AHP 37 Slinking Between Realms: Musk Deer as Prey in Yi Oral Literature (original) (raw)
Mark Bender. 2015. Slinking Between Realms: Musk Deer as Prey in Yi Oral Literature in Gerald Roche, Keith Dede, Fernanda Pirie, and Benedict Copps (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 37 Centering the Local, A Festschrift for Dr. Charles Kevin Stuart on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, 99-121. This paper concerns the representation of various species of musk deer in the folk literature and lore of the Yi ethnic group of southwest China. The Yi are one of the largest of China's fifty-five ethnic minority groups, numbering close to seven million. Most Yi live in mountain environments of Yunnan Province, southern Sichuan and western Guizhou provinces, with a few small communities in the western part of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Prefecture. There are around eighty sub-groups of the Yi, ranging in size from over a million, to only a few thousand. While the dominant group in Southern Sichuan province is the Nuosu (numbering around two million), many sub-groups live within the broken uplands of Yunnan, including the Nisupo, Lipo, Lolopo, and Azhe of the central and southern regions of the province.
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SLINKING BETWEEN THE REALMS: MUSK DEER AS PREY IN YI ORAL LITERATURE
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