10 / The Contingent Ethnicity of the Prmi Prmi and Naze ethnicity works very differently from that of the Nuosu. Nuosu ethnic boundaries are definite. All Nuosu are Yi in minzu terms, and Nuosu are clearly distinguished locally from other ethnic groups (both Yi and non-Yi) both by recognition of difference and by endogamy, just as in larger contexts they are clearly distinguished as Yi from members of other minzu, and in many situations from other Yi as well. Prmi and Naze ethnicity, by contrast, is both less definitely bounded and more contingent. Boundaries between Prmi and Naze are blurred even in terms of recognition (some people are not even sure who is who), and still more so by frequent intermarriage between the two groups, as well as by intermarriage with Han in many contexts, and sometimes even with Naxi. In addition, both Prmi and Naze have had different minzu identities at different times and in different places—Prmi have been both Zang and Pumi; Naze have been Naxi, Mongolian (or anyway Mengguzu), and maybe Mosuo. Prmi and Naze thus display what I call historical and contingent ethnicity. It is likely that, in the days before the ethnic identification project, they were not only known by a variety of names in a variety of languages but also identified themselves with a variety of different collectivities in different situations. The terms Prmi and Naze are autodesignations of the respective groups in their own languages. Prmi speak a language of the Qiang branch of Tibeto-Burman, whereas the Naze, whose language is closely related to that of the Naxi, speak a language variously thought to belong to the Yi and the Qiang branches. In other languages, however, these neat categories become blurred. In Nuosu, both Prmi and Naze are known as Ozzu, a category that also includes Tibetans. In classical and early twentieth-century Chinese sources, both groups were known as Xifan, or “Western Barbarians,” and early Western explorers, ethnologists, and missionaries picked up this usage. The religious identification of both groups drew them partly toward Tibet through their Buddhism, but they also had their own priestly spirit-practitioners, called ndaba in Naze and hangue in Prmi, who are not affiliated with any wider religious community, though some of their rituals resemble those conducted by Naxi ddobaq or Nuosu bimo. At the same time, political allegiances drew some of the elite families of the Prmi toward Tibet (at least one Prmi ruler was a subordinate of the Dalai Lama) and of the Naze toward Mongolia (several local Naze rulers claimed descent from Qubilai’s troops who conquered western Liangshan in the thirteenth century). In short, we cannot reconstruct Prmi or Naze ethnic identity at any time in the past; we can only surmise that each local community presented a different picture. All we can do, in fact, is to look at the current, local picture in terms of the everyday languages of ethnic identity, and look at the past in terms of the metalanguages of ethnohistory and ethnic identification, and then examine how the metalanguages and the everyday languages interact to produce the present ethnic identities of the Prmi and Naze. We will find a picture so fluid that even the formally rigid categories of ethnic identification are subject to slippage in both the Prmi and the Naze cases. We begin in this chapter with the Prmi and their ambiguous relationships with the Naze and with the broader category of Zang; chapters 11 and 12 deal respectively with the ethnic identity of the Naze and with the Naze as a multivocal symbol in the discourses of others. THE PRMI AND THEIR LOCAL ETHNIC RELATIONS The three factors of culture, history, and kinship, which we have seen to be the bases of ethnic identity generally and among the Nuosu, also operate in the ethnic consciousness of the Prmi. But they operate differently: among the Nuosu, these three factors, to varying degrees, distinguish Nuosu from other ethnic groups; in the Prmi case, by contrast, they sometimes distinguish and sometimes fail to distinguish, making the ethnic boundaries themselves fuzzy and shifting in some (though not all) communities. In the cultural realm, Nuosu ethnic identity is distinct and constant regardless of culture. Prmi ethnic identity, by contrast, varies as culture varies, but not uniformly. Many aspects of Prmi culture serve as ethnic markers in local communities, in two ways. First and unsurprisingly, ethnic markers serve to distinguish local Prmi from other local ethnic groups. But in...