The paper road Mueggler, Erik
2011., 20111003, 2011, 2011-11-02
eBook
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens ...from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows ...how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed.Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.
The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, ...China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinship of bondage and the bondage of kinship are best seen as participating reciprocally in a single field of relations. I then follow a group of domestic slaves as they travel to the administrative city and search for a litigation master to write up their own legal plaint. With this exercise, I propose a second methodological argument: that reading and writing are complex human skills, often partly available even to those who cannot use pen and paper, and involving the coordination of forms of textuality across different planes of inscription.
This essay explores the Nasu or Né variety of the “Yi” writing system, used in many indigenous communities in southwest China. I argue that Né texts participate in a distinctive form of life for ...humans, ancestors, and spirits. At the levels of graph, verse, and page, textual practice traverses meaning and image to amplify ritual practices that manage relations between humans and non-humans. This analysis works against the “modernist” sense that Né texts can be understood, severed from the context of their creation, iteration, and recitation, as “literature”.
Cet essai examine la variante Nasu ou Né du système d’écriture « Yi », utilisé dans de nombreuses communautés indigènes du sud-ouest de la Chine. Je défends l’idée que les textes Né contribuent à créer une forme de vie particulière pour les humains, les ancêtres et les esprits. Aux niveaux de la graphie, du vers et de la page, la pratique textuelle traverse le sens et l’image pour renforcer les pratiques rituelles qui gèrent les relations entre humains et non-humains. Cette analyse va à l’encontre de l’idée « moderniste » selon laquelle les textes Né peuvent être pris, séparés du contexte de leur création, de leur itération et de leur récitation, comme de la « littérature ».
In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the ...margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community--a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.
This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after ...this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity-obsessed cultures of urban and semi-urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more 'modern', allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in 'modernized' forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression. Le présent article compare les lamentations funéraires dans une communauté de langue tibéto-birmane du Yunnan, en Chine, sur deux périodes : début des années 1990, alors que le rituel était en pleine renaissance, et 2011, suite à des contacts plus étroits de cette communauté avec la Chine urbaine et semi-urbaine, obsédée par la modernité. Les lamentations donnent forme au chagrin sur la scène publique en conceptualisant les défunts et leurs relations avec les vivants dans un langage poétique fleuri. Les lamentations du début des années 1990 décrivaient ces relations comme un cycle de souffrance dans lequel les enfants remboursaient, après la mort de leurs parents, une dette de souffrance qu'ils avaient envers ceux-ci. En 2011, des pleureuses innovantes ont réorienté leur interprétation de la souffrance vers une émotion personnelle, intérieure et intime, rendant ainsi les morts plus « modernes » tout en permettant aux vivants, définis largement par leurs relations avec les défunts, de participer à des formes « modernisées » d'expression émotionnelle, sincère et authentique.
In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis Charles Rock made a brief trip to England. He clipped the obituary of an old friend from the Times and ...pasted it in his diary. On the facing page, he pasted a photograph two decades old, and wrote this caption:J. F. Rock (standing) with his older friend Fred Muir, Entomologist at the Hawaii Sugar Planter's Experiment Station, Honolulu. Photographed in our home in Liloa Rise (Breaside), Honolulu in the spring of 1913, while our phonograph played Spiritu Gentile, Caruso singing.
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens ...from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
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