Studies on Ethnic Groups in China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. xiii, 248 pp. (Figures.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99223-5.
Lijiang Stories is a collection of essays analyzing myths, urban legends, rumours and other tales of and about Lijiang, a town and region in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, and the Naxi ethnic minority for whom Lijiang is home. Each chapter is organized around a story or set of stories the author, Emily Chao, encountered while conducting field work at various times between 1990 and 2011. In that period Lijiang was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, devastated by an earthquake, and transformed by post-quake reconstruction, tourism and the expansion of China’s market economy. Though not a typical ethnography, Lijiang Stories is informed by a good deal of ethnographic research. Chao’s interpretations of her stories illuminate the shifting meanings of ethnicity, gender, class and national identity in an era of profound social change. Her focus on stories is apropos given the subject matter of Lijiang and the Naxi. Tales, myths and rumours—of matriarchy, love suicide and bride abduction—have fueled Lijiang’s mystique and its development as a tourist destination, and have gained a reality and fixedness that at times obscure the actual lived experiences of the Lijiang Naxi.
The stories in this volume are a disparate lot, and several fit the definition of “story” only loosely. The first chapter relates an account of a “failed” shamanic ritual Chao witnessed in a rural Naxi village in 1991, and situates that failure in the shift from Maoist to post-Mao norms of collective social obligation and personal responsibility. In chapter 2, Chao details how the somewhat obscure dongba religion was transformed from a regional set of rural religious practices into the exclusively Naxi dongba “culture.” This transformation was effected by Naxi intellectuals employed at state-run cultural institutes, who were influenced by Han-centric understandings of modernity, civilization and religion. Similarly, chapter 3 analyzes a folk tale of bride abduction that has come to be seen as the origin myth of the Naxi, again largely through the endeavours of these Naxi intellectuals. As Chao makes clear, historically bride abduction was rooted in poverty, marginality and the “Han prestige system” (119), not Naxi “ethnic” tradition. These two chapters convincingly demonstrate how state-led promotion of minority culture has homogenized cultural practices, obscured intra-ethnic differences of gender, class and place, and essentialized as exclusively Naxi traditions long shared among the many ethnic groups of northwestern Yunnan.
Subsequent chapters explore intra- and inter-ethnic boundary maintenance in light of what Chao describes as “cataclysmic changes in the organization of labour and the transformation of Lijiang by global, national, and local forces” (155). Chapter 4 deconstructs an urban legend circulated among town dwellers about the poor personal hygiene (the “fox stench”) of female taxi drivers, many of them Naxi migrants from rural Lijiang. In Chao’s interpretation, these tales reflect the status anxieties of “downwardly mobile town dwellers [who] saw or smelled in female taxi drivers … the embodiment of danger, the crossing of gender boundaries, and the power of artifice, all tied to the workings of capitalism” (149). Chapter 5 plumbs a defamation lawsuit, brought by a notoriously self-promoting promoter of traditional Naxi music, for what it illustrates about Naxi-Han relations, cultural entrepreneurship and neoliberal transformation.
One strength of Chao’s approach is that it foregrounds the role of narrative in identity construction; it underscores that who we are is largely the result of the stories we tell ourselves and what others tell about us (and we about them). The Chinese state emerges as a principal teller of stories about Lijiang and the Naxi, and about other minorities and the Han majority. Lijiang Stories illuminates the ironies of the state’s discursive efforts to codify minority culture in ways amenable to socialist market expansion.
Less successful is Chao’s attempt to tie the chapters together into a cohesive whole. The book is largely a collection of previously published, stand-alone journal articles and book chapters. Different scholarly publications possess different audiences and expectations regarding the presentation of empirical evidence and the use of disciplinary jargon, and consequently the book is uneven. Certain chapters, like the one on bride abduction, contain extensive quotes from legends and interviews on which Chao bases her arguments. In other chapters Chao presents little in the way of material or “texts” to support her claims, and the analysis meanders into digression and conjecture. Particularly frustrating is the lack of empirical evidence in the chapter on rumours of female taxi drivers’ poor hygiene, as it includes no quotes or perspectives from the taxi drivers themselves. Given the extent to which other chapters incorporate diverse perspectives, the absence of these Naxi migrant women’s voices—and stories—is a curious and disappointing omission.
One way Chao tries to tie her stories together is by situating them within the context of neoliberalism. However, the concept as she employs it is muddled, overly broad. Both the growing emphasis on individual personal responsibility and the assertion of Party-defined collective interests are presented as indicators of neoliberal hegemony. Neoliberal imperatives drive phenomena ranging from “imaginings of bodily abnormality” (122) to the local Communist Party’s aggressive moves to quash a lawsuit and compel the parties to undergo “ideological work” (180). Certain trends Chao attributes to neoliberalism, such as the state-promoted homogenization and essentialization of cultural practices, began in the 1950s long before China embraced market reforms (as she herself shows).
Despite these weaknesses, Lijiang Stories is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on Chinese minorities in the post-socialist era. The book will be of particular value to anthropologists, sociologists and folklorists interested in how market- and state-driven projects of identity construction obscure and transform inter- and intra-ethnic difference, and how groups generate their own narratives to challenge and defend boundaries of hierarchy and status.
Susan K. McCarthy
Providence College, Providence, USA
pp. 146-148