Organizer and Chair: Donald Sutton, Carnegie Mellon University
Discussant: Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bottle Gourd and Dog Ancestor Myths of Origin in Ethnic Perspective
Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania
Bottle gourd (calabash) symbolism is widespread in Chinese popular religion. It may be traced back to southern, originally non-Sinitic, cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths having to do with chaos, creation, the flood, and the peopling of the world. In particular, Tai and Tibeto-Burman peoples such as the Dai and the Yi regard the bottle gourd as central to the genesis of the universe and themselves. Thus, the pervasive cucurbitic symbolism of Chinese culture is testimony to the gradual absorption by the Han people of essentially non-Han myths. On the other hand, there is an equally widespread myth that many southern peoples were the descendants of a dog named Panhu. It is curious that the second graph of one form of this name is that for calabash. The source of this dog-ancestor myth is obscure, but it appears initially to have been perpetuated largely among the Han people and only gradually did it become adopted by the southern peoples themselves. It is well known, of course, that the dog is a common device throughout Eurasia for ascribing lowly, bestial origins to the "other." Thus, the conjunction of the dog ancestor and the calabash in the context of the southern encounter between Han and non-Han attests an unusual inversion in which the Han exchange "other" with "self" and the non-Han exchange "self" for "other."
"I Have Heard Said": Travelers' Tales and the Qing Colonial Discourse
on the Taiwan Indigenes
Jinhua Emma Teng Harvard University/Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Accounts of Qing travelers to Taiwan, besides first-hand empirical description, contain second-hand stories-travelers' tales, local lore, and origin myths-which constitute another body of knowledge about the indigenous peoples. These "stories" surface in the travel accounts to explain situations that cannot be comprehended through observation: they describe the indigenes in both their threatening and subordinated aspects. Many of the "stories" correspond to major paradigms of colonial views of indigenes: the Other as subhuman, superhuman, ancestor, woman, or as minor. Chinese origin myths about the indigenes, for example, link these people variously to the magical dog Pan Hu, the immortals of the mythic isle Penglai, or the inhabitants of Peach Blossom Spring. Local lore, such as the story of a Han woman married to a tribal chief, is used to explain the process of cultural assimilation, while tales of native female shamans serve as a reminder of the threatening aspect of non-assimilated indigenes. Travelers' tales about the accessibility of indigenous women are symbolic of colonial power relations. If the "stories" can be seen to embody a kind of "Oriental Orientalism," how do they relate to "empirical" ethnographic or geographic accounts? What is the relation between first-hand observation and hearsay? I argue that these two forms of knowledge are produced in close relation to one another, and that the circulation of these "stories," linked as they are to major paradigms of colonial discourse, reinforces the structure of colonial relations described in official accounts.
Creating Polyethnicity: Rival Origin Myths of Local Gods in the Miao Frontier
Donald Sutton, Carnegie Mellon University
This paper examines four origin myths of a trio of gods, the Three Princes, worshipped in the polyethnic highlands of west Hunan, an inner frontier brought under official rule between the 17th and 20th centuries. Extending the idea, proposed by James Watson in a study of Tianhou (Mazu), that different social groups venerating the same gods may hold very different conceptions of what they stand for, the paper finds that competitive ethnic groups (in this case Han and local Hmong [Red Miao])-and also officialdom-come to uphold contrasting, self-serving myths of the Three Princes' human origin and meaning. Three main arguments are made: (1) The variant origin myths of ethnic heroes and martyrs permit cult members to set forth and reconcile, with the help of punning and metaphoric language, the central dilemmas of the frontier society; (2) Divinity and ethnicity are mutually constitutive, in the sense that the representation of a god, and an emerging ethnic group, may each help to (re)constitute the other; (3) By speaking to more than one group, a single myth has the capacity to mediate among viewpoints, leaving room for the biculturalism and polyethnic communication that have characterized this and many other frontiers.
Tales from the Fields of Yunnan: Listening to Han Stories
Susan Blum, University of Colorado, Denver
Anthropologists often use their entry into the field to situate their fieldwork and introduce the ethnography that follows. Indeed, most monographs open with descriptions of the fieldworker's first impressions of the group of strangers who would later become her/his long-term associates, and describe the group's reaction to the shock of seeing the outsider. In this paper I will look at stories Han tell-or told me-of their initial contact with ethnic groups. As Charles Briggs pointed out a decade ago, we must "learn how to ask," that is, we must read the stories for what they are saying, and how and why they say it, rather than merely assuming that we can read them literally as transparent vessels containing information. The stories included here are accounts of individual Han encounters with ethnic groups near Kunming, predominantly in Yunnan. I will examine performative aspects of the narratives when available to enrich our comprehension of the stories. This and other information about "context"-that endlessly expandable topic covering everything from speakers and hearers to social setting to political climate-vastly increases our comprehension of the units of discourse. In this paper, we will listen to Han ethnographers, students, and travelers who returned from their own field explorations with tales to tell of their contact with strangers, ethnic others, in the context of the contemporary Chinese nation-state in all its complexity.