Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. xii, 246 pp. (Illustrations.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-9954-6.
Can the story of a goddess illuminate how borderlands’ peoples position themselves against empires and nations? Megan Bryson is largely successful in arguing that the tale of Baijie, “goddess on the frontier,” provides such insights. Baijie was not a single deity but rather four legendary figures linked by name, gender, and location of worship in the Dali region of China’s Yunnan Province. To tell the tale of all four Baijie legends, Bryson’s book sprawls across a millennium, from the Dali Kingdom (937–1253) to the present, and analyzes the textual and visual representations of Baijie. The book seeks to reveal how “Baijie’s transformations from the twelfth century to the present have echoed and shaped Dali’s local identity and how it has been gendered” (2). This is a particularly insightful contribution to understandings of gendered representation in China’s inter-ethnic encounters.
Bryson’s main method is to analyze textual and visual evidence, which is then contextualized within historical time frames. In this way, Bryson reveals how elite male writers used Baijie to position “themselves in relation to China” (3). The earliest manifestation of Baijie was as Baijie Shengfei (Holy Consort White Sister), depicted in the Buddhist texts of the independent Dali Kingdom. In chapter 2, Bryson provides a convincing reading of three Dali ritual texts and the only extant visual work (the Fanxiang juan) depicting Baijie Shengfei, arguing that the goddess reveals how elites articulated their “politico-religious” identity as a civilized, distinct polity. Baijie Shengfei was a local female serpent (nāgī), represented in the tradition of Indian dragon maidens but with a twist: the painting techniques were Chinese and the goddess appears chaste and fully clothed in the best Confucian tradition. This reading is reinforced as Bryson expands analysis to Baijie’s consort, Mahākāla, a fierce Buddhist guardian deity popular in India but not Song China. Bryson hypothesizes that Dali elites used Mahākāla’s fierceness to articulate a masculine autonomy, while Baijie Shengfei’s chastity undercut Song ideas about Dali as an uncivilized borderlands with sexually undisciplined women (59).
By the 1400s, long after the independent Dali Kingdom’s destruction by the Mongols and its incorporation into the Yuan (1279–1368) and then Ming (1368–1644) empires, a new Baijie had emerged. In chapter 3, Bryson traces the stories of Baijie Amei (Little White Sister) in Ming materials, from her miraculous birth to her immaculate conception of Duan Siping, founder of the Dali Kingdom. While the emergence of this Baijie legend corresponded with the rise of the Bai ethnonym, Bai history, and the use of genealogy by Dali elites to claim local Bai ancestry, Bryson challenges the standard interpretation that this was an era of growing Bai ethnicity in the wake of outside conquest. She reveals that a single Dali clan, the Yangs, produced many of these writings and that the Yangs probably promoted the significance of the Dali Kingdom’s miraculous origins because they claimed Baijie Amei as an adopted daughter. Her extraordinary birth along with her conception of Duan Siping therefore underpinned Yang claims of local status rather than broader claims to a shared Bai ethnicity (92–93).
In chapter 4, Bryson traces the legend of a widow martyr who came to be called Baijie Furen, a story that, by the late Qing (1644–1911), had evolved into the tale of a widow who drowns herself rather than submit to her husband’s murderer. As Bryson explains, the legend is both local, in that the murderer was founder of the Dali Kingdom’s predecessor, and translocal, in that Baijie Furen borrowed aspects of the iconic tales of Meng Jiangnu and Qu Yuan. Thus, Baijie Furen’s legend was shaped both by Qing efforts to promote civilizational and ideological loyalty on the frontier—in the form of chastity among women—and by ongoing local efforts to preserve a unique historical identity that also marked Dali society as civilized according to Confucian gender norms.
In chapter 5, the inquiry expands to include both the analysis of symbols in texts as well as interviews (conducted 2006 to 2009) with worshippers of the local village goddess Baijie. For elites producing current textual representations, the goddess is an example of ethnic difference, a distinctly Bai deity who continues to minimize the difference between Bai and Han through her adherence to Confucian gender norms. Worshippers, however, do not emphasize Baijie’s ethnic dimension, allowing this village deity to unite rather than divide diverse neighbours. Over the past millennium, the various forms of Baijie have therefore been used to “simultaneously signif[y] that which marks Dali as a politically, historically, or ethnically distinctive place, and that which marks Dali as civilized by the gendered criteria of Chineseness” (170).
In its ambition to link religion, ethnicity, and gender to larger stories of identity over a vast period, the book is necessarily reductive at times. While the basics of Bryson’s important arguments should hold, specialists in different disciplines and eras will likely be spurred on to further consider their implications. For me, an historian of frontier policy and ethnicity in Qing and Republican times, I know from other work that it was not always the case that “Qing officials worked to spread Chinese civilization to the frontier” (110). I also suspect, based on recent studies, that the salience of Han identity rose to unprecedented importance in the nineteenth century. How do these basic historical developments, which the book does not consider, impact the representation of Baijie Furen and Bai identity over the course of the Qing period? The book also deploys the concepts of ethnicity and Zomia without engaging broadly with these subjects’ complicated literatures. For example, the book refers to Dali as part of the highland Asian region of Zomia in ways that, like James Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed (Yale University Press, 2009), seem static and in contradiction to Willem van Schendel’s original purpose for radically rethinking Asian spaces in “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance” (Environmental Planning D: Society and Space 20, no. 6, 2002). But these are relatively minor concerns, and China specialists from multiple disciplines should welcome this new book.
C. Patterson Giersch
Wellesley College, Wellesley, USA
pp. 149-151