Mythogeographies of anthropological knowledge: writing over the lines and footsteps of history in Southwest China

Abstract

In this article, I delve into the field diary of Ma Changshou – a major Chinese ethnohistorian and social anthropologist active between the 1930s and 1960s – to show how his journeys through Liangshan, a mountainous land in Southwest China inhabited by the Nuosu-Yi, led to a new kind of anthropological knowledge. Ma worked under the theoretical, methodological, and ideological assumptions of his era, where he strove to assemble his findings on Nuosu-Yi kinship relations and textual sources into a linear historical narrative, even though the Liangshan of his day was not fully controlled by a centralized state bureaucracy. Retracing Ma's journey in mythogeographical fashion, I propose that the travel-fieldwork trajectories of China's Republican-era social scientists and their interpretation of data obtained from native chieftains, bimo ritualists, and other members of prominent Nuosu-Yi clans have shaped today's knowledge of Nuosu-Yi history, society, and culture. Notably, Ma's mythogeography fleshed out two different essentialized but intertwined ways of seeing the past: that of state-bureaucratic societies and that of genealogy-based societies like the Nuosu-Yi. Mythogeographies like this can give rise to more than new ways of performing genealogies; they can throw light on the anthropo-history of China and the world at large.