Megan Bryson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799546
- eISBN:
- 9781503600454
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799546.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese ...
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This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese frontier region from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Dali, a region where the cultures of China, India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia converge, has long served as a nexus of religious interaction even as its status has changed. Once the center of independent kingdoms, it was absorbed into the Chinese imperial sphere with the Mongol conquest and remained there ever since. Goddess on the Frontier examines how people in Dali developed regional religious identities through the lens of the local goddess Baijie, whose shifting identities over this span of time reflect shifting identities in Dali. She first appears as a Buddhist figure in the twelfth century, then becomes known as the mother of a regional ruler, next takes on the role of an eighth-century widow martyr, and finally is worshiped as a tutelary village deity. Each of her forms illustrates how people in Dali represented local identities through gendered religious symbols. Taken together, they demonstrate how regional religious identities in Dali developed as a gendered process as well as an ethno-cultural process. This book applies interdisciplinary methodology to a wide variety of newly discovered and unstudied materials to show how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in a frontier region.Less
This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese frontier region from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Dali, a region where the cultures of China, India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia converge, has long served as a nexus of religious interaction even as its status has changed. Once the center of independent kingdoms, it was absorbed into the Chinese imperial sphere with the Mongol conquest and remained there ever since. Goddess on the Frontier examines how people in Dali developed regional religious identities through the lens of the local goddess Baijie, whose shifting identities over this span of time reflect shifting identities in Dali. She first appears as a Buddhist figure in the twelfth century, then becomes known as the mother of a regional ruler, next takes on the role of an eighth-century widow martyr, and finally is worshiped as a tutelary village deity. Each of her forms illustrates how people in Dali represented local identities through gendered religious symbols. Taken together, they demonstrate how regional religious identities in Dali developed as a gendered process as well as an ethno-cultural process. This book applies interdisciplinary methodology to a wide variety of newly discovered and unstudied materials to show how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in a frontier region.
Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799553
- eISBN:
- 9781503601079
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799553.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
China’s Southwest, lacking locally grown cotton, had imported raw cotton, cotton yarn, and cotton cloth. Among our five village sites in mountainous Yunnan and Guizhou, differences in the distance ...
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China’s Southwest, lacking locally grown cotton, had imported raw cotton, cotton yarn, and cotton cloth. Among our five village sites in mountainous Yunnan and Guizhou, differences in the distance from industrial centers and the railway allowed some villages to specialize in hand woven textiles and other commercial crafts while other villages relied less on women’s handcraft labor. With milder winters, the work of cultivating double-cropped rice and opium left less time for handwork, and generated income used to buy textiles. The variations in Han women’s work and footbinding provide fertile ground for testing the relationship between girls’ labor and footbinding. The examination of Southwest China concludes with comparison to Gates’ earlier survey data on footbinding among nearly 5,000 Sichuan women.Less
China’s Southwest, lacking locally grown cotton, had imported raw cotton, cotton yarn, and cotton cloth. Among our five village sites in mountainous Yunnan and Guizhou, differences in the distance from industrial centers and the railway allowed some villages to specialize in hand woven textiles and other commercial crafts while other villages relied less on women’s handcraft labor. With milder winters, the work of cultivating double-cropped rice and opium left less time for handwork, and generated income used to buy textiles. The variations in Han women’s work and footbinding provide fertile ground for testing the relationship between girls’ labor and footbinding. The examination of Southwest China concludes with comparison to Gates’ earlier survey data on footbinding among nearly 5,000 Sichuan women.
Stevan Harrell (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520219885
- eISBN:
- 9780520935259
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520219885.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, which brings this little-known part of the world to life, is a ...
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Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, which brings this little-known part of the world to life, is a collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being an ethnographic study, it is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. The book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.Less
Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, which brings this little-known part of the world to life, is a collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being an ethnographic study, it is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. The book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.
Katherine Swancutt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199687411
- eISBN:
- 9780191767128
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199687411.003.0005
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Economic Systems
Drawing on ethnography from Southwest China, this chapter introduces the ‘anti-favour’ as a heuristic tool for showing how obligations are fulfilled at all costs. Favours are often equated with ...
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Drawing on ethnography from Southwest China, this chapter introduces the ‘anti-favour’ as a heuristic tool for showing how obligations are fulfilled at all costs. Favours are often equated with gratuitous acts or favoured exchanges amongst close contacts. In the anthropology of China, they are typically theorized as guanxi, central to the sociality of the Han Chinese majority. In contrast, a dramatic approach to the anti-favour is customary among the highland Nuosu, who harness the existentialist process of ‘ideasthesia’ to complete esteem-building ordeals. In moments of ideasthesia, Nuosu evoke their warrior’s aesthetics and exemplars of bravery, which trigger a physically felt foreshadowing of the obligations they must fulfil (including, at their most extreme, atonement suicides). What the dual focus on ideasthesia and the anti-favour offers, then, is a new insight into how different modes of esteem-building are constitutive of the decision to commit to the full weight of obligation.Less
Drawing on ethnography from Southwest China, this chapter introduces the ‘anti-favour’ as a heuristic tool for showing how obligations are fulfilled at all costs. Favours are often equated with gratuitous acts or favoured exchanges amongst close contacts. In the anthropology of China, they are typically theorized as guanxi, central to the sociality of the Han Chinese majority. In contrast, a dramatic approach to the anti-favour is customary among the highland Nuosu, who harness the existentialist process of ‘ideasthesia’ to complete esteem-building ordeals. In moments of ideasthesia, Nuosu evoke their warrior’s aesthetics and exemplars of bravery, which trigger a physically felt foreshadowing of the obligations they must fulfil (including, at their most extreme, atonement suicides). What the dual focus on ideasthesia and the anti-favour offers, then, is a new insight into how different modes of esteem-building are constitutive of the decision to commit to the full weight of obligation.
Zhenping Wang
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824836443
- eISBN:
- 9780824870904
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824836443.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter explains how Tang–Nanzhao relations underwent four stages from the 790s until the early tenth century. The first three decades, from the 790s to the 820s, saw collaboration between the ...
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This chapter explains how Tang–Nanzhao relations underwent four stages from the 790s until the early tenth century. The first three decades, from the 790s to the 820s, saw collaboration between the two countries in fighting Tibet. Nanzhao's stance toward the Tang in the following thirty years fluctuated between peaceful coexistence and border harassment. During the 860s, border conflicts escalated into fierce military confrontations that exhausted both Nanzhao and the Tang. After both countries became bogged down by domestic problems, a degree of normality returned to their relations that would last until the eventual collapse of the Tang in 906. The chapter also shows how the developments in bilateral relations were attributable entirely to the multi-polar geopolitical landscape in southwest China.Less
This chapter explains how Tang–Nanzhao relations underwent four stages from the 790s until the early tenth century. The first three decades, from the 790s to the 820s, saw collaboration between the two countries in fighting Tibet. Nanzhao's stance toward the Tang in the following thirty years fluctuated between peaceful coexistence and border harassment. During the 860s, border conflicts escalated into fierce military confrontations that exhausted both Nanzhao and the Tang. After both countries became bogged down by domestic problems, a degree of normality returned to their relations that would last until the eventual collapse of the Tang in 906. The chapter also shows how the developments in bilateral relations were attributable entirely to the multi-polar geopolitical landscape in southwest China.
Alice Yao
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199367344
- eISBN:
- 9780199367368
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367344.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms during the first ...
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Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms during the first millennium BC. Their distinctive material tradition—intricately cast bronze kettledrums and cowrie shell containers—have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule, however, imperial conquest under the Han state in 109 BC reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. The author grounds an archaeological account of the region where landscape histories and funerary traditions associated the Dian and Mimo polities bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and chiefly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how precious funerary offerings—drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries—distinguished personal biographies and memories that were central to the transmission of status across generations. Imperial incorporation therefore emerges as a problem that entangled Han bureaucratic time and historical production with the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles. The book extends conventional approaches to empires to show how the political time of prehistory can complicate imperial governance and recast rupture less as a fateful consequence than a contentious process involving local actors and generating new stakes.Less
Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms during the first millennium BC. Their distinctive material tradition—intricately cast bronze kettledrums and cowrie shell containers—have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule, however, imperial conquest under the Han state in 109 BC reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. The author grounds an archaeological account of the region where landscape histories and funerary traditions associated the Dian and Mimo polities bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and chiefly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how precious funerary offerings—drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries—distinguished personal biographies and memories that were central to the transmission of status across generations. Imperial incorporation therefore emerges as a problem that entangled Han bureaucratic time and historical production with the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles. The book extends conventional approaches to empires to show how the political time of prehistory can complicate imperial governance and recast rupture less as a fateful consequence than a contentious process involving local actors and generating new stakes.
