Chanting Ancestors’ Names

Ancestral genealogies convey significance not only for individual life experience but also for the collective memory of an ethnic group. Some Tibetans, who call themselves ‘Prommi’ in Muli and elsewhere in Sichuan, have an inherited text known as the ‘Funeral Genealogy’ relating to the Ldong paternal lineage within their group; it is written in archaic Tibetan and presents the historical memory and culture of the Prommi people. Through a discussion of the funerary text’s locale, oral and archaic writing characteristics, this paper explains the special understanding of the ‘Ldong’ clan ancestors of the Prommi people as well as their views, as found in the Bon religion, on the origin of things, the origin of life (with a ternary view of divinities, humans and demons), life after death, the concept of clans and the family’s historical memory of the father–son connection in the ancestral genealogy. This will provide new historical and cultural data for studying groups sometimes referred to as ‘ancient Qiang’.