Overview

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as ""the age of wild ghosts."" Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community-a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise ""wild ghosts,"" he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

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9780520226319

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Reviews

Mueggler has written a fascinating and disturbing tale of guilt and failure in a period of chaotic change, providing ethnographic data on a minority group previously almost unknown in Western language literature. The anguish of the Yi in a world out of control is well captured in chapters that alternate from actual tries to analysis. --Choice

Author Information

Erik Mueggler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

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