THE HISTORY OF THE HISTORY OF THE YI
STEVAN HARRELL
YI AS AN ETHNIC CATEGORY
The question "Who are the Yi?" was much more puzzling to me,
a neophyte in Yi studies, than it seemed to have been to most
Chinese writing on the subject either before or after 1949. The
Chinese, in fact, be they scholars or ordinary southwestern
peasants, seem to have always known who the Yi were or, before
1949, who the Lolo were. But to me the answer was not an entirely
obvious one. There was, to begin with, considerable diversity
within that group of approximately five and a half million people
group defined as Yi by the Chinese People's Government. For
example, I knew that they spoke languages which, while fairly
closely related to each other, were by no stretch of the aural
imagination mutually comprehensible. The Yiyu Jianzhi (Short
Account of Yi Languages), gives figures of anywhere from 20% to
42% shared vocabulary between the Northern Dialect standard (Xide
accent) and examples of the other five regional dialects of Yi.
The fact that, after studying the Nuosu language of Liangshan (The
Northern Dialect, in the official classification), I could in fact
converse in that tongue, but could understand nothing of the Lipuo
(Central Yi) language of north-central Yunnan, confirmed in
practice what I had learned in theory. And when the Lipuo people
told me they could understand Lisu (the language of a non-Yi
ethnic group) pretty well, but could make no sense of Nuosu, I
began to wonder about how the Chinese government structured its
ethnic categories.
Cultural diversity was similarly puzzling. The Yi of Yunnan
(outside the northwestern corner of the province, anyway), while
showing considerable diversity among themselves, still seem to
possess some traits in common, such as lowland agriculture,
Han-style housing, and patrilocal marriage. But their society is
structured on very different principles from that of the Nuosu, or
Liangshan Yi, who have neolocal marriage, a highly developed
patriclan system and a structure of social levels (called castes
or classes or strata by various authorities) who are strictly
ranked and stratum-endogamous. And the Yi of Guizhou and
Northeastern Yunnan seem to have a still different structure.
Some Yi have writing and some do not; those that do use similar
scripts, but why are those that lack writing classed with Yi and
not with Lisu or Hani, other minzu that are closely related in
certain ways but have no writing system?
And then there are the disputed cases. The Sani of Lunan and
Luliang counties, the folks who sell "beautiful bags" around the
stone forest and in downtown Kunming, embroider their needlework
with the designation Sani zu, or Sani minzu, not Yi zu. Some of
them now claim that they are not in fact Yi (see Swain, this
volume). And I had the opportunity myself to stay briefly with a
group of people in Panzhihua City, southern Sichuan, who call
themselves Shuitian zu, or "Rice-field people," though the
government classifies them as a branch of Yi. They have no desire
to be associated with the people they themselves consider Yi, that
is the Nuosu of the surrounding hills, whom the Shuitian consider
to be wild and uncouth barbarians (Harrell 1990).
Other foreign observers have also wondered about the
boundaries of the Yi category, or drawn them differently from the
way they have been officially drawn by the authorities. Lietard,
for example, the most meticulous and unbiased of the early
observers of the Yi, includes in his list of "Lolo tribes" the
Lisu (1913:43-44). Mueller, in an authoritative summary published
about the same time, includes the Woni of Puer and Simao, a group
now officially classified as Hani (Mueller 1913:44). Mueller,
perhaps with foresight, expresses the Westerner's same
exasperation with the problem:
Doch hält es oft schwer zu entschieden, welche Stämme
noch als Lolo, welche als mehr selbständige Verwandte
dieses Volkes aufzufassen sind [ibid:40].
And Legendre, a doctor who spent years traveling here and there
across Yi territory in Sichuan and Yunnan, is sure that the
peoples in this category ought not to be classed together:
J'ai acquis cette fois la certitude qu'au Yunnan se
trouvant
de nombreuses tribus qualifées "lolottes" et se disent
telles,
qui n'ont presque rien de commun, physiquement et
moralement,
avec celles de Leang-chan [Legendre 1913:392].0
Finally, there is the widely attested fact that the Yi
themselves have never had a common name that encompasses all the
people the Chinese have referred to as Yi or Lolo (Hsieh 1982:1;
Vial 1898:24; Mueller 1913:39). Yi and Lolo are thus names
applied by others, rather than names originally applied by the
group itself; the category of Yi is one that has been constituted
by outside observers.
So the problem presents itself clearly not as "Who are the
Yi?" which is easily answerable by "Whoever the Nationalities
Commission says they are," but rather "How did the Yi get an
identity?" The quick answer to the question when phrased this way
is, "Through the process of ethnic identification (minzu shibie),
conducted in the 1950s, which employed Stalin's criteria of a
nationality as having a common territory, common language, common
economy, and common psychological makeup expressed in a common
culture" (Lin Yaohua 1987; Jiang 1985). Again, the Yi were who
the Nationalities Commission said they were, according to Stalin's
four criteria. But it is clear from reading these retrospective
accounts of the ethnic identification process that Stalin's
criteria were not employed in any strict manner, but rather to
confirm or legitimate distinctions for the most part already there
in Chinese folk categories and in the work of scholars who wrote
before the Liberation. So the question is unsolved: if the Yi
already had an identity in 1956, how did they get it?
My answer is that they have acquired an identity, in
scholarly circles at least, by having a history. It is generally
accepted that groups of people consider themselves, or are
considered by others to be, ethnic groups, if they see themselves
or are seen as having common descent, and as acquiring certain
common characteristics (ethnic markers) by virtue of common
inheritance (Keyes 1976; Nagata 1981). Since the category Yi
(along with its predecessor category, Lolo) was created not by the
Yi people themselves but by the Chinese who administered, fought,
and interacted with them, and by the Chinese and Western scholars
who studied them, it is in the minds of the outsiders that all the
Yi have always been assumed to be descended from a common
ancestor. And in order to demonstrate this descent, the
outsiders, Chinese and Western, have found it necessary to create
the History of the Yi. Those who would create or defend the
category (including scholars as well as the Nationalities
Commission) must first write the History.
But of course the category Yi or Lolo has meant different
things to participants in different civilizing projects. To the
majority of Western authors, most of whom wrote about the Yi in
the early decades of this century, the category was first and
foremost a racial one, its history to be found in the migrations
of peoples. To most Chinese scholars writing before the
establishment of the People's Republic, when the Confucian
civilizing project was still implicit even in the modernization
and development schemes of various Republican and warlord
governments, the category acquired meaning in the context of
traditional historiography, of matching names of non-Chinese
peoples found in standard histories to the non-Chinese existing in
our own time. And to the scholars of the Chinese People's
Republic, the category was important in the present as a
Nationality that met Stalin's four criteria, and in the past as a
group that was passing through the five universal stages of human
history as defined by official Marxism. For them, the history was
one of the development of productive forces and relations, and the
Yi were thus defined and scaled as the first step of the Communist
project. In each case, the History of the Yi served to show that
the Yi category was a valid one, that it consisted of people with
common descent, but because of the different ways people thought
common descent ought to be manifested, the content of the history
was different in each case. Let us examine the History of the
History of the Yi as it was practiced by Westerners, by Chinese
before the Revolution, and by Chinese after the revolution.
WESTERN WRITERS AND THE HISTORY OF THE YI
Westerners were not the first to mention Yi history. There
are the written accounts of the Yi themselves, in the forms of
genealogies and legendary history (see Zheng 1947, Ma 1985, for
example), and there are mentions of people thought to be the
ancestors of the Yi in much of the traditional Chinese
historiography, perhaps even from the pre-imperial Shu Jing (Book
of History) on; certainly from the Shi Ji (Historical Records) of
Sima Qian (2nd and 1st centuries A.D) and the two Han histories.
In addition, there are several geographical works dating from
various historical periods, such as the Huayang Guo Zhi and the
Manshu (Book of Barbarians), that treat non-Chinese peoples in a
somewhat systematic way. But none of these books concern
themselves with the project of Yi history: defining a people by
delineating its origin and development. The first to address
themselves specifically to the project of Yi history were foreign
scholars and travelers.
Foreigners had been coming into contact with Yi or Yi-type
peoples for centuries; they may even be mentioned in Marco Polo's
book. But it was toward the end of the 19th century that two
events stimulated foreign interest in a project of Yi history.
First and more generally, foreign travelers began crisscrossing
China, and some of them took particular interest in the
borderlands between China and Tibet, roughly the area where the Yi
live. The English diplomat and explorer Edward Colbourne Baber
traveled along the Anning and Jinsha River Valleys in 1877,
ringing but not crossing Liangshan (Baber 1882), and several
expeditions followed. These included, most noteworthily, those of
the French physician A.-F. Legendre, who made and wrote about
several trips around Sichuan and Yunnan in the first decade of
this century (Legendre 1905, 1913).
The second development involved the French colonization of
Indochina; they acquired Annam and Laos as protectorates in 1874
and outright in 1885 and became interested in expanding their
presence in China through the "back door" of Yunnan. The railroad
from Kunming to Hanoi was begun in 1895 and completed a few years
later, and more importantly, French Catholic Missionaries, mostly
from the Missions Etrangers de Paris, took Yunnan as their
province, evangelizing both Chinese and minority peoples (see
Swain, this volume). Certain of these missionaries compiled
and/or published more-or-less full and detailed accounts of Yi
customs, culture, language, and religion. Of the published
accounts, by far the most complete and most scientific is that of
Lietard (1911), concerning the Lolopo, a Central-Yi speaking group
living between Dali and the Jinsha River; the account by Vial
(1898) of the Sani (or Nyi or Gni) of Lunan and Luliang is also
fairly complete. From Liangshan we have no formal missionary
accounts, but several authors, including Lietard and Legendre
(1906) derive much information from a certain Father Martin,
resident for at least 18 years in Fulin (Hanyuan), outside
Liangshan proper but definitely in Nuosu territory, who, according
to Lietard, "semble avoir horreur de la publicité" (1913:18), and
thus not the author of any published works. Finally, an English
missionary, Samuel R. Clarke, lived in Guizhou for several
decades, and published an account of the local Yi, among other
peoples (Clarke 1911).
Western accounts of the history of the Yi continued into the
1930s and 1940s; notable from that period are the synthetic
treatment by Feng and Shryock (1938), and the chapter on the Lolo
in the massive Rassendynamik von Ostasien written by von Eickstedt
in 1944 (von Eickstedt 1944:162-178). After the 1949 communist
takeover of China, Western scholarship on the Yi seems to have
disappeared, with the exception of Bradley's linguistic studies
and a brief summary account by Dessaint, until the 1980s, when
minorities in China have once again become reachable by Western
researchers. Some of these, at least, have accepted without much
question the now orthodox Chinese History of the Yi (see, for
example Heberer 1984:209-210). Things may change in the next few
years; Harrell (1989, 1990) for one seems intent on calling the
whole enterprise into question with critical metahistorical
speculations. But at present, the Western chapter of the History
of the History of the Yi extends from the 1880s to the 1940s.
What then of the content of the History of the Yi as written
by Westerners? The earliest missionary accounts, by those who in
fact knew Yi peoples best, tend to rely on native legends and
cultural traits in tracing the origins of the people. Vial, for
example, deduces from linguistic affinities and Sani legends that
the Yi probably came from "the region between Tibet and Burma
(1898:2)", led by chiefs of families or clans, of which there must
have been two, because of the nature of division of Eastern Yunnan
and Northwestern Guizhou Yi society into Black, or landlord, and
White, or subject, dialect and culture groups (tribus). There in
Eastern Yunnan, he says, the Lolos had a kingdom, which endured
until it was conquered by the First Emperor of the Qin. He says
little of the later history. Lietard's account follows a similar
course: he sees the Lolos as originating in the northwest of
Yunnan, as attested to by the similarity in language, culture and
customs with the Tibeto-Burman peoples (1913:58), and has having
formed the population of the state of Dian in the second and first
centuries B.C., a state whose king was, in all probability, "un
Chinois naturalisé Lo-lo (1913:55)." The Cuan lords of Yunnan in
the sixth and seventh centuries were likely also Lolo kings of
Chinese origin. When the Nanzhao polity was formed, most of its
subjects were Yi, but the king was from the Minjia (today called
Bai).
In the accounts of these missionaries, very little about race
or physical characteristics is used to explain Yi history. But in
the accounts of scientists, natural and social, we find an
explicitly racialist paradigm, one that derives more from the
scientific impulse of generalization and systematization than from
the intimate knowledge and the desire to describe accurately that
seem to have motivated the missionaries. For these scientists,
beginning with Legendre and in rudimentary form even with Baber,
the History of the Yi is the history of a race, built on a series
of unexamined assumptions, probably part of the "habitus" of
Western culture, about the nature of ethnic or social groups. The
first of these assumptions is that there are, inherent and
inherited in groups of people, certain traits of personality,
culture, even economy that persist over generations. The second
is that these inherent and inherited cultural characteristics
correlate more or less exactly with inherited physical
characteristics. The third assumption is that there is such a
thing as a pure race, a physical-cultural combination that
originated who knows when, but far enough back in the past that we
don't need to worry about it, and has persisted through the ages,
at least in those places where the race has remained genetically
pure. Corollary to this third unexamined assumption is a fourth,
that mixed races are different from pure races; that when members
of these pure races intermarry, not only physical features but
cultural ones become blurred, mixed, undistinguishable. Hence
there are no cultural characteristics that "belong" to these mixed
races; in order to trace these people's origins, one must sort out
the original, pure elements that went into the mixture.
Examining the accounts of Legendre, Mueller, von Eickstedt,
and Feng and Shryock will give us a feel for how these racialist
assumptions shaped the history of the Yi as seen by foreign
scientists. Legendre was the first to do "physical
anthropological" studies on the Yi; when he traveled to Hanyuan he
took cephalic indices of some people introduced to him by the
modest Father Martin. From these and from measurements in Yunnan,
he determined that the current Lolo population in fact came from
three strains. There was an autochthonous strain, represented by
Tai and Mon-khmer peoples, that was short, dark, brachycephalic,
"une race Polynesienne tres bas dans l'échelle humaine
(1905:399)": the Negrito. Mixed with this was the Chinese, the
Mongoloid type, who had entered Sichuan and Yunnan early in the
historical era. And then later, there came the Lolos: the
original Loloish strain, which was related to Caucasoid peoples of
central Asia, was "un type supérieur (1905:477)" tall, high-nosed,
dolicocephalic, with broad shoulders, erect carriage, and perfect
proportions.
In Legendre's account, the Lolos of his day in Sichuan and
Yunnan were in fact very different because they represented very
different mixtures of these races. In Liangshan, where the Lolos
remained unconquered and unmixed with the other races, they
retained not only their racial purity but their original cultural
characteristics; they were warriors, bold and sometimes
treacherous, ready to counter their invaders to the point where
the Chinese, to whom Legendre concedes superior intelligence, had
to overcome the Lolos slowly and peacefully (ibid:478-79). In
Yunnan, however, the people the Chinese call Lolos are hardly
worthy of the same designation (see above, p. 4). These people
were mostly Mongoloid with some apparent mixture of Negrito or
autochthonous blood, with none of the fierceness or love of
vendetta found among the Lolos in Liangshan. They were peaceable,
resigned, capable of submitting to all yokes (1913:391). From
this Legendre derives the conclusion that there is in fact no
unity to the Lolo, that the latter is in fact a category imposed
by the Chinese, one with no justification in the scientific facts
(1913:392). As a Westerner, he doubts the category; as a man of
the early 20th century, he does so on the grounds of racist
assumptions about the relationship between what he calls "physical
and moral" characteristics.
Mueller, in a synthetic article written around the same time,
is willing to give more credence to Chinese sources, at least of
the traditional historical kind, and is less extreme than Legendre
in rejecting the connection between northern and southern Yi.
Even he admits that physically and culturally, the Lolos of
Liangshan and those of Yunnan have little in common, though
linguistically, he says, there is more justification for placing
them all in a single category (1939:48). Since he is unwilling to
give up the category Lolo altogether, he reconciles the physical
and cultural differences by attributing to the Yi of Yunnan great
mixtures with other peoples, both in (Thai) blood and in culture,
and keeping those of Liangshan as a relatively pure type
(ibid:50-51). These, he says, must have come from the north or
northwest; by the Western Han the historical sources point to
people in Yunnan who bind up the hair on their forehead into a
kind of horn; from the similarity to today's Yi in Liangshan,
these must have been Yi, as were the later commoners of the
"Thai-Reich" of Nanzhao from the 9th to the 11th centuries (ibid:
48-49). Mueller thus manages to retain both the unity of the Yi
category and the assumption that race and culture are united, even
if this is hard to see when mixing of one sort or the other has
occurred.
Von Eickstedt, whose data for his comprehensive work include
visits to Liangshan and other areas of China, presents a similar
picture, but with the further wrinkle that the difference between
Black and White (aristocrat and commoner) castes in Liangshan is
also attributable to racial differences. His historical scheme
goes like this: The Lolo and the Miao-Yao peoples are originally
part of the same group, Europid (sic.) peoples of Central Asia who
were driven from their homelands by droughts in the first
millennium B.C., and who then settled in the high plateaux of
northeastern Tibet. From there, however, they were compelled by
population pressure to move again into the still largely empty
lands to the south (1944:174-5). This meant, of course, that they
first settled Liangshan, and it is in Liangshan that the
aristocratic Black Lolos preserve the true nature of that race:
Sie bilden zweifellos den eigentlichen Kern des
Lolotums,
gelten als kühn, räuberisch, gastfrei und offen, kriegs-
gewöhnt und kriegsbereit, und sind voller Hass und Miss-
trauen gegen die Chinesen, während sie gegen Europäer
keinerlei Abneigung zeigen [1944:168].
Es herrschen blutige Fehdern, Mord, Diebstahl und
schranken-
lose Habgier, aber auch Liebe zum edlen Zuchttier und
Achtung
vor die Frau [ibid.].
Among the White Lolos, who are ordinarily the descendants of
captured Han slaves, as well as among the Lolos of Yunnan,
however, little of that lawless martial tradition remains; they
are basically a Mongoloid type, or at best a mixture of these with
true Lolos, and retain little or nothing of the Black Lolo system
of social classes or their former pastoral economy.
Such attention to racial factors may not seem surprising in a
German writing during the Nazi period, or even in a Frenchman or
German writing before World War I. But Feng and Shryock's account
of 1938, written by an American and a Chinese in the time of Boas
and Herskovits, seems more surprising: although it, like Mueller's
account, relies on culture as well as race, it gives the
impression of an underlying assumption that the two naturally go
together. In the first place, they use data from Legendre and
Ting to argue that Black and White Lolos were racially different:
the blacks were a conquering group of a single racial stock, while
the Whites were subjugated peoples from a mixture of different
stocks. Due to pressure from Chinese, blacks in Yunnan in recent
centuries have been decimated or driven northward, and remain only
in a few areas (presumably, but not explicitly, the northeast of
the province) (Feng and Shyrock 1938:107-8). Exactly how this
happened is hard to know, since it is difficult or impossible to
match the names of former peoples found in Chinese historical
sources with the ethnic groups that must have existed at the time:
"Because of the presence of other tribes, it is often hard to tell
whether a mentioned tribe was Lolo or not (ibid.:108)," in other
words, there were Lolos all through history, but we can't tell
whether particular sources were talking about them or somebody
else. The Cuan peoples of the Northern and Southern Dynasties and
early Tang period were, according to Feng and Shryock, of mixed
ethnic stock: while the Eastern Cuan were definitely Lolo, the
Western Cuan were probably composed of several different ethnic
groups. The only conclusion the authors can draw was that Cuan
was a political, rather than an ethnic category; the conclusion I
draw from that is that for the authors, an ethnic group is a
racial and/or cultural, but not a political group (ibid.:117). At
the very moment Feng and Shryock were working out this analysis
(and not far from Yi territory), Edmund Leach was studying the
Kachin.
If the later History of the Yi, as presented by Feng and
Shryock, is clear in its outlines if not in its details, their
origin and early history are still matters for speculation. They
dismiss theories based on language, because of insufficient
knowledge, and concentrate on the two characteristics they think
most salient: race and culture. They discuss at length racial
theories propounded by Legendre, Ding, and others, all of which
connect the Lolo to Iranian or other central Asian, Caucasoid
types. In the end, though, they find these theories inconclusive
(ibid.:126). They then go on to consider cultural hypotheses,
noting that there are affinities to Mongols and other northeastern
Asian peoples in the use of felt, the lack of pottery, and the
possible division into Black nobles and White commoners. But
contrary evidence comes from the fact that the Lolo, while they
keep herds, do not use milk; thus they must not have originally
been a pastoral people, and the origins in northern Asia thus seem
questionable (ibid.:126-127). In the end, Feng and Shryock,
unlike many analysts, do not put forward a pet theory of their
own. But they do hold to the assumptions about the importance of
race, and about the enduring nature of a group, with its own
racial and cultural characteristics, that endure across the ages.
CHINESE HISTORY OF THE YI BEFORE 1949
As mentioned above, traditional Chinese scholars did not
engage in the History of the Yi project in any systematic way.
When Chinese scholars did begin to take up the project, many of
them did so as part of an international ethnological or
ethnohistorical community, so that their scholarship did not
evolve entirely independently of their Western colleagues'. But
there are definite differences of emphasis which reflect the fact
that whatever methodological influence the Chinese scholars may
have received from the West, they were still engaging in a project
that derived from an assumption that was purely Chinese: the
assumption that Lolo or Yi was a real category. For the Chinese
scholars, such an assumption is not explicit; rather it is part of
their conception of the world from the beginning, something that
is not examined and does not have to be. Thus we do not find, as
among the Westerners, any speculation that the Lolos might not be
a single people after all; rather the assumption is that the
category is real and the task is to find out how the people got
where they are today.
In addition to this paramount assumption of a real category,
there are other characteristics that distinguish the Chinese
approach from the Western. Closely connected to the first
assumption is the premise that the categories with which we deal
are very old; certainly by the time historical records appear, the
Lolos were already in existence. Another important assumption is
that names hold the most important key to unlocking the secret of
the Lolos' origins and history. If one can correlate the names of
peoples living at different epochs, as described in traditional
historiographic works, with the peoples known to exist in our
time, one has solved the puzzle: in a sense one has traced the Yi
through their history, which is a branch of History with a capital
H, which stands for Han. A final important assumption, not nearly
so prominent in Western works, is that cultural differences among
various Yi groups are due to differential exposure to a higher,
more advanced Han culture. In the service of this eminently
Chinese project, scholars of the Republican period used many of
the same tools used by their Western counterparts: they paid
attention to race, to character traits, and to cultural practices.
But the fundamental assumption remains that of the real category,
which can be traced through history. Let us examine briefly some
of the tracery.
One of the earliest accounts was that of Lu Simian, in his
Zhongguo Minzu Shi, published in 1933 (Lu 1933). This work is
divided into chapters, each chapter covering a category of people
named in the early histories, whose descendants can presumably be
traced until today. For example, describing the history of the
peoples in the West and Southwest of China, there are chapters on
the Miao and the Qiang. The Yi are treated in the chapter on the
Pu, which begins "The Pu are also called the Pu, and in addition
called the Pu, and today are known as Lolo. They are also one of
the large races of the southwest (237)." The Pu, a name that goes
as far back as the Shu Jing and the Zuo Zhuan, were a group found
in Yunnan by the time of the Han, but who had earlier been spread
out over Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan. They
were forced out of their eastern territory, but later formed the
Yelang kingdom in Yunnan. After that, they appear again as the
rulers of the Eastern and Western Cuan, whose black man and white
man inhabitants, respectively, correspond to the Black Lolos and
White Lolos of today (241).
This account is in some ways the most purely Chinese of the
sources I examine here: it begins with a name from ancient
historical sources, assumes that the group named existed even
earlier, and traces the group through to the present. It says
little about cultural traits; its main interest is in the history
of the assumed category.
Another explanation, by Jiang Yingliang, also relies on
historical documents, but comes to completely different
conclusions. According to Jiang, who visited Liangshan in 1941,
but did not publish his results until seven years later, the Yi (
) of Liangshan have an even longer history. The earliest mention
of these people is in historical accounts of the Zhou Dynasty,
which even before it conquered the Shang already was having
trouble with peoples, variously referred to as rong and man, who
belonged to the Qiang groups. From the earliest Zhou rulers to
You Wang, the last king of the Western Zhou, there were frequent
attacks from the Qiang, eventually forcing the Zhou to move their
capital eastward from Changan to Luoyang. During the Spring and
Autumn period (771-481), the Chinese kingdoms of Qin, Han, and
Zhao all attacked and defeated various groups of Qiang, who were
forced to move westward. After this, they dispersed into various
areas in the Sichuan-Gansu border region. The Baima people, for
example, as described in the Later Han History, showed such traits
as felt manufacture and legal protection of women, traits they
hold in common with the Yi of Liangshan today. From here the
Qiang/Yi people moved further south, until by the end of the
Northern and Southern Dynasties they occupied most of the
territory east of the Tibetan Massif, south of the Chengdu Plain,
and north of modern Kunming.
The continuity of these peoples, according to Jiang, was
broken up in the Sui and Tang Dyansties, when they were dispersed,
some of them becoming the various peoples of the Tibeto-Burman
family found today, some assimilating to Han language and culture.
Only those remaining in Liangshan, because of their lack of
contact with the outside and their independence from government
rule, have preserved their primitive social conditions (Jiang
1948:20-22).
Jiang's account, unlike Lu's, is interested in cultural
traits and linguistic relatedness, but it basically follows the
same, Chinese strategy of assuming the cultural unit in question
is very old (in this case, at least three thousand years),
equating its identity with that of non-Han peoples described in
traditional Chinese historiography, and tracing cultural
differences at least partly to differential contact with advanced
Han civilization.
Another account from about the same time, by Zeng Chaolun
(Zeng 1945), follows this basic pattern but includes more factors
in its explanation and gives us an even clearer picture of the
distinctive Chinese approach to the History of the Yi. Zeng's
original named base are the Nan Yi (Southern Yi ), as mentioned
by the poet Sima Xiangru of the Han dynasty. Unlike the Miao,
originally a lowland people forced out by the Chinese, the Yi have
always occupied the entire Liangshan region (94). Where they came
from is not certain, but racial and linguistic factors seem to
point to affinity with the Tibetans, since the Yi language, like
those of Tibet and Japan, has an "inverted word order."
The differences between various groups of Yi are also
explicable by history, according to Zeng. The majority of the Yi
in Yunnan, for example, are so much Sinified that their original
customs and habits have almost completely disappeared (95). [In
Kunming, they haven't used them for years.] It is only in
Liangshan, where the Yi have lived undisturbed and unacculturated
for thousands of years, that one can find the pure, unadulterated
Yi culture. There the Yi are divided into tribes, by which Zeng
seems to mean something like clans, each of which has its own
character traits: some friendly, some hostile, some strong and
some weak, some treacherous, ruthless, or fierce, some more gentle
(96-97). It is also in Liangshan where the "social class"
division into Black aristocrats and White commoners is found;
although we cannot prove that this existed among the other
branches of the Yi, Zeng thinks that it did, and was abandoned
under Chinese influence (95). The system, as it is found in
Liangshan, seems to be a relic of "the outmoded feudal system,"
and is something that ought to be abolished. At the same time,
Zeng sees the slave system as providing more security for the Wazi
(captured Han slaves) than the tenancy system provides for tenants
in the Han areas (112).
Zeng's account, like Lu's and Jiang's, traces the Yi from a
known historical people, and although he does not correlate the Yi
at every step of their history with some people mentioned in the
books (his main purpose, after all, is ethnographic rather than
historical), we can still see the basic assumptions of an ancient
people with a name and an essence, and of the influence of
"superior" Han culture as the explanation for any internal
contradictions or differences among Yi groups. The criticism of
the "outmoded Feudal system" is also characteristic of Chinese
accounts; scholarship on Chinese minorities in this period is
often rather applied in nature; it assumes not only Han
superiority but superiority of modern institutions over
traditional ones.
Such a vision of Yi history as a branch of History seems to
have been all pervasive in pre-1949 Chinese ethnology and other
scholarship. For example, Wei Huilin (1947), in an article
basically concerned with reform and community development in Yi
areas, prefaces his remarks by a recitation of the historical
names of the Yi people, starting with the Lu and Luo of the Spring
and Autumn period, and running through the Xi, Kunming, and
Qiongdu of the Han, the Nanman attacked by Zhuge Liang in the
Three Kingdoms, the two Cuan of the Southern Dynasties, the
Nanzhao and Wuman of the Tang and Song, the Wuyi and Luolouman of
the Yuan and Ming, and the Luoluo of the Qing. Many other
examples, each deriving the modern Yi from a slightly different
succession of ancient groups, are mentioned in Hsieh 1982. And
while the particulars of these hypotheses differ, as does the
evidence they use, they all hold to the position of an ethnic
group that has existed over the long haul from the times of
earliest historiography to the present.
THE REVOLUTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE YI AFTER 1949
The History of the History of the Yi since 1949 is much
longer than either of the earlier two episodes. There are two
reasons for this. First, there has been much more official and
scholarly attention paid to minorities generally in the People's
Republic than was paid to them earlier; the national policies of
jural equality as well as integration into a "United, Multi-ethnic
State" (Tongyi Duominzu Guojia) certainly have a lot to do with
this. The result is the second reason, that simply a lot more is
known about the Yi and their history than was ever known before.
In particular, more Yi-language manuscripts and stone inscriptions
have been found, and scholars have begun to take some of these
things seriously, things that were previously dismissed as
unreliable legends. Also, there has been much more archaeology,
and as with the trends in Chinese history, archaeology and legends
have been correlated into a much more detailed and coherent
picture of the past. If a neophyte (even more neo than I) asked
me for a recommendation on what to read about Yi history, I would
certainly recommend a P.R.C. account over either an older Chinese
one or one from a Western pen.
But P.R.C. history is, of course, no more "objective" than
earlier history from China or history written by Westerners. It
too has its purposes and its assumptions. One of the purposes of
this modern History of the Yi is carried over from its Republican
predecessor: to document the integrity of the category and show
how it has persisted through time in spite of the changes that the
Yi have gone through. But added to this is another element, which
is at the same time a purpose and an assumption. This is the
construction of the History of the Yi, like the history of
everything else, according to the five stages of history laid out
by Soviet historiography, the stages corresponding to the
primitive, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist modes of
production. Added to this is the breakdown of the primitive stage
into matrilineal and patrilineal phases, following the plan laid
out by Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) and distilled by Frederick Engels
(1883). Adopting the five-stage model of history and the Morgan
model of the primitive stage makes possible a much more complete
and detailed History of the Yi. This is primarily because the
five stages of history are defined in terms of their forces and
relations of production, and the sub-stages of the primitive stage
are defined in terms of the particular social structures. So
source materials that were formerly ambiguous or difficult to
interpret can be made clear; details can be filled in. Most
importantly, cultural traits, only hinted and guessed at in
previous kinds of history, can now be supplied by inference from
what we know must have existed when the Yi were at a particular
stage. The result is a History of the Yi that for the first time
contains fairly detailed reconstructions of the culture and social
structure of the Yi in premodern times.
Other assumptions in the modern History of the Yi carry over
from the Chinese model of the prerevolutionary period. The
existence of the category, basically unchanged from very early
times, is of course still assumed, and the formulation of the
history acts to justify the boundaries of the category, just as
the boundaries of the category define the scope of the history.
This is reminiscent of the dialog between history and legitimacy
traced by Sangren (1988) in his analysis of temples in Taiwan: as
with the Yi as an ethnic category, the present defines the scope
of the history, and the content of the history legitimates the
claims made in the present.
Another carry-over assumption is that internal cultural,
linguistic, or even mode-of-production differences between
different branches of the category are to be explained not by any
kind of original differences, but by the effects of different
kinds of environmental and acculturational influences. Those
branches of the Yi that had more contact with the Han culture (now
defined not as inherently superior, but rather as farther along in
the five-stage developmental scale) are likely themselves to be
more developed. Those whose natural environments were more
favorable are likely to have developed further on their own. And
any branches that have any characteristics that are more like Han
society than the corresponding characteristics of other branches
are assumed to have undergone acculturation toward Han culture.
In other words, what is Yi is assumed to be whatever is most
different from Han; other variations are assumed to be the result
of Han influence.
Finally, race is out; language and culture are in as the
primordial characteristics that originally define a group and
constitute its basic essence.
The interaction between the definition of the category in the
present and the formulation of the history is a constant and
seamless one, but for the purposes of this analysis it is easier
to look at it from one side at a time. I will thus first describe
briefly how the category Yi was formulated in the process of minzu
shibie, or ethnic identification, using history as an important
guide to identification. I will then describe at somewhat more
length how, given the category that was now official and
buttressed by historical evidence, the more complete History of
the Yi has been written by different authors.
Long shrouded in silence, the process by which the ethnic
identification process was actually done has now become the
subject of a few articles (Lin Yaohua 1987; Jiang Yongxing 1985).
The announced method was to ask first for social groups that
thought themselves to be minzu to make application to the
authorities; in Yunnan 260 groups submitted their names. After
this, teams of specialists in culture, led by Lin Yaohua, and in
language, led by Fu Maoji, would investigate the validity of the
claims according to the standard of Stalin's four criteria (Lin
1987:1). But in fact the investigators ended up using the
criteria very flexibly. In particular, they found that the third
criterion, a common economic base, was not a characteristic of
very many minzu in China. We can see this with the Yi; according
to official histories, Liangshan was still in the slave stage of
society in 1950, while Yi areas in Yunnan and Guizhou had passed
into feudalism for hundreds of years. But, argued the
identification teams, the criteria delineated by Stalin were in
fact based on what happens in capitalist society; "the common
economy of areas where many minzu lived together linked together
different minzu, but it did not eliminate their respective ethnic
characteristics; the result was that the existence of a common
economy was not obvious in any minzu area (Lin 1987:2)." What
this says, it seems to me, is that the identification teams
already had their categories in mind; if Stalin's criteria went
against the pre-existing categories, it was the pre-existing
categories that took precedence.
There were, of course, problematic cases, small groups that
claimed independent minzu status, and whose claims had to be
investigated. Several of these were people who spoke Yi
languages; Lin gives the example of two groups that reported
themselves as Tujia (no relation to the officially recognized
Tujia minzu of Guizhou, Hunan, and Hubei) and as Menghua. About
170,000 people reported that they were Tujia; another 40,000
claimed to be Menghua. Investigation teams first determined that
the Menghua and Tujia were the same; the Menghua were Tujia who
had migrated south from Menghua county, and 76% of a sample of
1000 vocabulary items were the same. Then, ethnographic
investigations disclosed that this Tujia group (including the
previous Menghua) had "retained many common Yi [cultural]
features, such as clan-elder systems, surname exogamy, levirate,
remnants of cremation, ancestral spirit platforms, polytheism, and
magical arts. In addition, they could intermarry with Yi. For
this reason, the Tujia and Menghua were determined to be a branch
(zhixi) of the Yi (Lin 1987:3-4).
This description of the actual process reveals the presence
of several of the abovementioned assumptions about ethnic groups.
The Chinese investigators basically already knew what Yi meant;
not fitting Stalin's criteria was no serious impediment to
declaring them a minzu. In addition, when there were
problematical cases, it was language and culture traits that were
examined in order to determine where these people fit. Common
vocabulary items indicate a genetic relationship between
languages, that is, a common linguistic history. And common
cultural traits are always spoken of as "retained" (baoliu). That
is, there is the presumption that Yi all had common traits in a
primordial past, and that any group that has any of these traits
has retained them in the face of acculturative pressure (rather
than borrowing them, for example), as well as the converse
proposition that progress comes from contact with the outside
rather than from the people's own internal development.
All along, there has been a stated principle that the process
of ethnic identification should not be carried out by fiat, but
that the wishes of the people themselves ought to be taken into
account. But as admitted in Jiang Yongxing's 1985 retrospective
on thirty years of identification work, this principle was not
always followed. Jiang states, in fact, that one of the reasons
why there are still so many unsolved ethnic identification
problems in the Southwest is that the identification work has
consistently overemphasized historical kinship (Lishi shang de
xueyuan lianxi) and underemphasized the wishes of the ethnic
peoples (minzu yiyuan) (Jiang Yongxing 1985:309-315). This
critique, I think, strikes at the heart of the matter; the wishes
of the ethnic peoples cannot always be made to coincide with the
pre-existent Chinese category, while history can usually be
formulated in such a way that the category remains intact (see
McKhann and Diamond, this volume). This seems to be the reason
why most remaining problems of ethnic identification involve
groups that want to break away from the larger (Han or minority)
minzu in which they have been classified, rather than independent
groups who want to be amalgamated with a larger minzu (Jiang
Yongxing 1985:304).
The process of ethnic identification was thus little threat
to the category of Yi (which by common consent of representatives
of many branches, was the name adopted for the whole group);
history had been used in the formulation of the category, as had
linguistic and cultural commonalities, both inferred as
demonstrating a common history. This did not mean, however, that
the definitive History of the Yi had been written. Of course
there was and still is a lot more to find out, in the sense of
strictly empirical facts. What the completion of ethnic
identification did mean for history was that any serious
historical treatment would have to contribute to the demonstration
that History was something common to the whole category. In
addition, history would have to show how the category or branches
thereof passed through the five universal stages.
All this has resulted in a richer, more complete, more
detailed history, and one in which differences among branches of
the category must be explained in terms of differential experience
rather than any kind of primordial or essential separateness.
This does not mean that there is a single, official, orthodox
history, without any disputes. There is, on the contrary, still
no agreement about where the Yi originated. What is agreed on is
that wherever they originated, they all originated there and have
diverged afterwards.
To illustrate how the History of the Yi looks under modern
conditions, that is, assumed unity of the category, progress
through the five stages, and explanation of differences in terms
of differential environmental conditions and varying degrees of
Han influence, I will recount the story as told by one historian
in some detail. Since I have only read one full-scale history, Ma
Changshou's Yizu Gudai Shi (Ancient History of the Yi), I will use
it as the example, keeping in mind that some of Ma's positions,
particularly regarding the origin of the Yi, are still quite
controversial.
The first topic treated in Ma's history is the nature of
primitive society among the Yi. The only sources available for
investigating this question are Yi traditions, which are available
in two forms: books of stories of the creation of the world, and
recitations of genealogies at festivals, war councils, etc. From
these sources, we can tell that the first, or matrilineal, stage
of Yi primitive society was longer than the patrilineal stage;
this is because many Yi genealogies recite twelve "dynasties" at
the beginning of the world; of these, only the last two show the
characteristic Yi pattern of "father-son linked names" (fu zi lian
ming), in which a man's second name becomes his son's first name.
That the Yi were matrilineal in late prehistoric times is also
confirmed by the legend of Asu Awo (a Han transcription of a Yi
name) looking for his father. Briefly, this is the tale of a man
who was born in the old days, when people, "after birth knew their
mother but not their father." Asu Awo went looking for his
father, but was not successful until a spirit told him to perform
ancestor worship. After this, paternal grandfathers and
grandsons, as well as fathers and sons, knew each other. This is
a story of the transition from matrilineal to patrilineal descent
in the later stages of primitive society (Ma 1985:1-2).
The next question is where and when this happened. The key
figure in all this is a man called Zhongmuyu in Han, or Zzemuvyvy
in Yi, who is acknowledged by all Yi and some Hani to be their
common ancestor. If we figure the numbers of generations in
genealogies, we come up with about 80, which at 25 years per
generation comes to the former Han (10). With regard to the
place, Zzemuvyvy is referred to in Yi manuscripts from as far
afield as Liangshan and parts of Yunnan as living in places that
can tentatively be located near Kunming; in Guizhou manuscripts,
his abode can be located in Northeastern Yunnan, near present-day
Zhaotong. Therefore we can posit an early migration of the Yi
from central Yunnan toward the northeast (5-7).
After Zzemuvyvy in many Yi manuscripts come the six ancestors
(liu zu). Since their names do not link with Zzemuvyvy, the
chances are that they were more than one generation after him;
anyway legend has it that the eldest pair were the founders of
clans who settled in the south (near Kunming again), the next pair
founded clans that settled in the north (near Zhaotong), and the
youngest two established clans that settled in the East (in
northwestern Guizhou) (9). At the time of the formation of the
clans, the Yi were still not divided into classes; that is, they
were still in the stage of primitive society. But especially the
eldest two clans, who settled in the south, frequently fought with
other tribes; the result was that they began to enslave war
captives, which we know from Engels was the origin of the slave
system, the second stage of history and the first to involve class
divisions (12-13).
By the Eastern Han period, then, the Yi had populated most of
eastern and northeastern Yunnan, as well as northwestern Guizhou.
It remained for them to enter Liangshan. Those who did so were
members of one of the middle pair of clans, called Heng (Yi, He)
in Guizhou and called Guhou in Liangshan. These clans, it will be
recalled, were originally settled in Northeastern Yunnan; some of
them remained there and became the historical Pu. Others either
stayed in the area, moved to Yongning in the extreme south of
Sichuan, or combined with the other of this pair of clans to form
what would become most of the aristocratic Black Yi clans of
Liangshan today (14-15). If it sounds complicated, it is. The
point is, it all fits together: Yi traditions, Chinese history,
the five stages and, most importantly, all the branches of the Yi
come into one coherent account.
When the clans moved from the east into Liangshan, they
subjugated the natives; this probably happened between the end of
the Han and the first few decades of the Tang. The subjugated
natives, referred to as Puren, Puren, Tulao, and other names that
may correspond to modern Xifan and Naxi, as well as another group
who are now extinct, all became the commoner subjects of the Black
Yi clans; they are thus ancestral to the White Yi of present-day
Liangshan society (19-22). Not only the Yi category, but the Naxi
and Xifan, can be traced through history in this way.
The next question Ma takes up is the formation of the slave
mode of production. This probably happened first in Yunnan: we
can see from the Dian bronzes of the early Han period that there
was a slave polity existing in central Yunnan at that time. Many
of the scenes show masters or mistresses and slaves, the latter
sewing, spinning, working in the fields, or in one very striking
casting, about ready to be the victim of a human sacrifice. That
this was slave labor is beyond doubt, since lots of people are
working together, and we know that labor is more individualized
under the later feudal system. These slaves all appear from their
costumes to be of different minzu; from the specific nature of
their clothes or hairstyles at least four of the eight
identifiable minzu are probably Yi. The slave system was thus
established in all the Yi areas at least by the Three Kingdoms
period(39-49).
Generally characterized, the period of the Eastern Han and
Three Kingdoms was characterized by competition between the slave
system of the Yi and the feudal system of the Han; from the end of
the Three Kingdoms to the beginning of the Tang, a period in which
the Chinese polity was weak in the Southwest and had very little
influence on Yi society, was the period of consolidation of the
slave system, culminating in the establishment of the Nanzhao
kingdom, itself a polity based on the slave mode of production
(54-5).
This period of the development of slave society was the
period of dominance of the Cuan. Cuan was originally the surname
of one of the biggest slaveowning families in Yunnan; later it
came to be applied to the people under this and other families'
rule. Most historical sources speak of the Wuman (black
barbarians) of Eastern Cuan and the Baiman (white barbarians) of
Western Cuan; the question debated by historians is the connection
between these and the later Black and White social strata in Yi
society. According to Ma (this is still a disputed issue), there
is no direct correspondence. The Baiman, living in the Western
Cuan area (roughly between Kunming and Dali) were influenced early
on by Han society, especially after the opening up of the trade
route from Chengdu through the Anning River valley after Zhuge
Liang's southern expedition. In the fertile plains of this area,
they developed irrigated agriculture and a flourishing economy,
and also adopted many features of Han culture and society. In the
Eastern Cuan area, by contrast (in eastern and northeastern
Yunnan), development proceeded more slowly because of a less
favorable natural endowment and less contact with progressive
(feudal) forces; here the slave system became consolidated. It is
clear that the eastern Cuan were the Yi; the Western Cuan seem to
have been of several sorts, of which at least one was the
ancestors of the modern Bai people (69-73).
The Nanzhao kingdom, established in Yunnan in the 8th
century, was the inevitable result of the development of the Yi
slave polity to a certain degree. Nanzhao was a multi-ethnic
polity; it is still under dispute who the rulers of the first, or
Meng, dyansty were; the subsequent Qi, Yang, and Duan ruling
lineages were definitely Bai. The social system, although
possessed of some feudal influences already, was basically a slave
polity, in which the ruler gave land to lords of different ranks,
and the lords in turn, according to the Man Shu (Book of
Barbarians)
After the harvest is over, the barbarian official (man
guan) divides the grain according to the population of
the tenant households; what is left over is transported
to the official [quoted in Ma 1985:80].
Ma points out that this demonstrates that there was no fixed
amount that was due to each household, but rather the slavelord
gave the slaves just enough so they wouldn't starve. This was
reminiscent of Liangshan before the Democratic Reforms, when the
slaves were in an equally oppressed position.
During the Nanzhao period and the subsequent Dali kingdom
(973-1283), there were a lot of migrations of peoples, many of
them part of royal schemes to settle or defend various areas,
others the result of people fleeing the control of the central
authorities. In general, during the Dali kingdom there was more
and more development of the productive forces, more and more
influence of feudalism (91-94). But the transformation was not
complete until the conquest by the Mongols in 1283, when Qubilai
issued an order prohibiting the capture of slaves in northeast
Yunnan, and when the Mongol prince known as Saiquchi in Chinese
distributed land and tools to conquered Yi peoples, showing that
the tenants, who had no land or tools previously, were still
working under the slave mode of production.
The Yuan represented the real watershed for the Yi in Yunnan.
The area was once again, for the first time since the later Han, a
fully integrated province of China, and Han migration into the
area, as well as economic development in terms of trade, mining,
and intensified agriculture, brought about the complete triumph of
the feudal system there (96-97). In Liangshan, on the other hand,
the slave system as we know persisted until 1956, though it, too,
was not devoid of feudal influences, especially in the Qing
dynasty around the peripheries of the area. Here the slave system
persisted under the rule of tusi (native officials) during the
last three dynasties. In Liangshan, unlike the situation in
Yunnan, land was poor and trade routes inconvenient, so the
productive forces were unable to develop. The result was that the
Ming and Qing governments retained big slaveowning clans as tusi,
and did not try to alter the social system in the area (106-108).
But even in Liangshan, there was influence from Han society.
During the Ming and Qing periods, there was a gradual encroachment
of Han peasants and feudal land relations, especially in the
peripheral areas around the Anning Valley. The result was that
the big tusi became more and more agents of the central feudal
regime, and less and less representatives of the slaveowning
class. This in turn led to revolts in the late Ming, and the
replacement of tusi in the core areas of Liangshan with
independent rule by local slaveowners (110-112). In more
peripheral areas, however, the feudalization of society continued,
so that prominent Black Yi often had two kinds of dependents at
the same time: Yi slaves and Han tenants (116-118).
As mentioned above, Ma Changshou's account, written in 1959
but not published until 1985, is not without its controversial
points: in particular the ethnic identity of the Nanzhao rulers is
still a matter for lively discussion (see Qi 1987), and the Yunnan
origin of the Yi is disputed by those who think they came from the
northwest. With regard to the latter issue, a recent article by
Chen Tianjun (1985) demonstrates even more clearly than Ma
Changshou's book the power of the five-stage and Morganian
historical schemes. According to Chen, the origin of the Yi goes
back further, to the San Miao of classical History, who were
always fighting against the Xia dynasty. These San Miao most
likely lived in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, whence
some of them were driven westward into modern Qinghai, where they
amalgamated with local peoples to become the Qiang. The San Miao
were already patrilineal when they fought the Xia, which means
that the matrilineal-patrilineal transition recorded in the Yi
genealogies and in the story of Asu Awo looking for his father
probably happened between five and four thousand years ago in that
area (Chen Tianjun 1987:109).
The Qiang, in turn, according to Chen, were driven out of
their homeland in the Northwest by pressure from the Qin in the
fourth and third centuries B.C. (see Jiang Yingliang's 1948
account, above); they fled south along the Tibetan marches to the
later homeland of the Yi in Yunnan. Their patrilineal clan
society lasted until this time, and the Yi show up again as the
Kunming, a tribal people harassed and eventually enslaved by the
Dian kingdom, which was nominated by the Pu. Under the influence
of the Han dyansty, with its opening up of salt and mining
industries in Yunnan, the Yi passed from the primitive to the
slave stage (112-113).
In this account, we can see the slave-feudal transition
occurring at three different times in the three different areas of
Yi settlement. In Yunnan, it came earliest, at the time Nanzhao
was taken over by Dali, while it persisted in Guizhou and
northeast Yunnan until the Ming, and in Liangshan, in modified
form at least, to the 1950s (114-117).
Both in Ma Changshou's account and in Chen Tianjun's, the
five stages of history are a unifying force. They not only make
sense of what would otherwise be ambiguous statements in old
historical records; they also explain why, in modern times, people
as diverse as the Lipuo, Sani, Menghua, and Nuosu can be shown to
be nothing but varieties of a single category Yi, distinguished
from each other by nothing but unequal rates of development
through those stages ordained by the objective laws of historical
development. We even find the Yi following the basic patterns of
development within the feudal stage: a recent article by You Zhong
shows how, in areas of heavy Han influence, the overthrow of Tusi
in the late Ming and the replacement by officials appointed from
the center represent the transition between the earlier substage
of manorial feudalism and the later stage of the landlord economy,
which was the status of most of Chinese society in the late
centuries of the Imperial Era (You 1987:190-192).
DISCUSSION
The History of the Yi thus has its own History; in the hands
of different kinds of writers the Yi have acquired very different
kinds of Histories. I am not here to judge the varieties against
one another. I think that in each case, the historians have known
what they were going to write before they even did the research
for their History. Westerners were interested in races; Chinese
before 1949 in correlating the Yi History with the Capital
H-History; and Chinese after 1949 in using objective and universal
historical laws to lend legitimacy to an ethnic classification
(see Litzinger, this volume, for a comparable case among the Yao).
And in each case, they did a fairly good job: that is, they
produced internally consistent Histories that explain what they
set out to explain: in each case, who the Yi are and how they got
to be that way.
Again, though, the outsider finds himself a bit disturbed by
this. Is a relatively ideologically neutral History of the Yi
possible? Could one write such a history with an agenda that was
neither racialist nor nominalist nor orthodox Marxian? What would
an observer who studied Yi society anew from an ethnographic
perspective, visiting communities and interviewing local people in
Liangshan, Guizhou, and many parts of Yunnan, and then reading the
classical sources and the Yi traditional manuscripts, come up
with? Would such an observer find a unified group, a Yi category
that was internally consistent? A series of related peoples with
different, though perhaps related, histories and only remotely
similar societies? A native history and a history created by
outsiders, or several histories created by outsiders? It is
difficult to predict, since it is difficult if not impossible to
write the History of the Yi over again from scratch. Since 1956
the category Yi has come to exist not only in the minds of Han
scholars and administrators, where it has always been, but also in
the administrative and budgetary plans of the Nationalities
Commission and the provincial governments, and increasingly in the
minds of the various kinds of Yi, who learn their own history and
culture not only through native ceremonies and recitations of
genealogies (which, as we see, can easily be shown to support the
orthodox, unified interpretations) but also through the curriculum
of the schools. They too have come to be Chinese, and as such
their history has become part of Chinese history. And Chinese
history, now as in the Imperial Era, belongs to and is defined by
the ruling orthodoxy. Under this orthodoxy, though there may be
disagreements about specific points, minzu have already been
defined, and the Yi are a single minzu. Any future historian of
the Yi must take this into account.