Against the Flattening of Ridges and Ravines : (Dis)locating Cultural Security through Writing with the Yi of Southwest China

TY - CHAP

T1 - Against the Flattening of Ridges and Ravines : (Dis)locating Cultural Security through Writing with the Yi of Southwest China

AU - Karlach, Jan

PY - 2025/2/14

Y1 - 2025/2/14

N2 - The Yi nationality, an ethnopolitical category constructed during the 1950s nationality recognition campaign, is typically portrayed by the Chinese state and its citizens as a coherent ethnic group with shared cultural characteristics. This clichéd depiction reflects the state’s top-down cultural security imperative to present each nationality as a building block of the Chinese Nation. However, the official Chinese narrative of ethnic coherence starts to unravel when viewed from a bottom-up perspective built on the everyday practices of the Yi and non-Yi elites as well as of other stakeholders within the Yi nationality. Drawing on longitudinal and multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this chapter offers three ethnographic vignettes from Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces that reveal how ritual practitioners and ordinary people from different Yi ethnic sub-branches and localities seek to master the hegemonic voice within a wider “Yi-osphere.”

AB - The Yi nationality, an ethnopolitical category constructed during the 1950s nationality recognition campaign, is typically portrayed by the Chinese state and its citizens as a coherent ethnic group with shared cultural characteristics. This clichéd depiction reflects the state’s top-down cultural security imperative to present each nationality as a building block of the Chinese Nation. However, the official Chinese narrative of ethnic coherence starts to unravel when viewed from a bottom-up perspective built on the everyday practices of the Yi and non-Yi elites as well as of other stakeholders within the Yi nationality. Drawing on longitudinal and multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this chapter offers three ethnographic vignettes from Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces that reveal how ritual practitioners and ordinary people from different Yi ethnic sub-branches and localities seek to master the hegemonic voice within a wider “Yi-osphere.”

KW - Yi people

KW - Southwest China

KW - hegemony

KW - polyphonic writing

KW - metaphysical critique

KW - ethnography

U2 - 10.5117/9789463722889

DO - 10.5117/9789463722889

M3 - Chapter

SP - 227

EP - 249

BT - Cultural Security in Contemporary China and Mongolia

A2 - Ptáčková, Jarmila

A2 - Klimeš, Ondřej

PB - Amsterdam University Press

ER -