Erik Mueggler | University of Michigan (original) (raw)
Papers by Erik Mueggler
Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines
Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 53 | 2022 Figurations chamaniques. ... more Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 53 | 2022 Figurations chamaniques. Écritures, dessins et broderies de Haute Asie, suivi de Varia Divination and the scapular theory of writing in north Yunnan: graph, verse, page La divination et la théorie scapulaire de l'écriture au nord du Yunnan : graphe, vers,
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, 2018
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020
I begin with an image, since several of these perceptive, stimulating, and generous commentaries ... more I begin with an image, since several of these perceptive, stimulating, and generous commentaries ask questions about relations between images and words. It is the image of a corpse. As Piers Vitebsky notes, corpses are at the center of the book under interrogation. Vitebsky’s question, why is the corpse itself not being interrogated (“why do the dead not need a voice”), I will defer, noting only that this book, too, strives to be the image of a corpse. The drawingwasmade from a photograph taken in 1993
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021
The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, co... more The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinshi...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscripti... more In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscription of two texts on a cliff face at the center of her domain. One was in Nasu, the language of the ruling lineage; the other was in Chinese. Both commemorated the long, powerful line of Né (or Yi) native chieftains to which Lady Qu was heir. Yet they gave contradictory accounts of the forms of chiefly succession, sources of political authority, and geopolitical position of the native domain. The inscriptions show that chiefly sovereignty was neither merely embodied in ancestral authority nor simply endowed by the emperor. Sovereignty—particularly that of a female chieftain—was the capacity to master both modes of self-description while embodying their incompatibility. While we often understand colonialism through power-laden projects of translation, Lady Qu's inscriptions give evidence that Ming colonization of the southwest might require a different approach. Native chieftains were o...
Michigan Quarterly Review, Sep 1, 2005
American Anthropologist Journal of the American Anthropological Association, 2003
Science, 2008
Promoting the one-child policy. Posters, such as this 1986 example, were widely used in the campa... more Promoting the one-child policy. Posters, such as this 1986 example, were widely used in the campaign to curb the projected problematic growth in China's population.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014
This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, fro... more This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity-obsessed cultures of urban and semi-urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more 'modern', allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in 'modernized' forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression. When I asked Lichink'aemo 1 to help me understand a lament I had recorded in her home village in northern Yunnan in April 2011, she gladly agreed. She and her husband, both nearly 80, were living with their son in the county town, a long way from the mountain valley they called Júzò, where they had spent most of their lives. Even here in their son's new three-storey house, devoted to a flourishing business of banqueting officials, this language could bring harm if performed in the wrong context. For many reasons-this potential for harm, those lubricated officials, curious grandchildren-we chose to walk to a park to transcribe and translate our recording. The old couple had a cheerful word for all who stopped to watch as we worked at a table under the treestattered youths, shop employees, ladies who swept the park. When asked they patiently explained what we were doing. The onlookers' comments-awed, respectful, patronizing, suspicious, dismissive-revealed a deep gulf in sentiment and sensibility between this and anything with which they were familiar. The recorder emitted tuneful wailing in a language that none but my old friends could decipher. Our bystanders made it clear that to them this was emotion expressed in a backward and exotic mode-a remnant of the past from within mountains barely yet illuminated by the light of modernity. All who happened by belonged to the marginal populations of an undistinguished small town struggling unevenly towards prosperity. Yet all let us know that this tuneful weeping marked a deep divide separating them from this pair of old farmers.
American Anthropologist, 2003
American Anthropologist, 2013
Songs for Dead Parents, 2016
From the first pages, we understand that Songs for dead parents is not only an ethnographic accou... more From the first pages, we understand that Songs for dead parents is not only an ethnographic account of death rites among Lòlop’ò of Southwest China—not another book, that is, that treats death as a culture-bound syndrome and the dead as figments of cultural belief. This is a book about the death that lives intimately within our bones and skin, and about the dead who gesture through our hands and infiltrate our dreams. Here, death rites are taken to address existential questions, such as “how bodies might be unmade and remade, dematerialized and rematerialized” (p. 3), or “what a dead body [is]” (p. 4), or “what spirits are, what persons alive and dead are” (p. 11), or how we can “hear the dead” and what language they speak (p. 190). In one passage after another Mueggler reveals death rites as both responses to political shifts of power, and interventions into philosophical problems of materiality and immateriality, actuality and virtuality, animacy and inanimacy—problems that arguably remain unsettled for anyone who has grieved, anyone who has been waylaid by her own death or another’s. Songs, then, is not so much an account of Lòlop’ò death practices, as it is a series of social and ontological insights about death and the dead as filtered through a troubled colonial history. In one exemplary moment Mueggler suggests that certain ritual chants be taken as akin to an anthropology of the dead, “skilled attempts to engage the dead in conversation, to observe their interactions, to divine their intentions” (p. 189), in an “effort to take the dead on their own terms” (p. 190). And Lòlop’ò anthropology of the dead is hardly irrele-
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2014
Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into ... more Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's benef...
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2011
In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis ... more In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis Charles Rock made a brief trip to England. He clipped the obituary of an old friend from the Times and pasted it in his diary. On the facing page, he pasted a photograph two decades old, and wrote this caption:J. F. Rock (standing) with his older friend Fred Muir, Entomologist at the Haw[aii] Sugar Planter's Exp[eriment] Sta[tion], Honolulu. Photographed in our home in Liloa Rise (Breaside), Honolulu in the spring of 1913, while our phonograph played Spiritu Gentile, Caruso singing.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021
Shortly after their master's death in 1760, a domestic slave named Ah Han and five of his enslave... more Shortly after their master's death in 1760, a domestic slave named Ah Han and five of his enslaved companions submitted a confession and a plea for mercy to a local magistrate in northern Yunnan Province. They had been caught, terrifyingly, between two factions of kin and enslaved persons struggling over who would succeed their master, the native chieftain Nuo Jiayou, as sole owner of all lands and persons in a sprawling native domain. Their legal plaint told of how, after the chieftain's funeral, they had been "hounded from dawn to dusk" by two of the chiefly household's high-ranking bondsmen, inciting them enter into a pact to plunder the household wealth. "For a time, these insects stupidly listened to their talk." The party of bondsmen and household slaves allegedly broke into the boudoir of the chieftain's elderly wife through a window, beat her, and confiscated her personal property, including silver, clothing, and grain. "Later, the head manager [also a bondsman] said, 'beating and humiliating our mistress is unpardonable.…' These insects, fearing punishment, consequently sought refuge in the mistress's chambers to repent and seek forgiveness." The six domestic slaves traveled to the prefectural capital with the chieftain's wife, where she presented her case to the departmental court. There, they seized the opportunity to find a litigation master to write up and present their own plaint. They ended their confession with an entreaty to "condescend to these stupid yi [uncivilized others] who know not our own errors and are easily lured into mischief; to excuse our previous crimes; and to punish the accused rebels." 1 Acknowledgments: I presented this essay to the Sociocultural Anthropology Workshop at the University of Michigan and gave briefer versions as talks in the East Asia Studies Center colloquia at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ohio State University. I thank all the participants for their comments and suggestions. Jean Hébrard and Stevan Harrell revealed their identities as reviewers for CSSH; I can't thank them and an anonymous reviewer enough for their aid in improving it. Ashley Lebner's enthusiasm for discussing these narratives and arguments was endlessly productive.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, 2018
Corpses and Voices Across Worlds, 2020
Response to book symposium on Erik Mueggler's Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in S... more Response to book symposium on Erik Mueggler's Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China.
Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines
Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 53 | 2022 Figurations chamaniques. ... more Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 53 | 2022 Figurations chamaniques. Écritures, dessins et broderies de Haute Asie, suivi de Varia Divination and the scapular theory of writing in north Yunnan: graph, verse, page La divination et la théorie scapulaire de l'écriture au nord du Yunnan : graphe, vers,
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, 2018
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020
I begin with an image, since several of these perceptive, stimulating, and generous commentaries ... more I begin with an image, since several of these perceptive, stimulating, and generous commentaries ask questions about relations between images and words. It is the image of a corpse. As Piers Vitebsky notes, corpses are at the center of the book under interrogation. Vitebsky’s question, why is the corpse itself not being interrogated (“why do the dead not need a voice”), I will defer, noting only that this book, too, strives to be the image of a corpse. The drawingwasmade from a photograph taken in 1993
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021
The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, co... more The article examines legal plaints authored by the household slaves, bondsmen, bonded tenants, concubine, wife, sisters, and affines of the chieftain of a native domain in northern Yunnan Province, China in 1760. These kin and enslaved persons of the chiefly house were struggling over whether a slave baby should become the chieftain of this sprawling realm. The documents were preserved in the hereditary house of the native chieftain along with some 500 manuscripts in an indigenous script now called Nasu, which carried its own assumptions about what writing was and what it could do. I read the Chinese-language legal documents with an eye to the tradition of Nasu ritual writing. I argue that a group of bondsmen accused of rebelling against the chiefly household were actually seeking to preserve it by extending the ritualized tasks of writing ancestry and descent into the realm of Qing legal practice. This allows me to extend the first of two methodological suggestions: that the kinshi...
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscripti... more In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscription of two texts on a cliff face at the center of her domain. One was in Nasu, the language of the ruling lineage; the other was in Chinese. Both commemorated the long, powerful line of Né (or Yi) native chieftains to which Lady Qu was heir. Yet they gave contradictory accounts of the forms of chiefly succession, sources of political authority, and geopolitical position of the native domain. The inscriptions show that chiefly sovereignty was neither merely embodied in ancestral authority nor simply endowed by the emperor. Sovereignty—particularly that of a female chieftain—was the capacity to master both modes of self-description while embodying their incompatibility. While we often understand colonialism through power-laden projects of translation, Lady Qu's inscriptions give evidence that Ming colonization of the southwest might require a different approach. Native chieftains were o...
Michigan Quarterly Review, Sep 1, 2005
American Anthropologist Journal of the American Anthropological Association, 2003
Science, 2008
Promoting the one-child policy. Posters, such as this 1986 example, were widely used in the campa... more Promoting the one-child policy. Posters, such as this 1986 example, were widely used in the campaign to curb the projected problematic growth in China's population.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014
This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, fro... more This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto-Burman-speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity-obsessed cultures of urban and semi-urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more 'modern', allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in 'modernized' forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression. When I asked Lichink'aemo 1 to help me understand a lament I had recorded in her home village in northern Yunnan in April 2011, she gladly agreed. She and her husband, both nearly 80, were living with their son in the county town, a long way from the mountain valley they called Júzò, where they had spent most of their lives. Even here in their son's new three-storey house, devoted to a flourishing business of banqueting officials, this language could bring harm if performed in the wrong context. For many reasons-this potential for harm, those lubricated officials, curious grandchildren-we chose to walk to a park to transcribe and translate our recording. The old couple had a cheerful word for all who stopped to watch as we worked at a table under the treestattered youths, shop employees, ladies who swept the park. When asked they patiently explained what we were doing. The onlookers' comments-awed, respectful, patronizing, suspicious, dismissive-revealed a deep gulf in sentiment and sensibility between this and anything with which they were familiar. The recorder emitted tuneful wailing in a language that none but my old friends could decipher. Our bystanders made it clear that to them this was emotion expressed in a backward and exotic mode-a remnant of the past from within mountains barely yet illuminated by the light of modernity. All who happened by belonged to the marginal populations of an undistinguished small town struggling unevenly towards prosperity. Yet all let us know that this tuneful weeping marked a deep divide separating them from this pair of old farmers.
American Anthropologist, 2003
American Anthropologist, 2013
Songs for Dead Parents, 2016
From the first pages, we understand that Songs for dead parents is not only an ethnographic accou... more From the first pages, we understand that Songs for dead parents is not only an ethnographic account of death rites among Lòlop’ò of Southwest China—not another book, that is, that treats death as a culture-bound syndrome and the dead as figments of cultural belief. This is a book about the death that lives intimately within our bones and skin, and about the dead who gesture through our hands and infiltrate our dreams. Here, death rites are taken to address existential questions, such as “how bodies might be unmade and remade, dematerialized and rematerialized” (p. 3), or “what a dead body [is]” (p. 4), or “what spirits are, what persons alive and dead are” (p. 11), or how we can “hear the dead” and what language they speak (p. 190). In one passage after another Mueggler reveals death rites as both responses to political shifts of power, and interventions into philosophical problems of materiality and immateriality, actuality and virtuality, animacy and inanimacy—problems that arguably remain unsettled for anyone who has grieved, anyone who has been waylaid by her own death or another’s. Songs, then, is not so much an account of Lòlop’ò death practices, as it is a series of social and ontological insights about death and the dead as filtered through a troubled colonial history. In one exemplary moment Mueggler suggests that certain ritual chants be taken as akin to an anthropology of the dead, “skilled attempts to engage the dead in conversation, to observe their interactions, to divine their intentions” (p. 189), in an “effort to take the dead on their own terms” (p. 190). And Lòlop’ò anthropology of the dead is hardly irrele-
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2014
Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into ... more Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's benef...
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2011
In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis ... more In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis Charles Rock made a brief trip to England. He clipped the obituary of an old friend from the Times and pasted it in his diary. On the facing page, he pasted a photograph two decades old, and wrote this caption:J. F. Rock (standing) with his older friend Fred Muir, Entomologist at the Haw[aii] Sugar Planter's Exp[eriment] Sta[tion], Honolulu. Photographed in our home in Liloa Rise (Breaside), Honolulu in the spring of 1913, while our phonograph played Spiritu Gentile, Caruso singing.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021
Shortly after their master's death in 1760, a domestic slave named Ah Han and five of his enslave... more Shortly after their master's death in 1760, a domestic slave named Ah Han and five of his enslaved companions submitted a confession and a plea for mercy to a local magistrate in northern Yunnan Province. They had been caught, terrifyingly, between two factions of kin and enslaved persons struggling over who would succeed their master, the native chieftain Nuo Jiayou, as sole owner of all lands and persons in a sprawling native domain. Their legal plaint told of how, after the chieftain's funeral, they had been "hounded from dawn to dusk" by two of the chiefly household's high-ranking bondsmen, inciting them enter into a pact to plunder the household wealth. "For a time, these insects stupidly listened to their talk." The party of bondsmen and household slaves allegedly broke into the boudoir of the chieftain's elderly wife through a window, beat her, and confiscated her personal property, including silver, clothing, and grain. "Later, the head manager [also a bondsman] said, 'beating and humiliating our mistress is unpardonable.…' These insects, fearing punishment, consequently sought refuge in the mistress's chambers to repent and seek forgiveness." The six domestic slaves traveled to the prefectural capital with the chieftain's wife, where she presented her case to the departmental court. There, they seized the opportunity to find a litigation master to write up and present their own plaint. They ended their confession with an entreaty to "condescend to these stupid yi [uncivilized others] who know not our own errors and are easily lured into mischief; to excuse our previous crimes; and to punish the accused rebels." 1 Acknowledgments: I presented this essay to the Sociocultural Anthropology Workshop at the University of Michigan and gave briefer versions as talks in the East Asia Studies Center colloquia at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ohio State University. I thank all the participants for their comments and suggestions. Jean Hébrard and Stevan Harrell revealed their identities as reviewers for CSSH; I can't thank them and an anonymous reviewer enough for their aid in improving it. Ashley Lebner's enthusiasm for discussing these narratives and arguments was endlessly productive.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, 2018
Corpses and Voices Across Worlds, 2020
Response to book symposium on Erik Mueggler's Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in S... more Response to book symposium on Erik Mueggler's Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China.
This is the introduction to The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China
This is the Introduction to The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration o... more This is the Introduction to The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet
This is the Introduction to Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text and World in Southwest China
Anthropology of This Century, 2018
This is a review, by Peter Vanderveer, of my Songs for Dead Parents: Body, Text and World in Sou... more This is a review, by Peter Vanderveer, of my Songs for Dead Parents: Body, Text and World in Southwest China and Piers Vitebsky's Living without the dead: loss and redemption in a jungle cosmos.