Lijiang Stories is much more than a set of stories. It is a careful exegesis of the many strands that, woven together, have become today's Lijiang. The strengths of this work are twofold: author Emily Chao paints a complex portrait of a region that refuses to objectify “Naxi” or naturalize the category, and she draws on extensive and intensive engagement with three areas of Lijiang through fieldwork that began in the early 1990s and continued through 2011.

With this temporal and geographic depth, Chao – unlike many other researchers of Lijiang (located in southwest China's Yunnan Province) – does not assume that dongba culture is something primordial, nor does she accept it as the most appropriate distillation of Naxi culture. Chao refrains from uncritically reproducing tourist-guide propaganda about Naxi love suicides and ritual. Instead, she thoroughly explores the production of discourses surrounding these practices, drawing on deep relationships with townspeople, basin villagers, and residents of a mountain village – people whom she has known, in many cases, for nearly two decades – and on a sophisticated critical framework that leans heavily on Foucauldian biopolitics. This strategy allows her to trace how the stories that circulate widely in a city visited by nearly 12 million tourists in 2011 were created and to explore alternate narratives.

Thus we read how the dongba ritual specialists who survived the Cultural Revolution were called together by the county government for a meeting in 1981 and told that “dongba are good … sanba are bad” (p. 60), a decision Chao links to the feminization of sanba, whose rituals and performances proved more difficult to contain within categories of accepted state practice. Henceforth, dongba were elevated as high-status arbiters of culture in the post-Mao era, while sanba ritual specialists – historically both men and women served in these roles – were further marginalized.

Chao's study, rather than tracing the creation of the group “Naxi” (today one of China's 56 officially designated ethnic groups), tracks the experiences of people who have found their lives disrupted and transformed through what Shao-hua Liu has called “bipolar” policies of the state since it incorporated south-west Chinese communities into its governing sphere – first through Mao-era campaigns and collective economies, then through widening inequality in the post-Mao era (Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin and AIDS in Southwest China, Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 13). Chao also points out that local resistance to state policies began early, when young men would cut off a finger to avoid conscription by the Nationalist army before the Communists took control (p. 30).

In this town, heavily Sinicized even before the Communist government took charge, residents who once downplayed their Naxi identity to better “fit in” later took proud ownership of that identity, only to be pushed out eventually by the tourist economy. But in Chao's analysis, the interactions are far from passive. She examines the differing roles that town, basin and mountain Naxi played in these shifts; she explores the role of Naxi leaders who had undergone higher education in promoting a specific form of dongba “culture” and thus Naxi identity; and she pays careful attention to gendered responses to changing circumstances. Indeed, while the study is not specifically about gender, Chao skilfully integrates a gendered analysis throughout her book.

One of the book's most masterful chapters (four), a version of which was previously published in Modern China, connects anxieties over rapid economic change brought about by Lijiang's late 1990s transformation into a tourist mecca and the concomitant expanded freedoms for women – specifically, women's sudden ability to earn significant income by driving taxis – to local ideas about fox stench. Many south-west Chinese communities have similar concepts, but Chao relates the sudden burst of fox stench accusations to the unsettling shifts as women from formerly lower status rural areas leapfrogged over men in both town and village settings, changing the “hierarchy of prestige” (p. 129). The chapter underscores both the uncertainty of navigating life in a rapidly changing region and the degree to which some Naxi communities have absorbed patriarchal gender norms.

Space precludes discussion of every chapter, but two chapters deserve specific mention. Chapter three examines historical and contemporary patterns of bride abduction and elopement, complicating overdrawn portraits of a mythic, idealized Naxi reality. Chapter five discusses how battles over dog meat epitomize the uncomfortable and uneasy coexistence of long-time Lijiang residents and entrepreneurs from all over China; here Chao infuses Chinese ideas about suzhi, or population quality, into an analysis that incorporates biopolitics and gender.

Chao's discussions of a “madman” and a shaman, used to frame the dramatic changes in personal responsibility from the high socialist period to the more recent era in chapter one and in the Conclusion, provoke some ambivalence. First, the unsuccessful visit of a Bai shaman to a Naxi village may have less to do with scepticism about the efficacy of Mao-era deities – that is, Mao, Deng and Lei Feng, all of whom she exhorts the “madman” to learn from (p. 24) – than about the unconvincing performance of this particular ritual specialist, who, after all, is not from the community, and, as Chao indicates in a note to a subsequent chapter, is part of a group that rarely performed rituals in this area (p. 204, n. 12). Granting too much significance to the failure of “shamanic bricolage” (p. 27), then, seems a stretch. Second, repeated use of “the madman” in place of a name seems problematic. Despite these qualms, the vivid details and tragic outcome for “the madman” lingered with me long after I finished the book, attesting to the narrative power and poignant qualities of both Chao's writing and the events she brings to the reader.

The accessible prose and fascinating range of skilfully analysed, ethnographically nuanced “stories” would make this an excellent text for courses on contemporary China, particularly those that delve into anthropology, religion, tourism, politics and gender. Since Chao provides details about her experiences as a fieldworker and about how she shaped her analysis, it would also fit well in courses about ethnography and discourse analysis.

Will the millions of tourists who have visited Lijiang enjoy it? If they can distance themselves from the primacy of authoritatively presented, yet inaccurate, tour guide narratives and accept that reality is more complicated, then they will surely profit from reading this book. One hopes that eventually, the book will find its way to its most important audience: the people of Lijiang – officials, tour guides, townspeople, villagers, entrepreneurs, scholars and everyone else. Hopefully a Chinese translation will soon follow; the discussion that will undoubtedly ensue can further enrich, and shape, our analysis of discourses in, around and about Lijiang.