Results by title

2 books match the query 'Mueggler, Erik'

cover of Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

Songs for Dead Parents

Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed.
 
Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.
[more]
cover of The Book of Cunning and Treachery: Writing, Slavery, and Sovereignty in a Qing Indigenous Domain

The Book of Cunning and Treachery

Writing, Slavery, and Sovereignty in a Qing Indigenous Domain

Erik Mueggler

University of Chicago Press, 2027

An ethnographic history of one of the dozens of indigenous domains that occupied China’s border regions during the Qing dynasty and before.

Erik Mueggler’s The Book of Cunning and Treachery is an ethnographic history of a chiefly household that ruled one of the many indigenous domains scattered through upland southwest China during the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The imperial colonization of this region proceeded by way of defeating indigenous polities and absorbing them into a system of indirect governance. In this system, indigenous chieftains inherited power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Mueggler tracks the history of two crucial yet unexamined archives pertaining to this household—a trove of Chinese-language legal, military, and administrative documents, and hundreds of ritual manuals, histories, and morality books written in the indigenous Né script—to show how the chiefly house reproduced itself through these languages, each with its own forms of ritual, recitation, and inscription.

As Mueggler demonstrates, through different forms of access to writing in Chinese and Né, male and female chieftains, domestic slaves, enslaved bondsmen, bonded tenants, chiefly concubines, and more existed in a complex ecology of relations. House and domain were governed through a dynamic process in which residents continuously worked out the status hierarchies that animated their relations with one another as well as the relations between the chiefly house and the local administrative system. This groundbreaking book provides a compelling account of the intertwined problems of writing, slavery, and sovereignty, as well as a vivid portrait of the unique form that indigenous jurisdiction took in this era.

[more]