Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow
About
“The Book of Cunning and Treachery: Writing, Sovereignty and Bondage in a Qing Native Domain”
This book project is an ethnographic history of an indigenous domain in Yunnan Province, China. Chinese imperial states controlled their border regions through a system of indirect governance known as the tusi system. Indigenous chieftains inherited sovereign jurisdictional power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Many indigenous domains in the southwest were governed chieftains of the ethnicity now known as Yi. Yi societies are known in China as having been “slave societies,” a characterization that has come at great cost to Yi peoples. This book project engages with an archive kept by one Yi chiefly house, with documents in Chinese and in the indigenous Yi script. Through legal documents, letters, personal diaries, and ritual manuscripts, the book explores the varied strategies with which enslaved and elite residents of the chiefly house wrote and rewrote the house and domain. In each chapter I read Yi-script manuscripts side by side with Chinese-language documents, working out how writing across scripts and genres was used to manage relations of kinship, slavery, bonded tenancy, and sovereign authority. While the idea of China has always been centered on the Chinese written language, this book investigates a different China, where Chinese writing was challenged and complicated by other forms of written inscription. The Book of Cunning and Treachery participates in a reconceptualization of Yi peoples spearheaded by Yi scholars, which demonstrates that Yi have been neither passive subjects of imperial states nor captives of “slave societies.”
Erik Mueggler is a Professor of Anthropology.
