Dr Jan Karlach

Southwest China is a region that has been perhaps uniquely shaped over the longue durée by mutual appropriations of status, authority, land, material culture, genealogies, and cultural-historical identities. Drawing on both ethnographic fieldwork and the official and unofficial Chinese and Nuosu-Yi textual evidence, in this article I offer a new view of how, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, native officials were shaped by their efforts at appropriating elements of officialdom (responsibility towards the court) and nativeness (adherence to local customs). My historical textual-cum-anthropological analysis builds on C. Patterson Giersch’s notion of the “middle grounds” between the Chinese state and its borderland peoples to reveal “further ways” of uncovering the history of their history. I show that mutual appropriations of officialdom and nativeness have led to specific forms of acculturation that are neither linear nor irreversible. Cultural hybridizations underpin the current Yi core identity and culture in Liangshan today.

In this article, I delve into the field diary of Ma Changshou – a major Chinese ethnohistorian and social anthropologist active between the 1930s and 1960s – to show how his journeys through Liangshan, a mountainous land in Southwest China inhabited by the Nuosu-Yi, led to a new kind of anthropological knowledge. Ma worked under the theoretical, methodological, and ideological assumptions of his era, where he strove to assemble his findings on Nuosu-Yi kinship relations and textual sources into a linear historical narrative, even though the Liangshan of his day was not fully controlled by a centralized state bureaucracy. Retracing Ma's journey in mythogeographical fashion, I propose that the travel-fieldwork trajectories of China's Republican-era social scientists and their interpretation of data obtained from native chieftains, bimo ritualists, and other members of prominent Nuosu-Yi clans have shaped today's knowledge of Nuosu-Yi history, society, and culture. Notably, Ma's mythogeography fleshed out two different essentialized but intertwined ways of seeing the past: that of state-bureaucratic societies and that of genealogy-based societies like the Nuosu-Yi. Mythogeographies like this can give rise to more than new ways of performing genealogies; they can throw light on the anthropo-history of China and the world at large.

The core of the article analyzes the historical development of Chinese anthropology from 1949 until today. First, it maps the parallel development of the anthropological terminology, thinking and practices, which together provided a scientific-theoretical basis for the subsequent political-ideological formation of the structure of the Chinese nation. Its conception is a bricolage of ethnopolitical categories, which came into being through a synergy of gradually indigenized theories of Soviet, European and American humanities and social sciences. The text further demonstrates that the historical experience of Chinese anthropology is being projected beyond the China’s borders, where it theoretically underpins the global political-economic strategy, the „Belt and Road Initiative“.

This article explores the engagement of the bimo – the Liangshan ethnic Nuosu-Yi literati-ritualists of Sichuan Province, China – with Weixin (WeChat), a ubiquitous Chinese all-in-one app. Utilizing a nethnographic approach – an ethnography of culturally conditioned simultaneous online and offline practices – I argue that by using the smartphones in ways unforeseen by their developers, the bimo are poaching the property of those who designed the app primarily for the Chinese-speaking majority. The usage of technology stipulated by the modernization push of the Chinese authoritarian state then transforms both the bimo and technology. The resultant techno-culture not only builds upon, reinvents, develops and reinforces the allegedly diminishing Nuosu-Yi folkways – especially inter-clan competition – but also feeds the state-approved Yi folklore. The dialogic reconciliation of the top-down computerization of society and the bottom-up socialization of technology reveals itself as intrinsically connected to the culturally conditioned use of technology in our everyday lives.

The article analyzes the work of the first generation of Chinese anthropologists, who emulated the late-Qing intellectuals in indigenization of the colonial science through contacts with European and American colleagues, at the background of the historical, political and ideological context of the Republic of China (1911–1949). The analysis shows that although the Chinese historiography ex-post profiled them as members of two competing schools, anthropologists formed a fieldwork-oriented community of practice in which they opened up a discursive space not only for confrontation with the enemy during the Second Sino-Japanese War but also for a critical interrogation of the racial assimilationist ethnic policies of the ruling Kuomintang. Clinging to their different approaches, the debates produced various conceptualizations of their common goal: the unified Chinese nation. Contemporary Chinese ethnic policies also draw inspiration from the foundations of republican anthropology.

In late 2020, the Chinese Communist Party triumphantly declared an end to (absolute) poverty in the country. As one of the most poverty-stricken areas of China, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province came into the spotlight both domestically and internationally. International media reports, some of which embedded fragments of the author’s expert opinion, launched a discursive counter-offensive. Furthermore, both sides incorporated anecdotes told by local ethnic Nuosu-Yi individuals. Interested in discursive hegemony rather than informants’ voices, however, both somewhat conveniently failed to grasp the complex interplay between the everyday lives of Nuosu-Yi and the state-driven poverty alleviation campaign. Focusing on the creative livelihood strategies and choices reflected in the everyday practical and ritualistic treatment of the traditional Nuosu-Yi hearth, the present article ethnographically analyzes the tension between various (re)presentations of poverty and the Nuosu-Yi cosmology that is animated to absorb them and facilitate preservation and/or reinvention of Nuosu-Yi lifeways.

Based on the theoretical ideas of political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott (“seeing like a state”), the concept of “everyday politics” by historian Michael Szonyi, and the take on the practice theory by social anthropologist David Kurt Herold along with the use of data obtained through qualitative (n)ethnographic field research, this article brings a fresh perspective on the functioning of “Chinese Internet” during as well as beyond the COVID-19 epidemic. Its authors thoroughly analysed the dynamics of multimodal interaction between different types of media, cyberspace users as well as one of the authors of this text, identify metaphors used in politico-mythological tales told by the official media which since 2016 “must hold the family name of the Party”. Furthermore, it focuses on the subjective expressive practices of ordinary Chinese Internet users along with the ways of their production of the related digital folklore. The broader framework understands the Chinese society as “post-digital”, where the line between everyday offline and online life is increasingly becoming unclear. The open conclusions of the article call for the differentiation of the current dominant interpretation of the Chinese Internet almost exclusively through geopolitical metaphors. Most importantly, the paper demonstrates the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the Chinese cyberspace – a state-building instrument of the Communist Party which is used within the borders of the PRC for penetrating into its geographical peripheries as well as those of the privacy of individuals – from the “native” perspective of its ordinary users. Finally, the study shows that even the heavily regulated Chinese cyberspace has its own shifting peripheries over which the state (yet) does not exercise a firm control. In the context of the global pandemic situation, it indicates what the better understanding of the Chinese Internet may bring to the world beyond its borders.

The present paper describes the history of the clan of native headmen (ch. tusi, nuo. nzymop) carrying the Chinese surname An, although their native clan surname is actually Lili. It is likely that the original members belonged to the elite stratum of an ethnic group referred to as Wuman in Chinese sources, the most probable ancestors of the Nuosu people (a sub-branch of the Yi ethnic category). Today, they inhabit Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in the southwestern part of Sichuan province in South- west China. The An lineage ruled large stretches of land within the borders of the aforementioned prefecture during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, with some remaining in power until the mid-20th century. This reconstruction of local history describes the turbulent changes and discrepancies within the Native Chieftain System (ch. tusi zhidu), as well as the An clan itself, through the course of more than 600 years. It offers a variety of perspectives, seeking to describe events from national, local, Han and Nuosu viewpoints. Serving as a case study, it also provides a basic contextual insight into the past of the whole region, as well as the operation of the tusi system within the wider context of the Chinese empire. The depiction of this unique multi-cultural environment stems not only from the Nuosu and Chinese written sources, but also partially from extensive fieldwork and collected oral histories.

The present paper outlines the origins, changes and the development of systems of indirect rule in Southwest China. The final stage in the development of this political mechanism was the so-called “native chieftain system” (ch. tusi zhidu), through which the central court managed the peripheral regions of its empire during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. The paper focuses on the development of these systems of indirect rule from the Zhou dynasty (11th century BC) to the beginning of the 20th century. The native chieftain system was a turning point in the history of the approach to indirect rule, which was implemented by the Mongolians in the 13th century. They took advantage of the Chinese experience with the “haltered and bridled prefectures system” (ch. jimi zhidu) adding their own features. During the Ming and Qing dynasties many native chieftains (ch. tusi) were agents of the court, through whom the process of sinicization, and therefore colonization, was practiced. These processes were de facto completed in the first half of the 18th century, during the rule of the emperor Yongzheng. The paper further concludes that many of the features of modern national policy of the PRC were inherited from the political and geographical structure of the native chieftain system. Within the paper, relevant terminology has been translated into Czech in order to support future research initiatives.

Zhitian Guo, a lecturer at the School of Sociology of Central China Normal University, whose research focuses on ethnicity, social integration and education, brings a different, immensely important and valuable contribution to the debate about the relationship between the Liangshan Yi and the Chinese state through a sociological study of the ethnicity-focused generational changes among Liangshan Yi ethnic cadres, de facto interlocutors between the Liangshan Yi and the Beijing government. The foundation of this recently published work lies in Guo’s dissertation defended at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge. Being an ethnic Yi from Liangshan (who call themselves ‘Nuosu’) herself, with close relatives serving as cadres in the past, Guo brings us an emic, yet balanced and critical perspective uncovering sometimes dialectical, but also dialogical negotiation of the state-crafted ethnicity on the one side, and tactics of self-preservation regarding cadres’ ‘Yi-ness’ on the other. Her qualitative study is based on interviews with her informants, whom she mostly recruited through her personal network. Moreover, she triangulated the obtained information through textual resources, such as cadres’ diaries and official reports.