Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:36:08.130Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Corpse, Stone, Door, Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2014

Erik Mueggler
Get access

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 17 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Ahearn, Laura. 2001. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Anagnost, Ann. 1997. National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Apter, David E., and Saich, Tony. 1994. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony. 2011. “Paper, Pen and Print: the Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge Order.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(2):232–60.Google Scholar
Bergeton, Uffe. 2013 “From Pattern to ‘Culture’?: Emergence and Transformation of Metacultural Wén” PhD diss., University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Besnier, Niko. 1995. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blomaert, Jan. 2008. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bol, Peter. 1992. This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bradley, David. 2007. “Birth-order Terms in Lisu: Inheritance and Contact.” Anthropological Linguistics 49(1):54–69.Google Scholar
Brose, Michael. 2005. “Uyghur Technologists of Writing and Literacy in Mongol China.” Tong Pao 91(4–5):396–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Kathryn. 2010. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Chen Wen, comp. [1455] 1995. Jingtai Yunnan tujing zhishu jiaozhu [Records of Yunnan with maps from the Jingtai reign, collated and annotated]. Collated and annotated by Li Chunlong and Liu Jingmao. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.Google Scholar
de Groot, Jan Jacob Maria. 1897–1910. The Religious System of China, Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect, Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith, 6 vols. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Spivak, Gayatri. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Ebrey, Patricia. 1990. “Cremation in Sung China.” American Historical Review 95(2):406–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fan Zhuo [864] 1962. Man shu jiaoju [Annotated book of barbarians]. Annotated by Xiang Da (Xiang Juemin). Beijing Zhonghua shuju.Google Scholar
Geertz, Hildred, and Geertz, Clifford. 1964. “Teknonymy in Bali: Parenthood, Age-grading and Genealogical Amnesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 94(2):94–108.Google Scholar
Gernet, Jacques. 1963. “La Chine, aspects et fonctions psychologiques de l'écriture” [China: Aspects and psychological functions of its writing]. In L'écriture et la psychologie des peuples [Writing and the psychology of peoples], ed. Cohen, Marcel, 29–49. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack, and Watt, Ian. 1963. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(3):304–45.Google Scholar
Gu Yuejuan. 2007. Nanzhao shi gaiyao [Outline of Nanzhao history]. Kunming: Yunnan Daxue chubanshe.Google Scholar
Herman, John E. 1997. “Empire in the Southwest: Early Qing Reforms to the Native Chieftain System.” Journal of Asian Studies 56(1):47–74.Google Scholar
Herman, John E. 2007. Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hershatter, Gail. 2011. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, William. 1966. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Howard, Angela. 1997. “The Dharani Pillar of Kunming, Yunnan. A Legacy of Esoteric Buddhism and Burial Rites of the Bai People in the Kingdom of Dali (937–1253).” Artibus Asiae 57(1):33–72.Google Scholar
Hua Lin. 1997. “Yunnan shaoshu minzu wenzi lishi shike dang'an shuping” [Inscribed stone archives of the history of Yunnan minority languages]. Xinnan Minzu Xueyuan xuebao 18(3):36–41.Google Scholar
Huang Zhaizhong. 1849. Daoguan Dading Fu zhi [Daoguan period gazetteer of Dading Fu].Google Scholar
Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2013. “On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1):1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, James. 1985. “Food Supply and Population Growth in Southwest China, 1250–1850.” Journal of Asian Studies 41(4):711–46.Google Scholar
Lietard, Alfred. 1913. Au Yun-nan: Les Lo-lo p'o [Yunnan: The Lo-lo p'o]. Munster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuch-handlung.Google Scholar
Rongfu, Liu and Xun, Li, eds. 1845. Dayao Xian zhi, juan 7 [Gazetteer of Dayao County, vol. 7].Google Scholar
Liu Yaohan. 1980. “You nulizhi xiang fengjianzhi guodu de yige dianxing shili” [A typical case of the transition from slavery to feudalism]. In Yizu shehui lishi diaocha yanjiu wenji [A collection of papers on the historical investigation of Yi society], 10–43. Beijing: Minzu chubanshe.Google Scholar
Marcus, Joyce. 1976. “The Origins of Mesoamerican Writing.” Annual Review of Anthropology 5:35–67.Google Scholar
Mueggler, Erik. 1998. “The Poetics of Hemp and the Price of Grief.” Journal of Asian Studies 57(4):979–1008.Google Scholar
Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mueggler, Erik. 2011. The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Oppitz, Michael, and Hsu, Elizabeth. 1998. Naxi and Moso Ethnography: Kin, Rites, Pictographs. Zurich: Volkerkundemusem.Google Scholar
Rappaport, Joanne, and Cummings, Tom. 2011. Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Zengrui, Rui. 2000. “Yizu wenhua liang ti” [Two questions on Yi culture]. Chuxiong Zhou Shifanxue bao 2000(2):1–4.Google Scholar
Salomon, Frank, and Nino-Murcia, Mercedes. 2011. The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fuwang, Yang. 2008. Minzuxue shiye zhong de Menglian Yi cun: bianqian yu fazhan [Ethnology of Menglian Yi villages: Change and development]. Kunming: Yunnan Daxue chubanshe.Google Scholar
Fuwang, Yang and Qiongying, Yang. 2000. “Yizu huozang wenhua chugai” [A preliminary study of the crematory culture of the Yi nationality]. Minzuxue yanjiu 32(6):65–70.Google Scholar