Hans. Here, villages of even the ostensibly "same" Nuosu ethnicity have radically different ways of identifying and describing themselves as Nuosu. This trek down the mountain culminates in a thoughtful and refreshingly clear discussion of the state-defined "Yi" ethnic group to which Nuosu were assigned in the state-building era. His exploration of this contentious (and, to novices, confusing) question of "Yi"- ness is one of the best and clearest available. His briefer and more glancing discussions of the Prmi, Naze, and Han, and even slighter discussions of the "tiny" ethnic groups scattered nearby, give us a glimpse of some other ways of marking ethnic difference in these Tibetan foothills.

What is striking about Harrell's account of the so-called Yi, though, emerges most clearly when compared with Erik Mueggler's ethnography of the Yi in Yunnan, The Age of Wild Ghosts.² While both books are wonderful in...