Chieftains into Ancestors

This volume combines anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis to build a new regional history that documents the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations arising from imperial China’s nation-building process.

An in-depth examination of how the Chinese imperial state impacted the social order of southwestern China’s minority peoples and redefined their histories and culture.

Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, largely ignoring the local histories that were preserved for generations in the form of oral tradition through myths, legends, and religious ritual.

Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture. Observing local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, it focuses 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.