Writing, Slavery, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Southwest China, by Dr. Erik Mueggler (Oct. 11, 2023)

Imperial China managed its border regions by negotiating power with indigenous chieftains. Hereditary chieftains were allowed sovereignty over indigenous domains in exchange for keeping the peace and lending their militias to imperial campaigns. Ming and Qing colonialism in the Southwest took the form of a long, staggered process of abolishing indigenous chiefly houses. Yet such houses often recreated themselves, seizing partial sovereignty over smaller domains. This talk follows the diary of an aspiring chieftain adopted into a twice-abolished, Yi-ethnicity chiefly house in the late Qing. A stranger to the house, the adopted chieftain used his daily account to probe its relational ecology—relations among the former chieftain’s wives, concubines, and daughters, the eighteen elite enslaved bondsmen who acted as the house’s agents, the forty-odd domestic slaves who attended the house’s elites, and the corpse of the former chieftain lying in his chambers waiting for the chiefly succession to be decided. I show how the adopted chieftain used his written diary as a tool for divination: for probing the undercurrents of collective intention among the house’s enslaved residents that would ultimately decide whether the house would make room for him or kill him.

About the Speaker:

Erik Mueggler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His research covers a variety of topics in social and cultural theory, focusing on the politics of ghosts, the history of natural history, and the ritualization of death in the border regions of China.

His latest book is Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China, which shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial. State interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects. He is currently working on ethnographic projects in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, on textuality, kinship, ritual, and the natural history of ice.

Organized and sponsored by the BU Department of Anthropology