Historians and anthropologists often struggle uncomfortably with the question of absence: documents missing, things unsaid, events unseen and unrecorded. Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China, edited by David Faure and Ho Ts'ui-p'ing, takes these unknown spaces as points of entry into the search for the “indigenous historical voice” in southwest China (p. 4). The collection presents new scholarship on empire, religion, and local society in what is now southwest China, spanning temporally from the middle period into the present. This rich and coherent collection brings together scholars from both history and anthropology, the majority working in greater China. As historical anthropology, it draws upon a wealth of materials and methodologies, including stele, inscriptions, genealogies, archival sources, oral histories, and ethnographic research. The authors attend to the complex relationships between written and oral, as “ritual performance and orally circulated myths unmask the silence presented in historical text” (p. 237), and the resulting combination of ethnographic and textual research uncovers active exchanges between indigenous communities and Chinese states. Establishing a dialogic relationship as the starting point of analysis rather than its conclusion, the volume then unfolds by exploring the “multiple recognitions of the past, [and] the negotiable nature of group identity” that transformed chieftains into ancestors (p. 105).
Kinship, genealogy, and indigenous conceptions of space and place link the nine chapters in this volume as they examine ritual, ceremony, and genealogical practices in specific localities across southwest China. Chapter 1 reappraises the Hmong Qhuab Kev ceremony, charting a new geography nearer to Hmong intent, and subsequently indicates the direction of the volume as a whole. Several chapters, particularly those by Lian Ruizhi, He Xi, David Faure, and James Wilkerson, focus on genealogies and their transformations. While the imperially sanctioned ancestor drew communities in southwest China towards the central state, indigenous people often did not conceive of these relationships as mere submissions. The authors demonstrate how intermediaries played critical roles between local, often indigenous society and the imperial bureaucracy. Some clans, such as the Zhao clan discussed by Lian Ruizhi, were able to diversify their strategies, with certain branches engaging in behavior to receive official status, while other branches, empowered by the lineage recognition, acted as shamans and other important community roles. Chapters by Xie Xiaohui and Ho Ts'ui-p'ing both turn their attention towards gender, as they examine shifts from offering sacrifices to goddesses to patrilineal lines of succession. Ho, drawing on her own and other contributors' ethnography, argues that the regenerative power of Zhuang female deities adapts to political circumstances and changing relations with the state, and in the process empowers “not the deprived second gender but the conquered communities and the lost kingdom in the historical process of making China” (p. 239).
By spanning the Song to Qing periods, the collection also investigates the differences in how various Chinese states engaged with the southwestern borderlands. Attention to longue durée processes is a welcome addition to the field, particularly as, outside of works that focus on south and southwest China, borderlands history has developed in tandem with the New Qing History of the past two decades. Approaching later imperial Chinese history holistically leads to new insights, such as the provocative idea that Ming governance in the borderlands was closer to a nation-state model than the Qing dynasty's imperial mode (p. 18). Moreover, the local historical-anthropological approach highlights the intersectionalities that top-down approaches often elide. Throughout the volume, the authors transform stable categories of “state” and “local,” or Han and indigenous, into complex relationships between social status, ethnicity, occupation, and gender. Not only do they make evident that indigenous groups change over time—a position underscored by David Faure's request in the introduction to stop “bemoaning the imposed ethnicity of the southwest and move on to write the history of this imposition” (p. 4)—but they also demonstrate that the categories of “Chinese” or min (subject) are equally dynamic, underscoring the importance of frontier encounters in shaping the center.
The collection is well-illustrated with both maps and photographs, which make it more accessible for assignment in advanced undergraduate courses. For specialists, the volume also includes glossaries of Chinese characters at the end of each chapter. Chieftains into Ancestors would also be useful in comparative context with other indigenous histories and ethnohistories, particularly of the Americas and the greater Pacific world. Its microhistorical approach furnishes sufficient detail for meaningful comparison, providing a foundation for bringing the strong work produced on Chinese borderlands (both past and present) into dialogue with broader fields of indigenous studies. While Chieftains into Ancestors builds on an extensive literature on popular religion and the state in south China, its innovative approaches to state-making and the long imperial encounter make it of interest to both scholars of indigenous history and China and Southeast Asia specialists.
