Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226483412
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed.Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

PART I

1

Corpse, Stone, Door, Text

In 1877, Liu Yuqing, a formidable local chief in the Ailao Mountains of central Yunnan, erected a tombstone for the founder of his patrilineage. He was in a victorious mood, having recently helped the Qing army crush an extended rebellion of the farmers and herders of his district. The rebels had been inspired by the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) and led by a determined young farmer named Li Zixue. They had seized an iron mine, manufactured weapons, and established a local government that controlled the northern Ailao Mountains from 1856 through 1874. As a reward for his aid in destroying them, Liu Yuqing had been returned extensive lands lost by his paternal ancestors.

On the stone, Liu inscribed a long text in the meter of the Three Character Classic, memorized by every schoolboy. The text begins with the mountain landscape, forested and wild.

南山中，林木茂, 野獸多1

In the southern mountains, The forests were profuse, The game abundant.

The inscription continues, telling of how Liu’s lineage led its nomadic people into these mountains to hunt during a time when they wore hemp and goatskins, ate buckwheat and meat, warred with neighbors on their borders, and were happy from dawn to dusk. Liu’s ancestors and their followers were among those known to the Ming as the rebellious Lisuo 力些, who fled the Tiesuo Valley after their defeat by the Ming armies in 1573. Seeking to convey a sense of autochthonous origins, the inscription implies that the Liu lineage discovered the land’s fertility and settled down to plow and plant during the time of Hongwu, the first Ming emperor. It tells of how Liu’s ancestor Pu Kai (1628–1662) built rice fields and markets and of how Pu Kai’s sons gambled away their father’s property after his death. After listing the lands returned to the lineage as Liu Yuqing’s reward for defeating the rebellion of his own people, the inscription concludes:

楷父體，火化后，無著落，楷遺體，原葬處，塔枝樹，地不利，乖事出, 移此后, 龍脈旺，萬事昌，南山強，惟我庄.

The body of Patriarch Kai, After its cremation, Has no resting place. The remains of Kai, Their original place of burial, Is marked by a stupa and a branching tree. But the site was not auspicious, Perverse events occurred. After the remains were moved here, Where the dragon veins are splendid, All things prospered. The power of the Southern Mountains, Belongs only to our house.

Liu Yuqing’s lineage and its rebellious subjects were of the people known locally as Black Luoluo (Liu 1845, juan 7), Lòlop’ò in their own language. Prior to the nineteenth century, Lòlop’ò wrapped the corpses of their dead in clothing and quilts and carried them to a forested mountainside to be burned. The corpses were raised on a wooden frame and firewood was piled beneath. Some of the burned bones and ash were placed in an earthen urn or cloth bag and buried two or three inches below ground in a graveyard. In most places, a small, square stone, uncut and unmarked, was placed on the ground above the remains. Pu Kai’s ashes had been removed from such a site and reinterred in a new lineage graveyard for buried corpses.2

Pu Kai’s stone memorial was a heartfelt repudiation of this practice. The shift from cremation to burial coincided with the encroachment, at first gradual then overwhelming, of Han traders and settlers into the domain controlled by Liu Yuqing’s lineage and its simultaneous loss of political autonomy. Liu Yuqing’s descendant Liu Yaohan has chronicled his ancestors’ struggle to retain control of their mountain territory in the face of the flood of immigrants who quadrupled the region’s population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, Pu Kai’s district measured about forty by sixty li, with several villages of Lòlop’ò tenants. Pu Kai welcomed Han craftsmen but forbade trade with the merchants who were moving out from garrison villages into the mountains; he is said to have had many merchants killed. After his death, his five sons traded and gambled freely, selling off four-fifths of their father’s land to Han families who brought in more Han settlers. Understanding that his family’s survival depended upon identifying with the Han ruling class, Pu Kai’s grandson Pu Zhongxin (1736–1795) took the Han surname Liu, abandoned his native dress, and married a Han woman. Liu Yuqing, whose mother was also Han, was Pu Zhongxin’s grandson (Liu 1980, 12–30).

Seeking to create a Han identity, Liu Yuqing’s ancestors found Han wives from elsewhere, opting out of the endogamous system of bilateral cross-cousin marriage pursued by ordinary Lòlop’ò. This strategy simplified the complex Lòlop’ò process of making kinship, shed the networks of relations among affines it generated, and focused inheritance and descent on a single patrilineage. On the tombstone erected over buried remains, Liu Yuqing inscribed this patrilineage in enduring material form. His memorial makes it clear that the stone could serve as a medium for stable relations among lineage, land, and landscape in a way that Pu Kai’s cremated remains alone could not. Bodies—both the living bodies of fathers and sons and the remains of dead forebears—were material anchors for the virtual relations of patrilineage. Stones stabilized bodily remains, rendered visible their relations to the living, and channeled the forces of the landscape to manifest in the fates of the living. The “perverse events” that plagued the lineage after Pu Kai’s death—the loss of most of its land and the rebellion of those who served it—were due to the improper placement of his cremated remains. To rebury them in a new place beneath an inscribed stone was to reject a practice that did not anchor the corpse solidly in the soil and to re-found the lineage after decades of loss and rebellion in secure connections among corpse, stone, land, and landscape.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, non-Han peoples across the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau learned the power of inscribed writing to fix corpses in the landscape, connect lineages to bodily remains, and make claims of land ownership founded on these links. But it was not only elites like Liu Yuqing who were beginning to inscribe on stone. Ordinary people, less constrained by the imperative to reassert or consolidate power, were learning the practice as well. Their stones did not always follow the custom—common in the models adopted from Han immigrants—of focusing kinship exclusively on patrilineage. Instead, they improvised, finding in the circumscribed surface of the stone the space to reaffirm other, more elaborate, practices of making kinship as well as constraints that began to transform these practices.

In Júzò, on the periphery of the Baicaoling Mountains, which extend the Ailao range northward into Dayao and Yongren Counties, the abandonment of cremation in favor of burial under stones layered new dimensions into worlds constructed for the dead to inhabit. Before people began to inscribe stones, writing was used in Júzò almost entirely for bureaucratic purposes. It was associated with tax records, land deeds and surveys, and the materialization of state authority in artifacts like stone road markers and a stone inscription memorializing the Qing victory over Li Zixue’s rebellion. When ordinary people in Júzò began to inscribe their tombstones, they adopted Chinese-language script for their own purposes for the first time. Inscribed stones became durable analogues of corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual materializations of networks of kinship relations. An understanding of textuality in which writing appeared as transient material traces of unseen nonhuman beings on the surfaces of the world, subject to creative interpretation, came into contact with a new understanding, where text was permanent inscription of durable meaning on stone and paper, subject to manipulation beforehand by the powerful and knowledgeable. Inscription on stone shifted textual agency from readers to writers and created durable links between state authority and dead bodies.

Recent literature in the ethnography of literacy questions previous attempts to establish global distinctions between orality and literacy influenced by Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s (1963) proposal that the introduction of writing into societies previously dominated by orality created new possibilities for distancing and critique, and encouraged logical and critical cognition. This argument emerged from a long history of scholarly efforts to clearly distinguish writing from other material-semiotic practices such as picture-making, particularly in the context of logographic scripts in Mesoamerica (a comparable case in Yunnan is Naxi dongba script).3 In recent years, the lively interdisciplinary reaction provoked by these arguments has deepened and diversified to produce a rich array of ethnographic and historical case studies describing the varied ways writing and literacy participate in specific social practices. This literature has moved away from looking for cognitive implications for literacy in general to understanding how particular practices of writing and reading are implicated in social relations, especially relations of power.

Of particular relevance is the large literature on imperial peripheries, where written colonial languages, vehicles for state power, are adopted by indigenous-language communities.4 An examination of tombstone inscriptions in Júzò reinforces three points in this scholarship. First, as Mathew Hull (2012) points out in an ethnography of practices of bureaucratic writing and reading in Pakistan, the category of writing tends to dissolve internally when specific graphic practices are examined in their social context. Second, as the category of writing fragments into particular practices, its external boundaries also blur: very little analytical purchase can be gained by drawing rigid distinctions between writing and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes