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.
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.
Corpse, Stone, Door, Text Mueggler, Erik
The Journal of Asian studies,
02/2014, Volume:
73, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking ...peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's beneficiaries or victims.
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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