Lijiang Stories

Shamans, Taxi Drivers, and Runaway Brides in Reform-Era China

Emily Chao

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780295804385
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the essentialization of difference shape the ways in which Naxi residents represent and interpret their social world. The vignettes presented here are lively examples of the cultural reverberations that have occurred throughout contemporary China in the wake of its emergence as a global giant. With particular attention to the politics of gender, ethnicity, and historical representation, Chao reveals how citizens strategically imagine, produce, and critique a new moral economy in which the market and neoliberal logic are preeminent.

1

THE MAOIST SHAMAN AND THE MADMAN

On a cool summer afternoon in 1991, a shaman (sanba) arrived in a dusty, mud-brick Naxi village to cure a farmer who had gone mad. During the ritual that followed, the shaman called on Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping to assist her in driving out demons, while she instructed the madman to brace up, learn from Lei Feng, and work for the greater good of his country. The shaman chanted: “The madman is one of the wretched masses. Arise if you don’t want to be enslaved! Let our flesh and blood build the next Great Wall.” She incorporated political slogans and phrases from the Chinese national anthem into her ritual incantations. She wore a shoulder bag adorned with a Red Guard armband and marched around the madman’s courtyard as if she were going into battle. The shaman bowed to the gods and burned incense, but she also invoked the “gods” and the experiences of the Chinese revolution—all in an attempt to save the madman.

This extraordinary ritual was held in East Wind Village in southwest China.¹ The shaman grafted national discourse onto local ritual structure in a context in which there had once been a clear division between the state and the shamanic. Her performance revealed both the penetration of state power and the agency of the shaman in creating a syncretic form of ritual practice that momentarily blurred national and local epistemologies. During the ritual, the shaman’s conjurings created a site for the reinscription of ritual meaning and the opening of new contingencies and ambivalences. The village audience immediately debated the merits of the ritual and ultimately assessed it to be a failure. However, whether a ritual is socially judged a success or a failure should not be the primary criterion for its examination; of greater interest is understanding why a given ritual was or was not socially persuasive.

Anthropological analysis has largely privileged rituals that are routinely performed and dramatize shared meanings and visions of reality. Failed rituals, those not associated with the successful reassertion or transformation of social order, are often relegated to the analyst’s dustbin. Examining failed ritual redirects the analytic gaze toward local processes of legitimation and authentication, and simultaneously avoids accepting merely temporary arrangements of power as part of a timeless cultural essence. Although shifting the analytic focus from ritual to ritualization avoids the reification of ritual by attending to processes, it is still informed by the functionalist celebration of normative practice. Understanding the failure of ritual draws us into the complex arena of conflict and contingency where social dynamics enable new identities or create marginal ones.

Failed ritual in this case may be understood through a series of contextualizations that revealed ambivalence among East Wind villagers about national identity, ritual discourse, class, and symbols of power in the 1990s. The shaman’s ritual brought out contradictions between Naxi historical experiences and a sense of shared national Chinese identity. The performance created a context in which different understandings of ritual among villagers and the lack of a singular all-encompassing belief system became apparent. And, finally, the shaman’s use of Maoist symbols of power led villagers to rethink their objections to the very economic inequalities that had mobilized them to hold the ritual in the first place.

NAXI

There are approximately 250,000 Naxi residing in Lijiang Autonomous Naxi Prefecture in Yunnan.² East Wind Village is located in the Lijiang basin, about an hour and a half by bicycle from Lijiang Town, the cultural and marketing center of Lijiang Prefecture.

The village, built under the shadow of Wood Ear Mountain, faces a flat plain of dry farmland on which villagers grow wheat, corn, and beans. The village is composed of a number of walled courtyards connected by a maze of narrow dirt alleys. Each courtyard has one or two buildings made of redmud bricks covered with pine fronds or gray ceramic tiles. Villagers use these buildings as living quarters and for raising pigs and chickens for household consumption. Only about a third of the village’s eighty-four households have a draft animal, and most of these animals are collectively owned by close patrilineal kin whose courtyards tend to cluster together. East Wind Village has some of the poorest land in the Lijiang basin. Unlike that of neighboring villages, its land does not allow for rice cultivation. Water shortages are not uncommon. Families are allotted two-thirds of an acre (four mu) of land per person, in contrast to the one-third to half of an acre (two to three mu) per person allotted to basin villages with superior land. Except for the seasonal gathering of wild “matsutake mushrooms” (songrong) and “wood ear” (muer) from Wood Ear Mountain, the residents of East Wind Village are primarily subsistence agriculturalists.

Poor agricultural yields continued to hinder economic growth and prosperity into the 1990s. Only a handful of families had direct access to cash, either from the pensions of retired family members or from the salaries of employed family members who resided outside the village. Before the Chinese revolution in 1949, a single landlord family owned the choicest land in East Wind Village. Two other lineages owned the remaining village land. With the exception of one Han family, all the contemporary residents of the village claim to be descendants of these three Naxi lineages. Small, family-based farms were prevalent in East Wind Village before 1949, as they were in 1991.

Early in the 1990s, villagers conceived of recent history as divided into “pre- and post-liberation” eras.³ At this time, the vast majority of East Wind Village residents supported the socialist state and had negative views of the pre-1949 era, which they associated with memories of hardship and poverty. Nevertheless, they did not have fond memories of collectivized farming and the political strife of the Maoist era. Many complained about the lack of freedom resulting from controlled work routines, and many recalled the collective era as one of frequent hunger. Production team authorities on collective farms—under pressure to represent their teams as successful—exaggerated actual grain yields, and as a result the village had barely enough grain for its own survival. Many villagers perceived collective-era “cadres” (ganbu), a term that refers to all officials in postrevolutionary China, as favoring their own immediate families in work assignments and work point allocations. Surprisingly, even the relatives of collective officials were critical of the officials’ behavior. The resentment one detects in these accounts suggests that the collective era was characterized by strained kinship ties.

The most salient distinctions between villagers during the Maoist era were expressed in the idiom of class. Class labels, mandated by the Agrarian Reform Law of 1950, were assigned by local cadres. There was an element of arbitrariness to these labels because, particularly in minority areas such as Lijiang Prefecture, there were often only slight economic distinctions among villagers. Yet, in an attempt to conform to national directives, local officials dutifully assigned class labels. Cadres and members of the Red Guard organized class struggle sessions in which the masses publicly criticized neighbors identified by these labels as having exploitative class backgrounds. In East Wind Village, the most prosperous household was assigned the label of “landlord” (dizhu). The vast majority of villagers were classified as “poor peasants” (pinnong) who farmed small plots of land and hired themselves out as agricultural workers to make ends meet. A handful of villagers were “middle peasants” (zhongnong), meaning they were small subsistence farmers, or “rich peasants” (funong). The male descendants of the sole landlord family left the village, and the female descendants married into poor-peasant families. Although it is common knowledge that middle-peasant and rich-peasant families in East Wind Village incurred severe criticism from their neighbors—some were beaten and had their property confiscated—these families were loath to discuss this era. Many of the villagers enthusiastically supported the Communist Party during the Maoist era, but they seemed cynical, if not embarrassed, about this in the early 1990s. However, two village elders remained proud of their pasts as early recruits to the Communist Party; they had worked in the underground movement, wielded some political power during the Maoist era, and by the early 1990s were “cadres who had taken early retirement” (lixiu ganbu). Then again, survival during the Maoist era for many of the older villagers meant passively conforming to the rhetoric of the time. Many older women who could not speak Chinese or understand the ideological content of political recitations talked about using songs as mnemonic devices so that they could reproduce the required political responses.

While decollectivization and the household responsibility system (chengbao), both instituted in 1980, marked a significant improvement in the standard of living in East Wind Village as a whole, they also brought about new economic inequalities between individual households. Decollectivization dismantled the collectives, which had been in existence since 1957, and instituted a system of village-based government. In concert with this, the Household Responsibility System allotted land to individual households, which then became independent economic units. Village residents unanimously preferred the Household Responsibility System to the system of “collective agriculture” (jiti). More than half of the buildings in East Wind Village had been built after decollectivization. By the 1990s, villagers had enough to eat and many families boasted of being able to eat meat at least once a week. Villagers highly valued the freedom to organize their own work routines. During the 1980s, rapidly changing standards of living in both the town and the basin made most villagers optimistic about the future. In the early 1990s, villagers would gather curiously at the few households with television sets and young people proudly sported fashionable clothing bought from stores in town. Some of the younger men planted fruit trees, and others planned to build a fish pond. Most villagers, however, continued to rely primarily on the farming of grain and beans, as they had done before 1949, and by the early 1990s, many villagers had begun to doubt the state’s promises that exemplary households would serve as models ushering in prosperity for all. A few exemplary households continued to thrive into the 1990s, but the village remained far from prosperous.

DIVINATORY DISCOURSE AND THE MAGIC OF MAO

As the shaman entered the madman’s courtyard, a rapt crowd of villagers gathered to watch her arrange offerings for the ritual. The villagers had high expectations of the shaman. Someone in an adjacent Naxi village had recommended her after she “cured” a local woman who had been unable to bear children.

A woman in her early forties, the shaman wore a Heqing Bai minority headdress, a Red Guard shoulder bag slung over an ordinary blue cotton shirt, apron-covered trousers, and the ubiquitous army-green tennis shoes. The shaman was not Naxi but of the Bai nationality. This was immediately apparent from the headdress, which identified her as from Heqing, about thirty miles (fifty km) from Lijiang Town; it is standard for rural Bai women to wear the headdress of their area. She conducted the ritual in Yunnanese, the lingua franca of the Lijiang basin area as well as of Heqing. What villagers found peculiar about her appearance was the Red Guard shoulder bag, a Cultural Revolution relic rarely seen in the post-Mao-era Lijiang countryside. Villagers claimed that the shaman was originally a poor peasant who had once been a Red Guard and Communist Party official with a high enough rank to have attended political conferences as far away as Kunming, the provincial capital.

The shaman first burned incense and prepared colored flags, which she positioned according to compass points associated with fire, water, metal, and wood. She placed an assortment of offerings in cups and bowls in the center of the courtyard next to a live chicken. The shaman’s actions—burning incense and bowing to the gods of the East, West, North, South, and Center—constituted chu ba zei, the standard procedure for beginning rituals in Lijiang Prefecture. Some Naxi families worship the gods by performing chu ba zei on the first and fifteenth of each month.

The shaman then began to sing: “I came to save the madman because I pity him! The madman is one of the wretched masses! We invite Mao Zhuxi [Chairman Mao], Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping to come and save the madman!” By invoking these names, she replaced a local ritual structure composed of the gods of heaven, mountain, and earth with a nationalized ritual structure presided over by this deified postrevolutionary trinity.

The shaman raised some wine cups toward the sky and poured water as if offering it to an invisible entity, and then she scattered rice in four directions as offerings to the gods. Addressing the madman, she began singing from the Chinese national anthem: “Arise if you don’t want to be enslaved! Let our flesh and blood be used to build the next Great Wall!” She interrupted the anthem to begin singing verses from an anti-Japanese war hymn, during which she dramatized a mock decapitation: “We’ll wield our knife toward the demons and cut off a demon’s head! One-two, one-two-three, one-two-three-four!” She marched as if in battle, singing this strange medley interspersed with quotes from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Mao 1969), sung to the tune “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music, and exhortations to “emulate Lei Feng” (xuexi Lei Feng).

Her words were all too familiar; these songs once performed in schools and during political meetings evoked memories from the not-so-distant past and aroused vague feelings of patriotism and determination to carry out political campaigns or tasks of heavy labor. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), loudspeakers roused the villagers every morning with the inevitable revolutionary songs or the exercise count one-two-three-four (yi-er-san-si), which echoed through the village. Quotations from Chairman Mao, recited like daily mantras, spoke of what many villagers who had been true believers once considered the very meaning of life.⁴ “Emulate Lei Feng!”—repeated every decade or so—exhorted the masses to learn and model their behavior on the personal sacrifices of that paragon of Communist righteousness. First in the 1960s, and then numerous times thereafter, the state promoted Lei Feng, a PLA soldier and tireless worker, as a model of socialist sacrifice. Lei Feng had rescued a bus filled with children by propping up a falling telephone pole, which eventually crushed and killed him. His diaries, often miraculously discovered in different places at the same time during Learn from Lei Feng campaigns, were narratives of sacrifice and tireless enthusiasm for serving the people. Versions of these diaries were the mainstay of political study sessions for years (Farquhar 1996). Lei Feng was both an embodiment of the Communist spirit (Spence 1990, 727) and a virtuous exemplar narrativized in the fashion of imperial and pre-1949 worthies (Ebrey 1981, 382).⁵

The strange juxtaposition of shamanic activity and revolutionary text made many of the young people whisper and giggle nervously. Shamanism belonged to the realm of prerevolutionary local practices that remained outside state control and was antithetical to the political slogans that articulated the voice of the state. Despite this apparent incoherence, many of the older people watched attentively; the performance even transfixed some of them. The shaman appeared to use song and slogan as mnemonic devices with which to conjure strong attitudes and emotions from specific historical memories. In doing this, she sought to mobilize the madman and the audience by appropriating the fierce determination of the past for battle in a new context of demon quelling.

After the shaman threw the increasingly dazed chicken in various directions, telling the madman to fetch it each time, the ritual began to wind down. A cool breeze was blowing, but the shaman’s clothes were wet with perspiration as she alternately sang and trembled. More than an hour later, the shaman fed the chicken some rice and said, “Now they’ve eaten their fill and drunk until they are no longer thirsty, and so we ask that the demons go away and allow the madman to recover.” Then she instructed the madman to bow in the direction of the village graveyard. The ritual closed with the host, some relatives, the madman, and the shaman walking to the graveyard to send off the demons. Once there, the group killed and feasted on the chicken.

Later, the relatives of the madman graciously thanked the shaman and sent her on her way with ten duck eggs. Relatives of the madman described the duck eggs as a gift or a token of the host family’s gratitude.

Within moments of her departure, the village was abuzz with criticism of the ritual and the shaman. Before the shaman’s arrival, the villagers had generally felt that one or more demons were afflicting the madman. After the ritual, however, and in spite of the shaman’s demon-quelling efforts, the madman did not appear either substantially improved or particularly mad but was quiet and withdrawn. Most villagers felt that the shaman had not cured the madman, although some were hopeful that he might improve with time. By the next day, public opinion had moved toward a negative evaluation of the ritual itself. Some villagers called the shaman a “cheat” (pianzi), who had only come to East Wind Village seeking material gain. An older man complained, “She said Mao, Zhou, and Deng sent her to save the madman; she didn’t know the names of the gods and didn’t know how to sing shaman songs,” and he imitated the high, melodic tune shamans sang. Many of the older villagers rejected the shaman’s performance because her words, songs, and appearance were simply inconsistent with their cultural categories and shared memories of shamans and shamanic rituals. Before 1949, shamans in the Lijiang basin were men who wore cloth turbans, wielded drums or swords, and sang secret shamanic songs in a high melodic whisper.⁶ This shaman, many villagers pointed out, was a woman—wearing an ethnic-minority headdress and toting a Red Guard bag—who sang revolutionary songs and spouted political slogans.

Most of the villagers under the age of forty had never seen a shaman perform, and their knowledge of shamanism was based on older villagers’ memories of the performances of a shaman who had lived in the village before 1949. Their rejection of this shaman was based not so much on skepticism about her authenticity as on disapproval of what they saw as her promotion of the Maoist era. For many of the young people, the shaman’s Red Guard shoulder bag and strident rhetoric suggested a reinvocation of values they had once subscribed to and had since rejected. But did the reje...