This well written monograph is a fine ethnographic example of “thick description” of religious revival among the Premi, a small Tibeto-Burman-speaking ethnic group dwelling along the Yunnan-Sichuan border area of Southwest China. Author Wellens' repeat visits to the Premi area from 1999 to 2007 resulted in this balanced and thoughtful piece of scholarship. Wellens focuses on the ethnic and religious revival of the Premi as they attempt to rebuild their ethnic community and identity on the southeastern margins of the Tibetan cultural sphere. The book is well placed in the series of “Studies on Ethnic Groups in China,” edited by Steven Harrell. It gives fascinating insights into the role of certain social actors in several Premi villages and of the social complexities in play between ritual, religion, ethnicity and the power of China's nationality politics.

While the current work certainly provides a valuable new contribution to the slowly increasing scholarship on religious and ethnic revival among Tibetan and other minority communities in China, it is a little thin on theorizing rituals and the revival process that it describes. Quite in contrast to other Tibetan communities in China on the margins, such as those of Labrang and Songpan, at the time of the research tourism did not seem to play a role in local ethnic identity construction.Footnote ¹ The Premi—despite sharing a common Tibeto-Burman language called by the same name, as well as the same social organization—are neither a homogenous group nor simply “Tibetans,” nor can their religious revival be understood in the same conceptual manner as the latter. Provincial administrative boundary drawing cut through the former area of the historical Muli kingdom in this area, dividing it between Sichuan and Yunnan. The 1952 population census of the new People's Republic of China defined and counted the Premi dwelling in Muli as Tibetans, thereby allowing for establishment of a new autonomous Tibetan county within Sichuan province (p. 53f). Furthermore, these Premi identified strongly with Tibetan Buddhism, having the Gelugpa sect monastery of Muli at their center. However, the Premi on the Yunnan side of the provincial boundary were recognized as the “Pumizu,” a separate ethnic. This was one of the reasons, according to Wellens, why they felt inclined to strengthen their separate ethnic identity by promoting anji or folk religious practices rather than Tibetan Buddhism. Anji are performed by ritual specialists (likewise called anji) and focus on mundane concerns of households and village communities. This situation is comparable to the question of the Dwags po (Chin. Baima Zangzu) nationality in the Sino-Tibetan borderland in northern Sichuan, where the separate ethnic classification by the state is contested by a famous Tibetan scholar who cites historical texts and other evidence of cultural similarities, claiming the Dwags po to be Tibetans (cf. Janet Upton, “Notes towards a Native Tibetan Ethnology: An Introduction to and Annotated Translation of dMu dge bSam gtan's Essays on Dwags po (Baima Zangzu),” The Tibet Journal 25(1):3–26).

Wellens' actor centered approach builds on local distinctions in order to understand how religious revival is conceptualized. However, while the two “concepts” of anji (or hajji)—or local folk religion combined with ancestor cult—and Tibetan Buddhism are emphasized separately by ritual specialists and intellectuals, and require different training and traditions in either anji religious practice or Tibetan Buddhism, the rituals concerned look formally the same and most lay villagers would not even stress their difference. Yet, both types of ritual specialists also nurture and foster their distinct religious and ethnic identity. While powerful lamas and their supportive lay population (including well educated and intellectual Tibetans from the area) support Tibetan Buddhism on the Sichuan side, on the Yunnan side it was folk religious practitioners called anji/hangji who propelled ritual revival at household and village level after the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. Wellens argues that religious revival is not just a matter of a couple of actors but “The particular form of social organization of Premi communities, the political and religious history of Muli, and modern discourses on religion and ethnic identity were all instrumental in molding the different expressions of this revival” (p. 209).

Wellens claims that the ancestral cult is a special feature of Premi folk religion distinguishing them from Tibetans and strengthening their autonomy claims. The most powerful Tibetan mountain deities are often called by ancestral names, such as “A mnye” (“grandfather”) and certain communities strongly identify with these territorial gods while mediums can embody them temporarily. It is equally possible, I think, that the Premi of Yunnan emphasize their ethnic distinctiveness from the Tibetans (and the majority Han) as part of a modern self-assertion as being a separate and rather “independent” ethnic group, whereby their otherwise subordinate anji can avoid the hegemony of Tibetan Buddhist lamas and perhaps also of the state.

The book consists of five major chapters. Following the introduction, the author leads us from the local history of the Muli kingdom to its political integration into the modern Chinese state (Chapter 1). In Chapter 2, a Muli township in the post-Mao era is portrayed, while the following chapter deals with the Premi house as a contemporary example of how household rituals reinforce and construct social “relatedness,” kinship and marriage at village level, comparing different Premi villages along the provincial border between Yunnan and Sichuan. The relationship between ritual and state is framed as being part of the Premi cosmology (Chapter 4) and here we learn both about power relations and ritual practices as well as sometimes tensions between the two main ritual specialist groups, the Tibetan Buddhist lamas and the anji practicing local folk religion while conducting similar marriage, healing, and funerary rituals. Definitions and divisions between these two different forms of religion and ritual practices are far from being clear-cut (pp. 173ff ) while resembling the complex and rather integrated ritual landscape of Tibetan communities living further to the northwest and in the Himalayas. Ending with a chapter on modernity in Yunnan (Chapter 5) and the relation between “religion” and the “Pumizu” as an ethnic group recognized by the state, this book concludes with the various ways in which ethnic identity and ritual revival is related and constructed by different actors involved—individuals, village communities and the state—and why that is the case and what is at stake.