Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint.
Telling the story of a quintessential Chinese culture that spread
uniformly from the administrative heartland to the previously untamed
periphery, official records have largely ignored the local histories of
the country's conquered peoples, preserved for generations in the
form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious rituals.
The history of southwestern China, a region known today for its
minority character, is the subject of this volume.
In Chieftains into Ancestors, the authors describe the
intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local
culture. Since the acceptance of a new socio-political structure never
happens overnight, they observe local rituals against the backdrop of
extant written records, focusing on examples from the southwestern
Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The
authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write
the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped
out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual
analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they build a new
history of China's southwestern region - one that
recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that
took place in China's nation-building process.
David Faure is Wei Lun Professor of History at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong. His books include Emperor and
Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Ho
Ts'ui-p'ing is an associate research fellow at the
Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica and an adjunct associate
professor in the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua
University. She is the co-editor of State, Market and Ethnic Groups
Contextualized.
Contributors: Lian Ruizhi, Huang Shu-li, James
Wilkerson, He Xi, Xie Xiaohui, Kao Ya-ning, and Zhang Yingqiang.
