TY - JOUR
T1 - The Time of Red Snowfall
T2 - Steering Social and Cosmic Renewal in Southwest China
AU - Swancutt, Katherine
N1 - Funding Information:
Thanks go to all those who participated in the panel “Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion as Crossroads Encounters” at the 2020 Association for Asian Studies in Asia annual conference in Kobe, Japan, where I first presented the materials in this article. I would also like to thank Tony Milligan and Elisa Tamburo for their comments on an earlier draft, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their stimulating remarks. This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 856543).
Publisher Copyright:
© Nanzan University Anthropological Institute
PY - 2023/7/18
Y1 - 2023/7/18
N2 - Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, celebrate their Fire Festival with vibrant displays that evoke the myth-historical blunder of a hero killing a spirit. To atone for this blunder, they compete in arts and sports before spectators, judges, and the sky god, who receives their displays as ritual blandishments and expresses his satisfaction by sparing lives. These two-way displays typically continue until Nuosu pay their sacrificial debt to the sky god through the ritual for “the descent and exchange of the soul.” But many Nuosu approach the Fire Festival differently in the northeastern Liangshan mountains, where they seek to avoid summoning red snowfall, a euphemism that refers to a generations-old war, extreme bloodshed, and perhaps even the origins of humankind. Here, Nuosu call their sacrifices to the sky god “turning back the enemy” and move their competitions to unconventional days that fall outside of the Fire Festival’s celebratory window. By steering this season of social and cosmic renewal in a prosperous direction, Nuosu across Liangshan engage in worldmaking acts that show the conceptual value of the anthropology of display.
AB - Each year the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, celebrate their Fire Festival with vibrant displays that evoke the myth-historical blunder of a hero killing a spirit. To atone for this blunder, they compete in arts and sports before spectators, judges, and the sky god, who receives their displays as ritual blandishments and expresses his satisfaction by sparing lives. These two-way displays typically continue until Nuosu pay their sacrificial debt to the sky god through the ritual for “the descent and exchange of the soul.” But many Nuosu approach the Fire Festival differently in the northeastern Liangshan mountains, where they seek to avoid summoning red snowfall, a euphemism that refers to a generations-old war, extreme bloodshed, and perhaps even the origins of humankind. Here, Nuosu call their sacrifices to the sky god “turning back the enemy” and move their competitions to unconventional days that fall outside of the Fire Festival’s celebratory window. By steering this season of social and cosmic renewal in a prosperous direction, Nuosu across Liangshan engage in worldmaking acts that show the conceptual value of the anthropology of display.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85166341696&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
SN - 1882-6865
VL - 82
SP - 141
EP - 164
JO - Asian Ethnology
JF - Asian Ethnology
IS - 1
ER -