Stevan Harrell

Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China

People who are not members of the Han Chinese majority and who are officially classified as members of the Yi minzu (“ethnic group”) inhabit many villages within fifty kilometers of the industrial city of Panzhihua (formerly Dukou) at the southernmost point of Sichuan province. These people differ widely from each other in language and other cultural traits and in the nature of their relationship to their non-Yi neighbors. Of three Yi communities studied in the winter of 1988, one is isolated from and culturally distinct from the Han society of its neighbors, and its separate ethnic identity is taken by Yi and Han as a given. given. In another community, Yi and Han live totally intermixed and are culturally identical, and again the separate ethnic identity of the Yi and Han is accepted by all concerned. In the third community, the people classified as Yi are also culturally identical with the Han, though they live separately. Although they are classified as Yi, they do not admit that they belong to the Yi minzu; they insist instead that they are a separate group altogether—the shuitian zu or “rice-field people.” This paper attempts to explain why the nature of ethnic identity is so different in the three Yi communities.

On the Holes in Chinese Genealogies

The Problem The social history of Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries has been greatly enriched by the incorporation of the detailed demographic history of small communities. As students of Chinese history begin to move from and exclusive focus on large-scale generalizations to a finer-grained examination of local phenomena, we naturally hope to learn from our Europeanist colleagues and to emulate, where possible, their successful efforts at local history, including local population history. We, too, would like to be able to reconstruct families from sources resembling the English and French parish registers, for example. But it is not to be. With the exception of certain local and specialized populations,1 there exist very few population registers suitable for Cambridge-style family reconstruction. If we are to study population process in a wide variety of localities over a considerable time span, we seem to have only one kind of source in any abundance: the lineage or clan genealogy. There exist in the worlds libraries thousands of these genealogies, ranging in size from a few hand-scribbled pages to a small shelf of weighty tomes, covering most of the coast provinces and a few in the interior, containing useful data, in most cases, from at least the early Ming, and sometimes from as early as the Song.2 Beginning in about 1970, a few scholars have begun to extract

Pluralism, performance and meaning in Taiwanese healing: A case study

A case of presumed psychosis in a 16-year-old Taiwanese girl is examined to show the role of performance in creating meaning in a plural medical system. The case illustrates that there is no necessary correspondence between diagnoses, authorities, and therapies; that consensus, if achieved at all, is tenuous and context-dependent; that meaning is created by performance, rather than the other way around; and that understanding of how therapies work depends on their efficacy.

Is the Returning Farmland to Forest Program a Success? Three Case Studies from Sichuan

Chinas tuigeng huanlin or “Returning Farmland to Forest” (RFFP) program has been widely praised as the worlds largest and most successful payment for ecosystem services program, as well as a major contributor to Chinas dramatic increase in forest cover from perhaps as low as 8% in 1960 to about 21% today. By compensating rural households for the conversion of marginal farmland to forestland and financing the afforestation of barren mountainsides, the program, in addition to expanding forestland, aims to reduce soil erosion and alleviate poverty. This paper presents qualitative and quantitative studies conducted on the local implementation of RFFP in three diverse townships in Sichuan. We find the actual results to be more mixed than the official figures would indicate. Though there have been some positive results, we identify problems with site and species selection, compensation for land taken out of cultivation, shift of labor to off-farm activities, and monitoring of replanted sites, which challenge the ecological and economic impacts of these programs and reveal much of the effort of the program has been misdirected. We suggest that efforts are misplaced because of the top-down, panacea nature of the program, which in turn is a feature of Chinese bureaucratic management.

Syncretic Sects in Chinese Society: An Introduction

were classed, together with certain antidynastic political brotherhoods such as the Tiandi Hui (Triad Society) and its offshoots, as &dquo;secret societies.&dquo; For example, C. K. Yang (1967: 219), in his Religion in Chinese Society, lists religiously motivated rebellions in the nineteenth century fomented by the &dquo;White Lotus; the Eight Diagrams and Nine Mansions ... The Heaven and Earth Society, ... and the White Lotus Again.&dquo; Jean Chesneaux (1971: 36-54) categorized the White Lotus, the Eight Trigrams, and the Yiguan Dao as secret societies, groups that could be understood according to the model of the Triad Society, which he described in

Social-ecological Resilience of a Nuosu Community-linked Watershed, Southwest Sichuan, China

Farmers of the Nuosu Yi ethnic group in the Upper Baiwu watershed report reductions in the availability of local forest resources. A team of interdisciplinary scientists worked in partnership with this community to assess the type and extent of social-ecological change in the watershed and to identify key drivers of those changes. Here, we combine a framework for institutional analysis with resilience concepts to assess system dynamics and interactions among resource users, resources, and institutions over the past century. The current state of this system reflects a legacy of past responses to institutional disturbances initiated at the larger, national system scale. Beginning with the Communist Revolution in 1957 and continuing through the next two decades, centralized forest regulations imposed a mismatch between the scale of management and the scale of the ecological processes being managed. A newly implemented forest property rights policy is shifting greater control over the management of forest resources to individuals in rural communities. Collective forest users will be allowed to manage commodity forests for profit through the transfer of long-term leases to private contractors. Villagers are seeking guidance on how to develop sustainable and resilient forest management practices under the new policy, a responsibility returned to them after half a century and with less abundant and fewer natural resources, a larger and aggregated population, and greater influence from external forces. We assess the watershed’s current state in light of the past and identify future opportunities to strengthen local institutions for governance of forest resources.

The History of the History of the Yi, Part II:

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is, according to its constitution, “a unified country of diverse nationalities” (tongyide duominzu guojia; see Wang Guodong, 1982: 9). The degree to which this admirable political ideal has actually been respected has varied throughout the history of the PRC: taken seriously in the early and mid-1950s, it was systematically ignored during the twenty years of High Socialism from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and then revived again with the Opening and Reform policies of the past two decades (Heberer, 1989: 23-29). The presence of minority “autonomous” territories, preferential policies in school admissions, and birth quotas (Sautman, 1998) and the extraordinary emphasis on developing “socialist” versions of minority visual and performing arts (Litzinger, 2000; Schein, 2000; Oakes, 1998) all testify to serious attention to multinationalism in the cultural and administrative realms, even if minority culture is promoted in a homogenized socialist version and even if everybody knows that “autonomous” territories are far less autonomous, for example, than an American state or a Swiss canton. But although the party state now preaches multinationalism and allows limited expression of ethnonational autonomy, it also preaches and promotes progress—and thus runs straight into a paradox: progress is defined in objectivist, modernist terms, which relegate minority cultures to a more

Paradoxes and Challenges for China's Forests in the Reform Era

Chinas relatively recent dramatic increase in forest area has been hailed domestically and globally as one of the worlds few environmental success stories, but significant problems remain in Chinas reforestation efforts. We describe the challenges that China still faces if it is to meet its laudable – but sometimes contradictory – goals for its forest sector: improving rural livelihoods, sustaining and restoring ecosystem services, and increasing output of the forest product-dependent manufacturing and construction sectors. We do so while pointing out the unintended consequences of implementing these policy goals: overstatement of the quantity and quality of the forest recovery, domestic human and ecological costs of the reforestation, and externalization of Chinas continually growing demand for timber and forest products in the form of increased imports from vulnerable forests in other parts of the world.

Aspects of Marriage in Three South- western Villages

The impact of Chinas post-1978 reforms on rural marriage patterns and the family is explored. The author notes that there are two contradictory pressures involved namely a revival of traditional behavior associated with the era before land collectivization begun in 1956 and the growth of behavior associated with modernization and economic growth. (ANNOTATION)

Normal and Deviant Drinking in Rural Taiwan

Ou-yang Hsiu, the most famous of the Neo-Confucian scholars of the early Sung, once wrote a poem entitled The Drunken Old Man’s Pavilion. In it, he described the joys of watching the daily and seasonal changes in a misty pavilion on a mountain top, joys realized through the medium of large amounts of wine (Ou-yang 1963). Other poets as well extolled the pleasures of drink, poetry, and friendship. Not only in the sensuous lines of Li Pai but even in the restrained and correct verse of Tu Fu, wine and human warmth go together (T’ang-shih san-paishou 1968).