There are about 7.5 million Yi people in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi. Yi is a very diverse category, including peoples with at lest 60 names for themselves, and no commonly used word in any of their languages that refers to the group as a whole. Their languages belong to what is now classified as the Yi sub-branch of the Tibeto Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. Most of the Yi peoples live in upland areas, and are mixed farmers and herders. Since the incorporation of their territories into the Yuan empire in the 13th century, they have not had any centralized political authority, though many of their local leaders were given titles as tusi, or local agents of the imperial state.

Over the course of the last seven hundred years, various Yi peoples in Guizhou and Yunnan absorbed much of Chinese culture and religion, though the largest Yi group, the Nuosu of Liangshan in what is now southern Sichuan, were much less affected by outside cultural influences. In the 1950s, however, the Yi not only became full citizens of the People's Republic of China, but also officially became a minzu, one of the 56 into which the Communists divided China's population. At the time this minzu was officially identified, probably only a small percentage of its members identified themselves as Yi; they were much more likely to have seen their identity in purely local contexts as Nuosu, Sani, Lolopo, Axi, or some other smaller group.

 But that was fifty years ago. For the past five decades, the model of China as a nation of 56 minzu has become official dogma, taught in schools, celebrated in media, and institutionally enshrined in the creation of "autonomous" districts at the provincial, prefectural, and county levels (as well as minzu townships and villages); the standardization of languages, many of which are taught in schools and many others of which are now used in publishing; and the provision of a large number of affirmative action benefits, from lower school-entrance requirements to higher birth-quotas, for people who are designated members of minority nationalities. This development of the minzu as a naturalized category and a realized institution has also affected the minds of people who previously thought entirely in terms of more local ethnic categories. Nuosu, Nisu, or Lipuo people know that Yi is the Chinese-language term for themselves, and large numbers of them have come to learn through school and other media have come to know that there are other kinds of Yi besides their own local groups, people with whom they share a history (written in scholarly and textbook form), certain customs, and whose languages they may not be able to understand, but can certainly recognize as having much vocabulary that is quite similar to their own.

This consciousness of Yi as a minzu identity, while known at least to the majority of the population in most areas, has developed most strongly in those Yi who have taken their places as cadres, teachers, entrepreneurs, and other kinds of local elites. Ever since the 1950s, the party-state has made great efforts to educate members of minority minzu and involve them actively in the projects of state- and nation-building, education, and economic development that are the reason for the state's existence. In most Yi areas, these efforts at recruiting a local, ethnic elite have been very successful. Although mobility to the highest positions in the Chinese party-state apparatus has generally been closed off to minorities (only Ulanhu ever made the Politburo), they have taken many positions at the middle- and lower levels. The 1982 constitution requires that the top government leader of an "autonomous" district be a member of the minzu for whom the district is named, but in many Yi areas, also party secretaries up to the county level
have primarily come from the ranks of the Yi, and members of the bureaucracy, particularly in the areas of education, culture and politics (less so in the more technical branches) have also been heavily Yi.

 There are also a large number of Yi writers and intellectuals. The recent 3rd International Yi Studies Conference in Shilin (see below) attracted academic papers from over 140 scholars, the majority of them Yi. There are Yi professors and departments of Yi studies in three Nationalities Universities, and there is a large scholarly publishing industry. Many prominent Yi politicians and intellectuals have alternated between the worlds of politics and scholarship, like Feng Yuanwei in Liangshan who published a translation of the classic text Hmamu Teyy, and Wang Tianxi in Yunnan, who has written several books about philosophy and economic development. There are also Yi poets, writers, musicians, dancers, and TV personalities.

All these political and cultural elites have one thing in common: they are mediators between the local world of each larger or smaller ethnic community, out of which they all came and to which they are, almost without exception, fiercely dedicated, and the larger world of the Chinese nation, whose purposes and ambitions they mostly share, and in whose political and cultural activities they participate in the same way as any other Chinese, except that so many of them do so expressly or implicitly for the purpose of advancing the position of the Yi minzu (to which most of them express more overt loyalty than they do to their own local ethnic groups) in the Chinese polity and economy. As mediators, they have made use of a variety of media to express their point; this essay deals with the ways in which media mediate the particular juncture of local ethnic group, minzu, and nation, and with the specific media that have been put to this use.

THE MINORITY MEDIA ENCOUNTER

We can conceptualize the role of the media in this encounter between local and national/global cultures in the following way: Every culture has its media, that is its ways of transmitting information. Many small- or medium-scale cultures like those of the various Yi ethnic groups have a variety of media that are what we might want to call local media or interpersonal media, in contrast to the media we usually think of, or mass media. These local media in the Nuosu culture of Liangshan, the largest of the ethnic cultures among the Yi, included

 1. Handwritten textual media (books)
sacred
secular
2. Orally transmitted linguistic media
poetry
genealogy
oratorical traditions: antiphonal duels etc.
3. performative media
song
instrumental music
dance
oratory
4. visual media
architecture
needlework
smithy
lacquerware
religious drawings accompanying texts

 These interpersonal media differ from mass media in that they have a much lower rate and density of transmission of energy from one person (creator or transmitter) to another (receiver). A handwritten book can only be copied one copy at a time, and thus has a slower rate of transmission and a lower density of transmission than a printed book that can reach thousands or millions of people with a single press-run. Oral or performative media that have to be heard in person reach a smaller audience and a smaller number of students than those that can be broadcast, and visual media that have to be seen in person similarly do not spread as fast as those that can be printed or broadcast.

One way to think of the encounter between small-scale, local cultures like those of the Yi, and the large-scale national culture of China is as encounters between a culture with only local media and the mass media of the national culture (and later on, the global culture). One of the things that made these traditional cultures what they were was the absence of mass media and the reliance on local media for the transmission of information across space, time, and persons. With the political and infrastructural incorporation of the Yi areas into China came their exposure to mass media. In the early years and throughout the Cultural Revolution, Yi dealings with the mass media were just that: exposure. Yi people learned to listen to loudspeaker broadcasts and later radio; they learned the lessons of patriotism and science through textbooks; they heard the broadcasts of revolutionary songs and other performances; they gained limited access to such media as newspapers and magazines. But my impression (and I need to do more work here) is that it was very one-sided: the media only transmitted in one direction, from the ideological and media centers of the party-state and its ?û´«ÏµÍ3 to the geographic peripheries of the receivers, the Yi, with very little feedback in the other direction.

In the late 1970s, however, this began to change, and Yi began to become transmitters as well as receivers of information through various kinds of mass media. In other words, the Yi have become agents or participants, not just receivers or audiences, in the mediation of culture. They have done so in two ways:

 1) Mass media have been adapted to Yi use, primarily by and for the Yi, and in the process Yi content is transformed to a greater or lesser degree by its conversion from local or interpersonal media to mass media. In other words, things that existed in traditional Yi culture--music, secular texts, and lacquerware for example--are now produced in such a way that they can be mass-mediated rather than interpersonally or locally mediated. They are to an extent transformed in this process, because of the standardization effects both of mass production and of mass reception, but they are recognizably the descendants of the things that pre-existed the mass mediafication, and the primary audience is still internal to the Yi.

 2) Mass media are adopted by Yi people to present aspects of what is represented as "Yi culture" to the nation and the world. In other words, the previous (and still coexisting) process of transmission from the nation or the world to the Yi is reversed, and Yi people use modern media technologies and institutions, such as cassette tapes, picture books, and television documentaries, to represent the creators' idea of Yi culture to other Yi and to the rest of the world. Again, what is represented here is modified by the process of representation in media, but still remains connected to the cultural elements that existed before the mediated representation. The audience here is both Yi and non-Yi.

 These two modes of contact between the Yi and the mass media are not clearly separate from each other, but I have found it analytically useful to consider specific examples of Yi mediafication under the rubric of one process or the other. What follows is a catalogue of media and the way they have been adopted by one or both of these processes, with comments on the nature of the cultural transformations wrought by the processes of mass-mediation. Most of my examples come from the Liangshan region inhabited by the Nuosu people, which is the region and media I know the best, but insofar as I am able to bring in other Yi examples, including pan-Yi examples, I try to do so.

Mass Media Adapted to Yi Use

1. Medium: Standard, printable script

A. Textbooks
Yi languages were never taught in schools, as far as anyone knows, before the 1950s. What schooling Yi people had at various times and places was in the Han language. In the 1950s, an attempt was made to introduce a Romanized script for the Nuosu language of Liangshan and to teach this script in elementary schools; it is now thought of as a failure, but it is not clear at this distance whether it really failed or was not given enough time to catch on before the radical turn of the late 1950s brought a policy of conducting all education in the Han language.
In the mid-1970s, a group of Nousu cadres and intellectuals, sensing an opening amidst the declining radicalism of the last years of the Gang of Four, began to agitate for using the Nuosu language once again as a medium of instruction; the result was that by the end of the decade they had developed and got official recognition for a modified version of the traditional Nuosu script used by the bimo priests, and by the mid-1980s had compiled an entire corpus of elementary and secondary textbooks for a wide range of subjects, and had begun experiments with bilingual education in elementary and later in secondary schools.
Bamo Ayi and I conducted an analysis of the content of elementary textbooks in the Nuosu language, and this content illustrates well the process of mediation between local and national culture. Much of the content of the elementary lessons is translated directly from Han-language textbooks for the same grade levels; the only thing about the content that is Yi is that it is printed in a Yi language. But there are other lessons that are local in character. Some of these teach national lessons through local examples, as with the lesson that thanks the revolution for overthrowing the previous cruel slave system; others give local events an ideologically acceptable flavor, such as the lesson about the midsummer Fire Festival, which is full of local poetry and local color, but thanks the wise nationalities policies of the Communist Party for the existence of such a fun and colorful event.
Nuosu-language textbooks thus send two kinds of messages to their Yi audience: one national (or even global, as in the lesson of Einstein trying, trying again until he got it right), and one local. The balance between the two illustrates the fluidity and two sidedness of the process of local/national mediation.

B. Editions of old works
There are Yi-language works on a range of topics, especially from the earlier periods, but in recent centuries Yi-language books have primarily been of two kinds: the sacred ritual texts of the various priesthoods (called bimo in Nuosu and various cognate terms in other Yi languages), and secular texts concerned with mythology, legends and folklore, and philosophy. Since 1980 a number of these secular texts have been edited, transliterated into the modern script, and published, and a few of them have also been translated and published in Chinese.
Hmamu Teyy, or the Book of Teachings, can serve as an example. This Nuosu work is thought to date from the late Ming period or perhaps earlier; it was found in a variety of versions and editions all over the Liangshan area, and it speaks in five-syllable lines of the things a Nuosu male needed to know and do at various ages from one to ninety nine years. In the 1980s, two editions in modern script were published, and immediately there was controversy over which was better or more authentic. In particular, people argued over whether the passages that concerned the hegemony of the nuoho, or aristocratic caste, were part of the original text or a later edition. But the important transformation was that Hmamu Teyy was now available to the masses in just two editions instead of many, and could be transmitted to people without the aid of a tutor, and was available to girls and women if they wished to read it. Whether particular parts were authentic or not was less important than the change wrought by mass media in the way the book was transmitted and received. Here again, almost no non-Yi are affected by this mediation process; the audience is almost entirely Yi.

 C. Newspapers and magazines
There are now several magazines, including a monthly pictorial and a quarterly about minority affairs, published in the Nuosu language, as well as a Nuosu edition of the Liangshan Daily News (Niesha Ddogge Teyy or Liangshan Ribao). The newspaper functions primarily as a medium of transition from the nation to the Nuosu, since it is controlled by state propaganda organs and is a direct translation of the Han-language version of the same paper. The magazines, with much original editorial content, are more two-sided: in reporting on local topics of interest only to Nuosu people, they can take a media technology--printing--and adapt it to very local content, in the same way as editions of classic works do. The difference is that the content did not pre-exist the medium: the stories were written, not transliterated, for the magazines.

 We can see from these examples that the adaptation of print technology to Yi content can serve both as a mediator of national and global culture to the Yi (and probably a more effective one than the Han language or another outsider language would be), and a way to transform the mediation of information internal to the Yi- taking information that was previously transmissible only by interpersonal media and transmitting it by mass media. But in doing so, it becomes a more standardized form of information than was transmitted in the past. Again, the audience is Yi, because only a minuscule number of non-Yi read Yi, and in the case of the newspaper, there is also a Han-language edition.
 

2. Medium: Performance

 A. Standard dance tapes
Many Yi and other Tibeto-Burman and non-TB peoples of Southwest China have traditions of dancing in a line to the music of a flute or mouth-organ. In most of the variants I have experienced, the flutist leads the line, followed by people with their hands on the shoulders of the person in front, or holding hands with the people in front and in back. The flutist plays a simple, repeated melody which is associated in local practice with a dance step, and sometimes sung as well. Dancing around a bonfire on a cool night under the stars is a delightful form of entertainment.
In 1980s in Liangshan, however, cultural officials decided to mediafy this practice, and recorded a tape of dance tunes adapted to a kind of pop combo, and though the schools publicized a series of standard steps--some of them close to what was previously danced with the flute, and some of them only imaginatively related to the old steps. Officials of the Sani in Lunan (now Shilin) in Yunnan did the same thing around the same time, as did officials of other ethnic groups. Now a performance to the standard tape is an appropriate thing to present for visitors to a school or a township with a school, and sometimes dancers alternate flute and tape when the flutist wants to take a cigarette break or is just tired.
One has to conceptualize the taped music and the associated performance as a Yi thing, but it is a Yi thing modified by the addition of new instruments and new dance steps, even if the melodies are the same, and more importantly it is standardized so that, for example, scholars attending a conference in Shilin in 2000 could dance to tapes of both Sani and Nuosu origin.
 

B. Public performance of the local
Sometimes the change in mediation of a cultural form has less to do with the modification of the form itself and more to do with the relationship between the performers and the spectators. At an ordinary Nuosu village wedding, for example, usually teenagers and young adults dance and sing, while older people and children watch and listen; I watched such a dance at Yangjuan Village, Yanyuan County, Liangshan in 1993.
At the opening ceremony for the primary school in this same village in 2000, I participated in the dance rather than watching it, but the primary difference was in the nature of the audience. Officials, reporters, and well-wishers from the county seat, the prefectural capital, and even the provincial capital attended the ceremony, which was climaxed by a dance routine led by village flutist Ali Vuda, and danced by a line of young men and women (with one older bald guy). The flute tunes and lyrics were mostly composed and written for the occasion by Vuda, with some taken from popular songs or poetry. The content of many of the songs had to do with the opening of the school itself.
So here we have a traditional medium--dancing, singing, and blowing the flute- to a completely untraditional audience, recorded by at least one ethnologist, Li Xingxing of Chengdu, and several television and radio reporters, and content whose tunes are mostly traditional (except for one pop song), and whose words reflected the recent phenomenon of the opening of a school.

C. Folk-music recordings
Mass media such as cassette tapes can in fact record performances that in their content are fully traditional, or fully developed in the context of a society that has only interpersonal media. Such is the case with ethnomusicological recordings such as the series of Nuosu instrumental virtuosos recorded by Bamo Erha and Bamo Vusamo in 1995. Will the availability of these virtuosos's music influence other instrumentalists to copy their styles? Even if not, there will be much more interchange between musicians in different regions when their works become available on tape.

 Performance, then, is altered simply by the presence of mass-media that can transmit it to places and people who never would have known it before. The content of performance may or may not be changed radically by its being mass mediated, but the possibility is very real.

3. Medium: Public visual art

 A. Factory lacquerware
Nuosu have a lacquerware tradition whose vessel forms and design patterns are unique in all the world, though of course relationships with the nearby Chinese and the linguistically-related Burmese lacquer traditions cannot be ruled out. Until the 1980s, this lacquerware was made by a number of specialist clans in widely-scattered villages throughout Liangshan, with techniques passed down from generation to generation, and finished products traded through kin networks.
The mass media that have transformed the Nuosu lacquerware tradition are semi-assembly-line production and most importantly mass marketing through modern transport networks and wholesale and retail outlets. Factories were started in the 1970s in Zhaojue County and in 1980 in Xide County, using machine lathes and modern carpentry tools to fashion the wooden forms, with designs created by factory designers rather than by the painters themselves, but still relying on hand-painting to actually apply the designs.
The mass mediation of lacquerware has resulted in several of the processes outline above with regard to other media. Patterns have been standardized by the institution of factory artists/designers; shapes and forms have begun to include such elements foreign to the local culture as chopsticks, table-tops, and telephone stands; and the audience has changed from networks of relatives interpersonally mediated to Nuosu and increasingly Han Chinese and foreign tourists purchasers through department stores and private retailers.
As I have analyzed elsewhere, in the case of factory lacquerware there are both Yi and outside audiences, with the Yi predominating, but their receptions of the medium are different. For Nuosu these objects are both things of daily use and things of ethnic pride; for Han and foreigners they are things of artistic merit or folkloric curiosity.

B. The textile and clothing arts
Fifty years ago, Nuosu made all their own clothing, and like most upland peoples of Southwest China and Mainland Southeast Asia, they had an elaborate tradition of manufacture, from spinning and weaving through various elaborate techniques of needlework. Other Yi peoples were self-sufficient in clothing to perhaps a lesser degree, but they still had intricate and elaborate local sartorial traditions.
It is no doubt lamentable from some kind of perspective equating cultural diversity to biodiversity that most Yi women now dress in store-bought clothing for all but ceremonial occasions, that men do so for all occasions, and that even the more culturally and geographically isolated Nousu are wearing bought clothing most of the time, though there are still areas where most women still wear recognizably ethnic clothing and both men and women wear home-woven or home-felted capes in cold weather.
But other effects of mass transmission, in this case not only of information but particularly of materials, are what I want to discuss here. Store-bought yardage with bright colors and shiny textures affords ample opportunities for the creativity of a talented seamstress, so that one sees a proliferation of colors, textures, and patterns that were unthinkable to the Nuosu woman of 50 years ago. All the young women in a village will make their skirts according to the same bright pattern, and then exercise their individuality in needleworking their blouses and head-cloths. And sewing machines afford a quick way to produce clothes of authentic Yi design quickly and cheaply, so that there are now overtly commercial seamstresses to be seen with their machines in the marketplaces of county seats in Liangshan. The process to me seems analogous to recording dance tunes with a pop band, on the one hand, but analogous to creating new lacquer designs for the mass market, on the other. In either case, we can see that the processes of massification working on a folk art that is not strictly a medium (except in the sense that clothing confers much status information about the wearer and the maker), is perfectly analogous to processes going on in the areas we classically think of as media.

 It is important to realize, with all these media of print, performance, and public visual art, that the great majority of the promoters of these mediations--the authors/translators of the textbooks, the compilers of the editions of classical works, the editors of the newspapers and magazines, the performers, composers, and recorders of the performances, the designers (with one exception) and retailers of the lacquerware, have themselves been Yi, as of course have the consumers. In a process that is paradoxically both imported from the outside and internal to the Yi, they have put Yi content into mass-mediated forms, but in doing so, they have transformed their own culture from the outside in.

Mass media used to represent the Yi to the world

4. Medium: World-language (Han and English) scholarship

There have been studies of the in world scholarly discourses (Chinese and Western/colonial) for several hundred years, but in the 1980s Yi studies became a field, that is a scholarly entity with its participants, its journals, its books and monographs, its international conferences, and most importantly its topics and questions. I have treated elsewhere in detail the process of becoming a field, but in brief the conjunction of the revival of ethnic culture through media, described here, and the opening of China to field research by outside anthropologists and the opening of outside educational institutions to Chinese anthropologists, folklorists, comparative religionists, etc., has brought Yi scholars into the mainstream of anthropology, history, and other cosmopolitan disciplines, at the same time as it has allowed foreign scholars to study the Yi. Quite naturally, they have gotten to know each other and to collaborate, and the result is a transnational scholarly field. Here I treat books and conferences as media through which participants in this field represent the Yi

A. Books
There are hundreds of books of scholarship about the Yi, stemming from traditional Chinese ethnography, Marxist ethnology, Western explorer and missionary journalism and scholarship, and even Western-influenced anthropology. But here I want to treat two examples that are part of the formation of Yi studies as a field of mediation of Yi culture.
My own edited volume, Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China, has just been published by the University of California Press. It stemmed from a conference which I organized in 1995 and held in Seattle, entitled The First International Conference on Yi Studies. There were twenty-some participants, over half of them Yi and the rest mostly foreigners, and the papers were written in either Chinese or English, translated into the other language, and discussed in Chinese, the only language the participants all had in common. None were written or discussed in any Yi language. The papers were then given the usual treatment of an edited conference volume. This is one of the first two scholarly books on Yi topics to appear in a language other than Chinese in recent times; the other is a conventional (if outstanding) scholarly monograph by Erik Mueggler. Yi scholars represented in the volume see it not only as a contribution to scholarship (probably a minor one, given the volume of stuff that comes out all the time in Chinese), but more than that as a mediation between the Yi and the world, a medium of representation of Yi culture to outsiders. Unlike the textbooks and standard editions described above, this is not a use of mass media internal to the Yi, but a use of media to represent the Yi in a wider arena.
1úÍâѧÕßÒÍѧÂÛÎÄ*¯ (Essays on Yi Studies by Foreign Scholars), a volume recently edited by Bamo Ayi and Huang Jianmin, two Yi scholars from the Central Nationalities University, represents the inverse of the Perspectives volume. In this case, the editors have translated into Chinese works on the Yi written in English by foreign scholars, in order to make these works available to Yi and others who do not read English. Topics are similar to those covered in Perspectives, but the intent is different: it is not just to inform Yi scholars of what foreigners are writing about them, it is also to help Yi scholars connect themselves to an international scholarly field, and very importantly to demonstrate to Yi and Han that Yi studies is something that is taken seriously outside the local area.

B. Conferences
What would a scholarly field be without conferences? Yi studies also has its own. They had their beginning with the large-scale meeting of the Southwest Nationalities Studies Association (Î÷ÄÏÃñxåѧ»á) in 1986, and have continued every four years since then. But the conferences that have done the most as a mediation or representation of Yi to the wider world have been the international conferences, beginning with the aforementioned small meeting in Seattle in 1995, and continuing with the slightly larger one in Trier, Germany, in 1998, and culminating so far in the grand 3rd International Conference on Yi Studies, held at Shilin in September, 2000. That conference was a media-saturated event.
The affair lasted for four days, in which there was serious scholarly exchange, probably the largest-scale series of interactions among Yi studies scholars in history: over 140 papers were presented in six discussion sections, and there were keynote addresses and plenary fora aplenty. But the channels of mediation of Yi culture were far broader here than just the conventional scholarly ones. There were, for one thing, reporters everywhere, and accounts of the conference and the field of Yi studies were published in at least four regional and national newspapers and one national magazine. Television crews covered the opening ceremonies and some of the cultural performances. The performances themselves were varied and lavish (see below), and involved everyone from local Sani villagers to Nousu professors from Central Nationalities University and nationally known Nuosu talk-show host Shama Ago. There were also tours of the famous Shilin rock formation, whose tourist revenues earned by the county government provided over 1.2 million RMB to sponsor the conference.
This conference was a prime example of how Yi content can be mediated by a wide variety of media, not only in the primary setting of the conference itself, but in derivative settings of newspapers, magazines, and TV broadcasts. It is difficult to know whether the secondary consumers were mostly Yi or mostly outsiders, but events such as this clearly represent the Yi to a cosmopolitan audience.
 

5. Medium: Exhibits
A. Tourist venues
Yi are definitely behind in representing themselves through tourism promotion, compared to Miao and other minzu, with the exception of the Shilin National Park in Shilin (formerly Lunan) Yi autonomous county east of Kunming. That park , however, is one of the largest money-making tourist attractions in China. It was originally famous, of course, for the rock formations, and for the various literati who saw fit to use calligraphy to do what Chinese visitors would consider embellishing or contextualizing and what Western visitors would consider defacing them. But it has become a venue of ethnic tourism for the Sani people, through the medium of their epic poem Ashima (Golden Girl), which has been publicized through books, film, and other media and now is embedded in the Stone Forest itself, as certain rock formations are said to represent the tragic heroine, certain pools are where she met her lover Ahei, and her story is performed nightly in a movie version projected on a screen of water shot from fountains, accompanied by a laser show. Pretty young guides dressed in polyester versions of Sani traditional clothing tell their clients to address them as Ashima, and the film Ashima runs several shows a day at the Ashima theater on Ashima street in the county seat. So now what tourist visitors take away from the Stone Forest is not just an impression of nature, but an impression of Sani culture as represented by the Ashima story. Like tourist presentations of so many things, Sani culture here is simplified and reduced to a single theme in the Ashima presentations, but there two rival broader cultural shows available for viewing, one put on by the Shilin Tourist Corporation, formerly Wukeshu Village, and one by the Yunnan Provincial Tourist Bureau.
Shilin is the prime example of a Yi cultural tourist venue employing multiple media, but there is also a huge Yi culture park built in downtown Chuxiong, capital of the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture in north central Yunnan, and Ninglang county to the northwest, whose population is primarily Nuosu, has opened a museum featuring a huge kuzzur or lacquerware soup tureen, on its roof. Tourist exhibitions are clearly developing as a way to represent Yi culture to the world.

 B. Museums
Yi have been represented by others in museums probably ever since the Ethnographisches Museum in Berlin first displayed Nuosu armor and weapons in the early 1900s, and certainly more broadly since the establishment of ethnological museums to illustrate the minzu system of the Chinese state beginning in the 1950s. But since 1982 they have been representing themselves to the world through museum exhibits. There are the Liangshan Slave Society Museum outside Xichang, as well as several smaller museums in other prefectural and county seats.
Recently, I participated in a more international, more collaborative exhibit of Yi culture; with Bamo Qubumo and Ma Erzi I co-curated the exhibit Mountain Patterns: Survival of Nuosu Culture in China at the Burke Museum on the University of Washington Campus in 2000. Like the Perspectives and 1úÍâѧÕßÒÍѧÂÛÎÄ*¯ books, this exhibit involved both Yi and outsiders speaking to both Yi and outsiders in representing elements of Yi culture to a wider audience; it is noteworthy, however, that Nousu people who viewed the exhibit were moved not by its objects (which they all knew pretty well and might have seen better quality examples of) or style of presentation (they liked it OK), but by the fact that Nuosu culture was being displayed, proudly and respectfully, to the world.
This exhibit, in turn, generated a lot of secondary attention in other media. A companion volume of the same name provided a semi-popular account of Nuosu culture and the material objects on exhibit. The journal Asian Ethnicity has just published a review by Ralph Litzinger, an anthropologist who studies minority elites in south China, accompanied by reflective essays from each of the curators. And the aforementioned Shama Ago, host of the program °ë±ßÌì (Woman) on CCTV, made two documentaries about the exhibit and its curators, one focusing on Bamo Qubumo and one on me. Bamo had this to say about it in her Asian Ethnicity essay:
 
 

Not long afterward, Chinese Central TV repeatedly broadcast two documentaries, and immediately the telephone which had lain silent on my desk for a long time began ringing unceasingly: Beijing classmates and friends, fellow students and fellow workers, Liangshan kin and hometown relatives, friends and neighbors from all over, all in unison congratulated us on the success of the exhibit, while some people asked in detail how we could possibly have shipped such a heavy "wooden house" to America... I believe that--when they hear Muga's [Steve Harrell's] good wishes spoken on TV in the Nuosu language, when they see the objects collected from their own houses, or even pictures of themselves and their relatives appearing in America, even more "Nuosu Qobo"- friends, one telling ten and ten telling a hundred, will talk about Nuosu culture having reached American Muga's country. But what will they be thinking about it? In September, my sister and I will be coming back to America to be visiting fellows at Harvard, so before that we will return to Liangshan to visit our parents, so at that time I ought to find a few days' time to return to Meigu and interview a few families...

6. Medium: Performance again
I discussed above performance in mass media by the Yi for the Yi. Here I want to return to the topic of performance by taking up performance as cultural representation, with an audience that is decidedly mixed.

 A. Theater song and dance performance
Traditional Yi cultures had nothing like theaters, venues where people go to watch other people perform music, dance, or drama. The closest thing was when old people watched and listed to young people singing and dancing, or when a virtuoso drew a casual crowd of listeners. But the theater, and its extensions in the broadcast media, have now become places for the performance and representation of Yi culture to the wider world.
I take my primary example of this performance from my experience at the aforementioned 3rd International Yi Studies Conference. On the night before the scholarly activities began, there was a 15-act cultural show, for which the conference participants got free tickets, but many ordinary people bought inexpensive paid tickets, at the main theater in town. There were song and dance troupes from several Yi cultures, including the local Sani, the Lolopo/Lipuo of Chuxiong, and the Nousu of Liangshan. There were several solo song and dance performers, including notably soprano Sudu Alo, an instructor of music at the Central Nationalities University, and modern dancer and choreographer Shaga Ayi, a professor of dance at the same institution. Talk-show host Shama Ago was mistress of ceremonies, wearing her native Nuosu-style clothing for the first half of the show and changing into a Sani outfit in honor of the locals for the second half.
Performance, like tourist display, is a medium in which Yi culture, in being presented and represented to a mixed audience, is altered perhaps more drastically than in other forms of mediation. In this sense, this kind of representation performance is to the local performances discussed in #2, above, somewhat as the representation of Yi culture in textbooks is to the representation in new editions of classics. It is a standardized and altered version, with elements of Yi origin transformed by their very mediation into something very different: the dance performance at Yangjuan school would not hold the stage in an auditorium, any more than the content of a traditional book would pass the ideological standards of the education commission.
 

B. Pop and rock music
There are at least three Nuosu pop/rock groups that I know about: Mountain Eagle (É*Ó¥, Gguhxo Jjuonuo), Black Tiger (ºÚ»¢ Lanuo) and Tian Pusa (ÌìÆ?Èø), who don't seem, to use a Nuosu name but whose Chinese name refers to the hairlock that boys and men grow long on the front of their heads. Mountain Eagle was first, and their initial album, Nga Muddi Nga Ci Mgu (I love my homeland), sung entirely in Nuosu, was wildly popular in the Liangshan area; I rarely went on a jeep or 4x4 ride in 1993 when the tape was not played through at least once. But their audience was limited, and when they decided to try to go national, they switched to a more rock beat and most significantly to Chinese as their lyric language. But the subject matter of almost all their songs, whether of love or longing, has to do with homeland and uses Yi culture as a background, and their publicity photos have them all dressed up in traditional outfits that one would rarely see on boys. And Tian Pusa's album includes songs in both languages.
Nuosu rock and pop music thus presents an interesting amalgam of different mediation processes. The instruments and the cassette medium are entirely from the outside; the songs are a combination of Nuosu and Han language lyrics, of traditional and popular melodies. The audience for some of the albums places this kind of performance almost entirely in our first category of mediation: Yi using mass media to speak to each other, but the crossover albums fall into the second category of representation to outsiders.

Conclusion

 This necessarily superficial survey of the way that Yi culture and mass media have interacted in the last 20 years draws our attention to two broader points, one about the role of media in the contemporary world, and one about the place of minorities in the Chinese nation.

 With respect to media, I think we need to reflect on the extent to which the medium and the message are interconnected. In some cases, a modern medium like print does only a minimum amount of standardization of the message of a traditional text, and preserves at least one version of the content of the previously existing work. The patterns found on modern, machine-sewn fashions need not be any different, and sometimes in fact are no different, from those sewn by hand. In these cases, print and mass production are nothing but media, ways of transmitting content or information. In other cases, the medium alters the content, the message, drastically. The legend of Ashima is very different when presented by movie actors on a fountain-screen, and any kind of dance-steps found in Nuosu village recreation are transformed utterly beyond recognition by the choreography of Professor Shaga Ayi. Mass media thus present both an opportunity and a danger for societies that have previously had only interpersonal media: some cultural content survives the change almost intact, some is altered considerably, and some cannot really make the change at all.

With respect to the position of minorities, the adoption and adaptation of mass media illustrate an important point. In the early period of the Communist regime, and particularly in the radical years from the late 50s to the late 70s, minority policy was policy toward minorities and minorities work (Ãñxå1€x÷) was for the most part work by Han Chinese in minority areas. Since the early 1980s, with the creation of an educated elite class among minority populations such as the Yi, policy is still made primarily by the center, but implementation is largely in the hands of these local minority elites. And they adapt their local responsibility partly to local ends. It is very difficult for them to alter economic and political policies in the implementation, but they have much more leeway in the cultural field. And they have made effective use of mass media of all kinds, originally imported from the outside, both to increase the speed and nature of communication among themselves and to represent themselves and their culture to the outside.

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