Organizer: Magnus Fiskesjo, University of Chicago
Chair: Ann Maxwell Hill, Dickinson College
Discussant: Deborah Ellen Tooker, Le Moyne College
The focus of this panel is the slavery and bondage institutions of the highland peoples of Southwestern China and Southeast Asia. Such institutions are better known from the context of the dominating state societies of the region, and the presence of various forms of bondage in many highland societies is a subject rarely touched upon today, despite the attention from Western anti-slavery campaigns earlier in this century.
While the peripheral societies were often the passive sources of slaves captured by outsiders, some historically raided the lowlands for slaves they kept themselves—for example, the Yi in Southwest China, and the Wa of the Burma-China frontier; others maintained slaves of local origin. The study of such social institutions in their various forms and complexities in their historical context has important implications for how we understand historical process, social stratification and ideology in non-state societies, as well as the construction of identities and the nature of relations with surrounding states.
What were the specific forms of slavery and bondage amongst the supposedly predominantly egalitarian or anti-hierarchical uplanders? Under what circumstances does it become possible for the tables to turn with the raiding, capturing or trading of and in people, and can we identify and explain cycles or other variations? Also, how do these institutions and ideologies of slavery reflect on constructs of identity, if slaves are the ultimate "other" and stand at the opposite end of the continuum from "us"? These are some of the questions we want to address.
Dimensions of Servitude in Recent Yao/Mien History
Hjorleifur R. Jonsson, Arizona State University
Through a trade network, Thailand’s Mien purchased a significant number of non-Mien people, who became regular household members. The only clear cases of bondage over the last century concern non-Mien soldier-spirits, which men acquired by ordaining to ritual rank. Rather than making pronouncements on the presence or absence of institutions of slavery or bondage, I relate dimensions of servitude to historically specific articulations of Mien social and ideological frameworks that draw on ambivalent relations with lowland states, and how specifically modern forms of corvee draw equally on state-culture and the (partial) collapse of Mien household ideologies.
Captives, Victims, "Slaves": War, Sacrifice and Slave Trade in the Wa Context
Magnus Fiskesjo, University of Chicago
This paper presents an analysis of the forms of slavery and their place in the Wa society of the first half of this century, before the Chinese pacification in the 1950s. The Wa people of the Yunnan-Burma frontier were widely feared as fiercely independent warriors, and the threat of headhunting raids served as a deterrent to all outsiders, as well as to internal enemies within the strife-torn Wa lands. Such acts of war were often specifically targeted, in retaliation for an offense given against a community, but the declared aim was always to produce at least one acceptable sacrificial victim. The raids also, however, often yielded live victims who were captured and kept or adopted much like the other major category of people in bondage: children sold to meet debts, etc. Like those, the war captives either might emerge, eventually, as full members of Wa society, or, at the other extreme, they might be traded for use in sacrifice. Chinese Marxist attempts to pinpoint the level of advancement of Wa society on an Engels-Morganian scale stalled on the issue of presence or absence of "slavery" in Wa society, because the search was for stable social strata where they did not exist—and Wa society was studied in isolation. The various forms of bondage in pre-reform Wa society should instead be understood within the larger context of the trading, raiding and sacrifice of people taking place within the framework of a cosmology that cast the Wa predatory periphery as a center of attraction.
Captives and Caste in Xiao Liangshan
Ann Maxwell Hill, Dickinson College
Slaves in Nuosu (Yi) society of Xiao Liangshan in Yunnan before collectivization in the 1950s originated in captives taken in raids on ethnic groups adjacent to the high altitude communities of the Nuosu. Newly captured slaves occupied the bottom rung of the Nuosu social system stratified into endogamous, caste-like groups. Captives were frequently sold to other Nuosu by their original captors. While traffic in slaves lends itself to an interpretation of Nuosu slavery based on commodification of people, a more productive approach is suggested by the fact of the relative rapidity of assimilation of slaves into Nuosu society, such that their "otherness" was progressively diminished with each generation. Factors abetting this progression from outsider to insider included the organization of production (households instead of estates or other forms of large-scale production, absence of private property), caste without class (access to land after marriage regardless of status, indigenous notions of wealth), marriage as a ubiquitous marker of adult status, the descent-based ideology of Nuosu origins, etc. In the discussion of the Nuosu case, theories of slavery are reviewed and critiqued in light of what we know about the institution in non-sate societies. The Nuosu case is also used to comment briefly on the conventional Chinese Marxist interpretation of the Nuosu as a "slave society."