Chieftains Into Ancestors : Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China

Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint. Telling the story of a quintessential Chinese culture that spread uniformly from the administrative heartland to the previously untamed periphery, official records have largely ignored the local histories of the country's conquered peoples, preserved for generations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious rituals. The history of southwestern China, a region known today for its minority character, is the subject of this volume. In "Chieftains into Ancestors, " the authors describe the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture. Since the acceptance of a new socio-political structure never happens overnight, they observe local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, focusing on examples from the southwestern Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new history of China's southwestern region - one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China's nation-building process. David Faure is Wei Lun Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include "Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China."Ho Ts'ui-p'ing is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica and an adjunct associate professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University. She is the co-editor of "State, Market and Ethnic Groups Contextualized." Contributors: Lian Ruizhi, Huang Shu-li, James Wilkerson, He Xi, Xie Xiaohui, Kao Ya-ning, and Zhang Yingqiang. Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, largely ignoring the local histories that were preserved for generations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious ritual. Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture. Observing local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, it focuses on examples from the southwestern Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new history of China's southwestern region – one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China's nation-building process. While official Chinese history has always been written from acentrist viewpoint, Chieftains into Ancestors describes theintersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated localculture in the culturally diverse southwestern region of China. Contemplating the rhetorical question of how one can begin to rewritethe story of a conquered people whose past was never transcribed in thefirst place, the authors combine anthropological fieldwork withhistorical textual analysis to build a new regionalhistory one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, andgendered transformations that took place in Chinasnation-building process project_muse_41946-1632834 project_muse_41946-1632835 project_muse_41946-1632836 project_muse_41946-1632837 project_muse_41946-1632838 project_muse_41946-1632839 project_muse_41946-1632840 project_muse_41946-1632841 project_muse_41946-1632842 project_muse_41946-1632843 project_muse_41946-1632844 project_muse_41946-1632845 project_muse_41946-1632846 project_muse_41946-1632847 project_muse_41946-1632848 project_muse_41946-1632849 project_muse_41946-1632850 project_muse_41946-1632851 An in-depth examination of how the Chinese imperial state impacted the social order of southwestern China's minority peoples and redefined their histories and culture.