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studies on ethnic groups in china Stevan Harrell, Editor studies on ethnic groups in china Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers edited by Stevan Harrell Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad edited by Nicole Constable Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China by Jonathan N. Lipman Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China by Mette Halskov Hansen Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 by Edward J. M. Rhoads Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China by Stevan Harrell Governing China’s Multiethnic Frontiers edited by Morris Rossabi On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier by Åshild Kolås and Monika P. Thowsen The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album” Translation by David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler Doing Business in Rural China: Liangshan’s New Ethnic Entrepreneurs by Thomas Heberer Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China by Susan K. McCarthy Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: The Premi of Southwest China by Koen Wellens Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands the premi of southwest china koen wellens university of washington press seattle and london Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands is published with the assistance of a grant from the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Additional support was provided by the Donald R. Ellegood International Publications Endowment. © 2010 by the University of Washington Press Designed by Pamela Canell Typeset in Minion Pro Printed in the United States of America 16 14 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A. www.washington.edu/uwpress All photographs are by the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wellens, Koen. Religious revival in the Tibetan borderlands : the Premi of southwest China / Koen Wellens. p. cm. — (Studies on ethnic groups in China) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-295-99068-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-295-99069-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pumi (Chinese people)—Religion. 2. Pumi (Chinese people)—Rites and ceremonies. 3. Pumi (Chinese people)—Social life and customs. 4. Ninglang Yizu Zizhixian (China)—Religious life and customs. 5. Ninglang Yizu Zizhixian (China)—Social life and customs. 6. Muli Zangzu Zizhixian (China)—Religious life and customs. 7. Muli Zangzu Zizhixian (China)—Social life and customs. 8. Borderlands—Tibet. 9. Borderlands—China. I. Title. ds731.p844w45 2010 305.895’4—dc22 2010033489 The paper used in this publication is acid-free and recycled from at least 30 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984. 什么是迷信? 什么是宗教? 我们老百姓不清楚！ What is superstition? What is religion? We ordinary people are not sure! —Sixty-three-year-old Premi villager in Yunnan CONTENTS Foreword by Stevan Harrell ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv On Language and Orthography xix Map of Research Area in Southwest China 2 Map of Bustling Township 65 introduction 3 1 muli The Political Integration of a Lama Kingdom 24 2 bustling township A Muli Township in the Post-Mao Era 63 3 the premi house Ritual and Relatedness 94 4 premi cosmology Ritual and the State 132 5 modernity in yunnan Religion and the Pumizu 188 conclusion 209 epilogue 217 Glossary 219 Notes 237 Bibliography 259 Index 273 FOR EWOR D he Premi are one of China’s smallest, most remote, and least- known ethnic groups. What can we learn from them? Koen Wellens’s Religious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands: The Premi Tof Southwest China provides copious information on the Premi as well as on contemporary China, ethnography, ethnicity, religion, and the state. As the twelfth volume in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series, his book continues a tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship that puts the specific into the context of the general and uses particular cases to illustrate general points. Any book on contemporary ethnic groups must be grounded in ethnog- raphy. Until now, there has been precious little material on the Premi, most of it in obscure, minimally distributed, local Chinese-language journals and in some of the shorter chapters of general works on China’s “nation- alities.” Most people who have written about the Premi (myself included) learned about them as a side-effect of research on a better-known group, such as the Nuosu or Naxi or, especially, the Premi’s famous matrilineal neighbors, the Na or Mosuo. It seems that, except for the very few Premi who had become local scholars, no one had set out to study their history or society. As Wellens describes in his Introduction, a chance nighttime encounter with a Premi hangui priest led him to fill this gap. It wasn’t easy. The places he went required days of upsy-downsy hiking, weeks of sleep- ix x Foreword ing on hard board beds, months of subsistence on a limited diet. He had to learn a language for which there are no textbooks or even texts of any kind and deal with villagers rightly suspicious of any investigator (even a 190-cm European) as a possible agent of the Chinese state. But with the eventual help and cooperation of community members and scholarly collaborators of many ethnicities, Wellens gives us the first detailed ethnography of a Premi community. Religious Revival, however, is not just ethnography for its own sake; it is ethnography that teaches us lessons about ethnicity, religion, and the state in reform-era China. The ethnic identity and ethnic relations of various Premi communities are extremely complex. This group of about sixty thou- sand people, living in two provinces, turns out to be distributed among two different minzu, or state-determined ethnopolitical groups. In Sichuan, where many of the Premi were traditionally subject to the Gelugpa king of Muli, they are Zangzu, for historical reasons lumped, along with their close linguistic relatives such as the Nameze and Duoxu, into the larger group whose name we translate as “Tibetan.” In Yunnan, they are their own minzu, bearing the name Pumi, which is as close as Chinese characters can get to transcribing their name. We knew (we who knew anything about the Premi at all) that this division had consequences—Tibetans have long objected to the separate status of the Yunnanese Pumi—but Wellens’s book adds two important things. One is a detailed historical account of how this came about, in a tangle of politics, language, and religion stretching back to the beginning of the Qing dynasty and forward to the 1950s, reminding us that ethnic identity is often determined by historical contingency as much as by stable genealogical and cultural traditions. We also see for the first time how the different minzu statuses of Premi in the two provinces have led to very different configurations of religion, ethnicity, and religious and ethnic revival in the post-Maoist polity. Reli- gious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands enriches our understanding of the revival of religion in post-Maoist China by showing how historical con- tingency and the relationships among state, local elites, and communities can influence this process in locally specific ways. In Sichuan, where the Premi are Zangzu, or Tibetans, elites have promoted Tibetan Buddhism, while the revival of the indigenous hangui tradition has been a grassroots movement. But in Yunnan, local elites, eager to promote Pumi separate- ness, have been active in the revitalization of the hangui. Foreword xi All this crisscrossing detail of history, ethnicity, and religion allows us to see the nation-building efforts of the PRC regime in light of a novel sort of complexity. It points out the delicate road that a no-longer revolution- ary but still very authoritarian regime must tread as it draws leaders and members of local communities into its national body politic. At the same time, the Premi case demonstrates the opportunities that the construction of this body politic presents for local political and religious leaders as well as the limits to these opportunities. As so many volumes in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China series have shown, the CCP goal of building a multiethnic or multicultural nation entails a project that is both worth- while and tricky, both ideological and opportunistic, both inclusive and alienating of minority people. What the project is not, is predetermined. Every case and every community is different, and every study adds materi- ally to our understanding of the places of these differences in the national fabric. I am thus delighted to introduce and recommend Koen Wellens’s Reli- gious Revival in the Tibetan Borderlands. It is a fascinating report, from a faraway place, with lots to tell us about ethnicity, religion, and the Chi- nese nation. stevan harrell Seattle, July 2010 Preface uring the Spring Festival break of 1987, I was trekking through northwestern Yunnan with a fellow Chinese-language student. We had been staying mostly in small mountain villages situated Dseveral days’ walk from anything resembling a road. As two foreigners visiting at the time of the Spring Festival, we found ourselves at the center of lively parties with traditional chain dancing and flute music, accom- panied by copious meals of fatty pork meat and engaging in uncountable bottoms-ups of locally brewed spirits.

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