9 / Nuosu, Yi, China, and the World This chapter begins with a self-criticism. In the previous three chapters, describing Nuosu ethnicity in three very different rural communities, I have perpetrated a convenient fiction: the idea that one can describe ethnic identity and ethnic relations in a certain locality without considering the larger, national and international discourses of ethnicity and nationalism that pertain to the country in which the locality is situated. Certainly, chapters 6–8 did not treat Mishi, Baiwu, and Manshuiwan like the “primitive isolates” described in early twentieth-century ethnography. In this book imperial dynasties, warlord regimes, and modern revolutions sweep across Liangshan; people leave their communities to become educated, bringing back with them skills, knowledge, and even spouses from the outside; communities are collectivized in the 1950s and decollectivized in the 1980s, and are allowed to begin both capitalism and religion anew in the reform era. But throughout all this historical and geographical context, I have acted as if the important categories were the local ones: local Nuosu and outside Hxiemga in Mishi; Nuosu, Prmi, and Han in Baiwu; plains Nuosu, mountain Nuosu, and Han in Manshuiwan. I have neglected the fact that people who are Nuosu in local discourse, speaking their own language, and who are Yi (which in this context is nothing but a translation of Nuosu) when speaking Chinese, are also Yi or Yizu in a different sense: the sense that was created by the ethnic identification process, which made everybody a member of one or another of the fifty-six officially recognized minzu, or “nationalities.” This category of Yi is not simply the local category of Nuosu or Yi writ large. It is founded on different principles, includes and excludes different people, and gives its members the potential to participate in a wholly different discourse of ethnicity, a discourse that seeks to lump rather than split, that takes Yi as an imagined community rather than as a face-to-face group (Anderson 1991), that invites, even requires, the creation of another whole series of myths of common history, descent, and, stubbornly enough, culture. I committed this sin of omission knowingly, and for two reasons. First, I wanted, as an anthropologist, to focus in a serious way on the local, to attack the assumption that the official categories, the fifty-six mailboxes in a row, somehow reflect local reality. I wanted the local reality to be appreciated in its own right, to the point where I would not even assume that “Nuosu” meant the same thing in one community as it meant in another. Second, to do it all at once would be too complicated. So I postponed, as it were, the discussion of this larger-scale context of ethnic relations. But postponement is not cancellation, and now the rain check is due: it is time to focus not on the minzu discourse as something separate from the local relations in each community, but rather as something in which the same people participate and the same communities are involved, and ultimately as something that alters the vocabulary and syntax of the local language of ethnic identity. Local ethnic relations are a part of and influenced by larger-scale minzu relations, and there are several ways in which the fact that Nuosu are also Yi influences what it means to be Nuosu. But first we must talk about the participation of local community members in being Yi. ETHNIC LEADERSHIP AND LOCAL PARTICIPATION Nuosu people have not been entirely absent from the national stage of twentieth-century China. Probably the most prominent of all was Long Yun, a nuoho from Jinyang County in southeastern Liangshan, who went to study in military school in Kunming and later rose through the military ranks to become the ruler of Yunnan from 1927 until the Communist takeover extended to Yunnan in 1950 (Xie Benshu 1988, Lu Hui 1994). Also in the pre-Communist period, nzymo Leng Guangdian of Tianba in Ganluo was prominent in local political, military, and educational affairs, not only graduating from the Whampoa Military Academy in Nanjing but also returning to Liangshan in 1936 to mediate several local wars, as well as to establish the first modern school in a Nuosu area in Ganluo (Azha 1994, Wu Guoqing 1994). Both of these regional leaders lived on after the Communist takeover in Beijing, first honored as united-front personalities, then attacked as rightists in the 1950s, and finally rehabilitated (in Long Yun’s case, posthumously) in the...