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Encountering Miao Shamanism

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Encountering Miao Shamanism EPILOGUE: “GHOST MASTER” AT LANGDE: ENCOUNTERING MIAO SHAMANISM The previous chapters have examined the construction of the national- ist ideology in modern China, the research and investigation of southern Chinese minority nationalities, the concerned intellectual debates and polit- ical tensions, as well as the public representation of minority culture. In the epilogue, I will shift my focus to the village-level minority communal life and power relations to illustrate the continuity of shamanism in China and the symbiotic relationship between the shamanistic authority and political power. The main players here are the retired CCP Party secretary of a Miao I want to point out that the use of the terms “shaman” and “shamanism” is due to the convenience of understanding and the fact that Langde “ghost master” (guishi in Han Chinese) share the functional roles as the shaman in Manchuria and northeast Asia of being spiritual medium and communicator to the dead. Yet there are also two differences: one is linguistic, the word “shaman” has very probable Tungstic origin, and the other is gender. While North Asian shamans have traditional women, at Langde, the Miao ghost masters are usually men, and other ethnographic accounts about southern Chinese minority groups depict male shamans more than female shamans. For discussion of Manchu/northeast Asian shamanism, see Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 235–241. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 187 G. Wu, Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities, New Directions in East Asian History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6022-0 188 EPILOGUE: “GHOST MASTER” AT LANGDE … village, and a practicing shaman, “ghost master,” in that village. I attempt to conceptualize a dual power structure in which the shaman enjoys consider- able respect from the Communist Party secretary. I will analyze the persis- tence of Shamanism in the context of Chinese cultural tradition and inquiry about the limit of the Chinese state in actual life. On June 18, 2016, I arrived at Upper Langde Village (Langde shang- zhai), 27 kilometers to the southeast of Kaili, the capital of Southeast Guizhou Miao Nationality and Dong Nationality Autonomous Region, with an entrusted mission of facilitating a shamanic ritual performance. The minibus now runs every hour between Kaili and Langde, which is off the main road from Kaili to Leishan County. The village lies on hillslope, facing a river valley, and in-between is the end of the 1.5 kilo- meter-long country road leading to the village. Chen Hualong, my Miao friend living in Guiyang, wanted me to bring to his home an old T-shirt of his, because it is was essential for a shamanic ritual as his embodiment. His 80-year-old father Chen Zhengtao, the retired Communist Party secretary of the village who passed away in June 2018, had a dream a couple of weeks ago, in which Chen Hualong joined the army. This is not auspicious in Miao culture, Chen Hualong said, so his father wanted him to go back to the village, where the shaman, or guishi/ghost mas- ter, would help drive away the demons from him. Chen Hualong was hesitant. He grew up in the village and had been healed by the late vil- lage shaman for multiple times when he was a child, but now he is mar- ried and living in Guiyang with his wife and son, running his private tour company. He had a degree in English, and have been quite urbanized, not sure whether shamanism as a healing technique was truly effective or not. When I said that I wanted to meet with the new shaman who suc- ceeded the old one who died several years ago, Chen Hualong agreed to contact his father, and now, my need for an observation overlapped with his personal need for a ritual. When I randomly asked Hualong how he acquired historical knowledge about the Miao nationality, he replied that there had been a villager elder who transmitted Miao history verbally and in terms of published Miao history, he said he would read the books written by Miao nationality scholar. Hualong did not mention the offcial “Brief History” that I studied earlier. I roamed around in the village after meeting with his parents in their wooden house, who are both in their early 80s. The village was quiet, while also touristic with shops, nongjiale homestay hotels, and vendors of Miao embroidery pieces and silver alloy Miao jewels. It was July, EPILOGUE: “GHOST MASTER” AT LANGDE … 189 and Hualong’s parents just completed transplantation of rice seedlings under their stilt house. The mode of production is not different from other rural areas of southern China. In the evening, I had dinner with Hualong’s parents, his sister-in-law who runs their family hotel where I stayed, and the shaman in Hualong’s old home. The shaman is a very nice farmer in his early forties, same as my age—villagers in Langde are mostly surnamed Chen, and their girls married out to other villages. Shaman Chen receives education up to middle school and is a now a farmer. Miao shaman is not fulltime, and it is more like an obligation of community service. The current shaman is unrelated to the late sha- man but learned the techniques from his father after he was 18 years old. When the old shaman died, he naturally became the new shaman, he said, and he often has many requests from villagers.1 He must do a shaman’s job after mastering the techniques; otherwise, demons would process him. The shaman confessed to me that when villagers feel they have low energy, or have no appetite, or they just do not feel right while the hospital cannot diagnose, they would need his help. His expertise includes knowing where the evil spirits come from, what food the devil wants to eat, and what incantations he should chant. A shaman is usually a very healthy man, the “ghost master” boasted; and he can eat a lot and can endure sleepless nights. We ate sour-soup hotpot with tofu and vegetables, which was not as strongly sour as that served in Miao sour-soup hotpot restaurants in Guiyang or Kaili, stir-fried pork, and drank home-made rice wine. Later I decided to withdraw because I found that the old Party secretary and the shaman engaged more conversations in their own Miao language, and they drank nonstop. After I sit out on the balcony for a while, the shaman went out to talk to me: old secretary is drunk, and I cannot per- form the ritual for his son because I cannot explain to him. How about you? Wanna try? He asked politely, I can tell your fortune if you want. Me? I said, well, ok. I would like to try to see how his magic works on me. Then you take a thread from your clothes, and give a little money to her, he said, pointing to the old secretary’s wife. I did both. The old secretary’s wife seemed very familiar with all the procedures to assist a shaman. She went to the kitchen to fetch a round, fat bamboo rice con- tainer and put a bowl with rice on it, and the whole container was put on the foor. My cash was placed in the container. The shaman then sit on a stool, facing the rice and using a bamboo stick to stir the rice. He was gradually absorbed in his own deep contemplation before he raised 190 EPILOGUE: “GHOST MASTER” AT LANGDE … his head and asked several questions and told me what he saw in my life. Several days later, when I met Chen Hualong again in Guiyang, I told him what the shaman had told me about my life was almost accurate. Hualong was also intrigued by asking: how come? He never knew any- thing about you. I must admit that Hualong, whom I had not seen and contacted for more than ten years, did not know those details of my life. Back to the village. When I nodded and told the shaman what he said about my life in America was overall accurate, the shaman grinned, saying calmly: “I can see it.” This, of course, is not the formal ritual needed for scaring off demons, which requires animal sacrifce of killing chicken or duck, and performances will be more complex and the shaman will enter trance. He confessed to me that at that time he would be a very different person. Later, Hualong’s father, the old Party secretary appeared and joined us. After he got drunk, he began to beat his wife as he always did, which made her extremely angry and embarrassed this time—because of the visi- tors’ presence, although I did not see the fght. Hualong’s mother fought back and beat his father, so it was a draw. When the old secretary appeared, he still had a little nosebleed. He was still smiling, like nothing happened, and watching: the shaman repeated the ritual he did to me to tell Hualong’s fortune. When fnished, he talked to Hualong’s father in Miao language, and then turned to me, saying in simple Han Chinese language: Hualong is having some unpleasant experiences recently. I would not think I was conducting “interview” because I was a vis- itor and friend of Hualong. I also did not anticipate them to be very “hospitable” to fulfll my own (and many Han people’s) stereotyp- ical imagination that minority nationalities must be “warm” and “hos- pitable” to guests.
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