Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China
Stevan Harrell
Abstract
Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, which brings this little-known part of the world to life, is a collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being an ethnographic study, it is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. T ... More
Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, which brings this little-known part of the world to life, is a collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being an ethnographic study, it is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. The book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.
Keywords:
Yi,
Southwest China,
traditional society,
social changes,
communication,
genealogy,
ritual
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2001 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520219885 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520219885.001.0001 |
