The Bittersweet Taste of Rice. Sloping Land Conversion and the Shifting Livelihoods of the Drung in Northwest Yunnan (China)

Economic development and environmental protection have often proved to be conflicting driving forces behind change in northwest Yunnan province, China. In 2003, the Sloping Land Conversion Program brought an end to traditional shifting cultivation in the Dulong valley—part of the Gaoligong Mountain Nature Reserve, Gongshan County— and is now threatening Drung people’s livelihood and culture while further increasing villagers’ dependence on state subsidies. This paper addresses the implementation of this program and the difficulties encountered by locals in relation to environmental protection and economic development issues. It describes the specificities of swidden cultivation and explores aspects of human-environment relatedness in the Dulong Valley

Devenirs identitaires dans les confins Sino-Tibétains : contextes et transformations

International audienceThis article discusses the fl uidity of ethnic categorization in the context of changing ethnic relations, based on a diachronic and regional approach. It is argued that such an approach is needed to understand identity trajectories of peoples of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. While studies on minorities in China are often limited to one ethnic group, the perspective defended here considers the interactions between several groups in specifi c contexts, and at diff erent scales, which contribute to determine shifts in identity. The analysis focuses on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands of today’s Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, and the diverse and often Tibetanized groups located in these mountains. Taking into account the changing socio-political environment, mainly from the late Qing to the People’s Republic of China, helps us to uncover a number of factors determining the identity formation of the groups under consideration, and the persistence of a form of genealogical thinking. A range of cases is considered to provide comparative data at the regional level,supporting the degree of generality of the lability of ethnic categorization as well as identity changes, and the disjunctions between assigned categories,culture, language, and local identity

Tricks of the Trade: Debt and Imposed Sovereignty in Southernmost Kham in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries

Southernmost Kham, which borders Burma and Yunnan Province, remained at the juncture of several mutually competing political centers until the first half of the twentieth century. On the fringes of Tibetan, Naxi, and Chinese expansion and increasing political control, several Tibeto-Burman­–speaking groups such as the Drung and Nung gradually became integrated into their neighbors’ polities. Their political dependency often arose from trading with and accepting loans from commercial agents and from the intermediaries of local rulers, Naxi and Tibetans alike. This article addresses this practice of providing credit, which was developed at the expense of impoverished groups who were often obliged to accept the terms of the transaction. The author particularly emphasizes the connections between this system of debt dependency, the relationship between creditors and debtors that has to be considered in terms of exchange and reciprocity, and the question of political legitimacy. Within this broader context of regional interethnic relations, the article provides a detailed analysis of the concrete terms of the political relationship that existed between Drung communities and Tibetan chiefs of Tsawarong, which contributes to an understanding of the workings of this relationship and its economic, territorial, and even ritual components. Keywords: Tibet, Kham, Drung, Nung, Naxi, trade, debt, tax, legitimacy, ritua

Introduction to "Frontier Tibet: Trade and Boundaries of Authority in Kham"

The contributions in this issue focus on the period from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, when this “frontier Tibet” [Kham] formed a middle ground in which local communities, the central Tibetan government (Ganden Phodrang), the Chinese imperial government (Qing), and later the republican authorities negotiated means of accommodation and established new institutions and practices. Against this historical background, the articles address questions of economic history, cultural interchange, and political legitimation and contestation at critical historical junctures. They show in particular how historical developments in trade and commerce are interlaced with notions of wealth and value, and linked to political control and authority. Together they bring new, ethnographically oriented historical studies into the arena of theoretical approaches to borderlands and corridors of contact..

The missing share: The ritual language of sharing as a "total social fact" in the Eastern Himalayas (Northwest Yunnan, China)

26 p.Leach used the notion of “ritual language” in order to show that ritual acts are ways of “saying things,” but also that this language is common to otherwise dissimilar groups and serves to express or validate social status. Drawing on this proposition, I investigate in an historical perspective the interethnic relationships between Drung, Nung, Naxi and Tibetan in northwest Yunnan. Pointing out some basic characteristic of their past political relations, I discuss the ritual/power/fertility complex in the broader eastern Himalayas, centering my analysis on the ritual slaughter of animals and the distribution of their flesh. In the process of partaking is expressed a more general model on which power relationships are articulated, between humans as well as between humans and some spirits. I argue that the notion of debt can help in characterizing the underlying structure of a ritual language common to the people inhabiting the Eastern Himalayas

Shih Chuan-kang, Quest for Harmony. The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life

This long-awaited work by Shih Chuan-kang offers a precise ethnography and solidly researched discussion on kinship among the Mosos (Mosuo in Pinyin), sedentary farmers in Yunnan also known by the generic name Na. The Mosos are officially associated with the Naxi “nationality,” despite major socio-cultural differences. In fact, Moso society is matrilineal and matrilocal, and is noted for treating marriage as a marginal practice alongside a free sexual union system called tisese (literally “wa..

Aurélie Névot, Comme le sel, je suis le cours de l’eau. Le chamanisme à écriture des Yi du Yunnan (Chine)

Aurélie Névot, Comme le sel, je suis le cours de l’eau. Le chamanisme à écriture des Yi du Yunnan (Chine), Nanterre, Société d’ethnologie (Recherches sur la Haute Asie, 16), 2008, 317 p. Cet ouvrage ethnologique porte sur la « religion chamanique » des Nipa de la Forêt de pierre au Yunnan, l’un des groupes qui composent la vaste et composite « nationalité minoritaire » Yi – au total près de huit millions de personnes dans tout le sud-ouest de la Chine. Aurélie Névot y déploie une double analy..

Erik Mueggler, Songs for Dead Parents. Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler aborde dans ce livre la place des morts, âmes ancestrales ou esseulées, et confronte l’idée que les démons des autres ne sont pas si différents des siens. En l’occurrence, ces autres sont les Lòlop’ò de la province du Yunnan en Chine, auprès desquels Mueggler conduit ses recherches depuis 1992. Son excellente monographie, The Age of Wild Ghosts, abordait déjà les conséquences sociales de l’interdiction de procéder aux rituels funéraires pendant la période maoïste et montrait com..

Aurélie Névot, Comme le sel, je suis le cours de l’eau. Le chamanisme à écriture des Yi du Yunnan (Chine)

Aurélie Névot, Comme le sel, je suis le cours de l’eau. Le chamanisme à écriture des Yi du Yunnan (Chine), Nanterre, Société d’ethnologie (Recherches sur la Haute Asie, 16), 2008, 317 p. Cet ouvrage ethnologique porte sur la « religion chamanique » des Nipa de la Forêt de pierre au Yunnan, l’un des groupes qui composent la vaste et composite « nationalité minoritaire » Yi – au total près de huit millions de personnes dans tout le sud-ouest de la Chine. Aurélie Névot y déploie une double analy..