The Jingpo: Kachin of the Yunnan Plateau [1 ed.] 1881044157, 9781881044154

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The Jingpo Kachin of the Yunnan Plateau Zhusheng Wang Foreword by F. K. Lehman

Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-3502

© 1997 by the Program for Southeast Asian Studies, ASU All rights reserved. Published 1997 Printed in the United States of America

National Resource Undergraduate Center Ruth Yabes, Director Managing Editor Mark Woodward Associate Editor Anne Dresskell

This publication was funded in part by the U.S. Department of

Education.

The Athlone Press, London, has generously given permission to use E. R- Leach’s Kachin Hills Area Ecological Zones map. © The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements ofthe American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

0 This book is one of a series on Southeast Asia pubEshed by the Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State Uuiveraty, Tetrose, Arizona. For a complete list of publications, see our web site (http://www.asu.edu/clas/asian/pseas.html) or contact us via e-mail ([email protected]).

ISBN 1-881044-15-7

( Q ,/

uc.-.^r .1 Library System University of Wisconsin - Madiso’^ 728 State Street Madison. WJ 53706-1494 U.S.A.

Contents List of Maps, Figures, and Tables ...........................................xi Foreword ..................................................................................xiii Preface ...................................................................................... xix

Maps...........................................................................................x?d hitroduction .............................................................................

The Names Kachin and Jingpo................................

3

Data, Fieldwork, and Content ................................

7

1

One: Theoretical Grounds.................................................... 11

Leach’s Model............................................................. 11 Nugent’s Model...........................................................14

Friedman’s Model ...................................................... 17 Rethinking Leach’s Model........................................ 22 Adaptation: Historical and Dynamic Process of Survival.........................................34' Two: Setting and Ethnohistory........................................... 39

An Ecological Overview .......................................... 39

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viii

The Jingpo in Dehong............................................... 43

Historical Affiliation of the Jingpo...........................48 Historical Movement of the Jingpo........................... 54

The Dai and Han Chinese in Dehong...................... 60 Three: Historical Changes.................................................... 65

Early Days in Dehong ............................................... 65

Nineteenth-Century Changes....................................68 Other Incentives for Change...................................... 73

The Political System Before 1949 ......................... 79

Four: Dazhai, A Contemporary Jingpo Village................ 89

Land and People ........................................................ 89 Puguan: Its Clans, Lineages, and Legends ............. 93

Marriage, Kinship, and Social Structure.................. 98 Demography of Puguan and Dazhai...................... 105

Outlook and Housing in Dazhai............................. 110 Dress and Food.........................................................116

A Day in Dazhai.........................................................119 Five: Economy ofDazhai..................................................

Basic Concepts .........................................................123 Crop Production ...................................................... 125 Other Areas of Production...................................... 141 Exchange of Commodities...................................... 149

123

Gift Exchange........................................................... 155

Consutnption............................................................. 162 Six: Culture of Dazhai ......................................................

169

Culture, Beliefe, and Rituals.................................... 169

Religious Belief of the Jingpo.................................. 170 The Spirits in Dazhai............................................... 178

Rituals........................................................................ 180 Chan^g Attitudes Toward the Nat and Nat Rituals.................................................... 200

Christianity in Dazhai............................................... 205

Seven: The Road of Change ............................................. 221 Development and Modernization........................... 221 The Transformation of Yunnan Minorities......... 229 The Revolution in Dazhai........................................ 237 Old Problems—New Problems............................... 252

Conclusion: Perspective on the Changes in Dazhai......... 259

Characteristics of the Jingpo ................................. 259 Tingpo Principles...................................................... 261 Limitations of Jingpo Adaptation...........................262 Challenge &om Outside: Socialism and Nationality........................... 264

X

Appendix: The Dai Tusi System and Its History in Dehong .... 267 The Setting ........................................................ 270 The Peoples........................................................ 272

The Dai Tusi System ........................................ 280 Significant Traits of the Dai Tusz System ... 285 Changes Among the Tusi in Dehong.............. 295

Conclusions........................................................ 303

Notes .................................................................................... 305

Bibliography......................................................................... 337 Index...................................................................................... 355

Maps 1, 2.

Map of Dazhai Village and Surrounding Area xxi The Kachin Hills Area Subdivided On a Climatic Basis.................................................. xxii

Figures 1. 2. 3.

Hierarchical Oscillation: hitemal.................................. Il Ifierarchical Oscillation: External................................ 21 Ground Plan of Dazhai Jingpo House....................... 112

Tables 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Names of the Branches of Jingpoin Dehong.................. 45 Population and Cropland of Dazhai and Puguan, Selected Years, 1953-1988 ..................... 106 Age Grouping of Dazhai’s Population ..................... 109 Land Productivity of Darfiai and Zhanxi, Yield per Unit Area of Principal Dazhai Crops, Selected Years, 1953-1987............ 137 Dazhai per Workday Net Income, 1983 .................. 138 Itemized Income ofDazhai Households, 1988 .... 151 Itemized Expenditures of Dazhai Households, 1988 ....................................... 163

xi

xii

Per Capita Net Income of Dazhai Households, 1988 ....................................... 9. Christianity in Yingjiang County, Selected Years, 1956-1985 ................................................................ 10. Christianity in the Zhanxi Area.................................. 11. Per Capita Income of Dazhai, Selected Years, 1953-1988 ................................................................ 12. Basic Conditions and Income of Three Villages, 1988 ................................................ 8.

167

207 209

253 254

Foreword It is a pleasure for me to introduce to anthropologists this hook by m\' former student and colleague, Professor Zhusheng Wang, now head of the new Department ofAnthropology in the University of Yunnan, at Kunming. The book is based upon Dr, Wang’s doctoral dissertation, for which I was external member of the examining committee. It is now much more than a dissertation, and it will be of considerable interest both to anthropologists dealing with Southwestern China and Southeast Asia, and to social and cultural anthropologists generally. More than a generation ago, when I was first going out to do field work in Burma, the late Dr. Edmund Leach published a book. Political Systems ofHighland Burma (1954), that at once made a major intact upon anthropological theory. Its influence began to change our whole outlook on any number of major foci of our field; the relationship between social structure and culture, the perennial question ofwhether “structure” lay in the domain of

what Leach was later to call jural rules or in the calculus of directly observed behavior, the essentially political (and ecological) nature of ethnic categories, and, perhaps most of all, the extent to which social structure could be understood to encompass more than a single form of organization—^whether the tendency toward some sort of coherence and continuity in social structure had to mean the absence of any kind of organizational dynamics or oftypes of order in developmental competition. That book, of course, was about the Kachin, a complex nf upland, “tribal” communities distributed from the southern part of Yunnan (Southwestern China), across the top of Myanmar (Burma) and into the northeastern tip of India. xiii

xiv Leach worked among the Kachin in part during the war years of the 1940s, and only in Burma. Moreover, his work, or at any rate so £ir as what appears in his book is concerned, was almost wholly with those Kachin who speak Jinghpo (a Tibeto-Burman language apparently ofthe Luish brandi). These restrictions on his sources of firsthand observation and information turn out to be significant for us all. In the first place, we have to realize that “^chin” is, as indeed Leach made clear, a very political sort of

ethnic category. It is defined by the fact that the ritual system supporting its political structure, the system in fact governing the movement between the different versions of political order and its connection with the system of asymmetrical alliance marriage, on the theory of which Leach had an equally important influence (in his book and elsewhere), takes it origin among the Jinghpo, and is conducted in an archaic form of the Jinghpo language by Jinghpo priests. However, not all Kachin are Jinghpo; in fact the very word ‘Kachin” is not really a name Kachins generally give to themselves or to any group among them It is simply a somewhat indirect reference in Jinghpo to the region (Leach’s “Zone A” basically) where one normally found the most classical type of chiefs defining one of the forms of political order, the ones who controlled access to the rituals allowing others to be sponsored as chiefs and thus controlled the ritual system governing the alternation or oscillation between these political variants. We use the word ‘Kachin” for convenience, but it is not commonly known in countries other than Burma where these people live; it is an anglicized form of a Burmese version of the Jinghpo term, and in Myanmar it is the category under which all these people relate to the majority Burman people and their State, but it has no such significance in India or China. In China, “Jinghpo,” the official designation of a recognized minority nationality {minzu}, serves instead (perhaps somewhat confusingly in the Chinese ethnography of these people). The other ‘Kachin” are of several kinds, speaking languages from other branches of the 'nbeto-Burman family. Their view of the system is understandably rather different from that of the

Jinghpo, but, until now we have had no published work on any of these. Moreover, it happens that Professor Leach took what we now know was a somewhat odd view of the osciliation among Kachin political varieties. Professor Wang deals with this problem ^leudidly in the present book (see also Maran 1967, and Lehman 1993, 1997), and more especially shows not only that Jinghpo chieftainship is hardly to be identified with an attraction to Shan systems of princely rule, but also that both Jinghpo chieftainship and the alternative system of community administration by an oligarchy rather than a chief look rather different in China from anything Leadi wrote about (or indeed his predecessors in Kachin ethnography). This is because, in China, the political relations between Kachin and Shan valley dwellers are in good measure governed by the old Chinese tusi system; a system of indirect rule, administration, and cross-border customs revenue administration in which Shan princes bear major hisi titles and Kachin leaders either subordinate ones (in the Dehong area of Southern Yunnan where Dr. Wang was working) or independent ones (farther west in Teng Chong, former T’eng Yueh). This insight into the workings of Kachin political order is potentially of wider scope when one recalls (which Leach perhaps did not know) that the Chmese tusi system extended into what is now the Shan and Kachin territories of Myanmar until well into the eighteenth century, and hence may itself have played a significant part in the formation of the whole Kachin system I am pleased in this latter connection that Dr. Wang’s book contains as an appendix the excellent essay on the tusi system and its history in Dehong by his wife, Yang Hui, an essay based on the master’s thesis she did under my supervision. In addition, 1 find it fortunate that Dr. Wang, on the basis of a careful use of Chinese language sources, has been able to show, contra Professor Leach, that we can after all write reliably about a real history of the development of the Kachin political system and its varieties. This should once and for all exorcise the specter of a more stable equilibrium between two inherently equal polar types—^Leach’s attempt to preserve the idea that structure itself

xvi

entails equilibrium, even if “dynamic” equilibrium. With Dr. Wang’s book, the ethnography of the Kachin comes to play what I hope and believe will be a part in post-structuralist anthropology instead of remaining singly a model of classical structural anthropology. Not least, of course. Dr. Wang has done much of his work in non-Jinghpo ’peaking communities, mainly Zaiwa (known in Burma as Atsi). Now, at last, we begin to know how the Kachin system looks and works as a truly multiethnic system of order. Leach more than hinted at this view, but really was not in a position to tell us anything substantive about it. Dr. Wang redresses this imbalance nicely, having worked with both Jinghpo and Zaiwa. Moreover, unlike Leach, who wrote a good deal about the Shan as a foil, as it were, against which to look at Kachin chieftainship. Dr. Wang has also worked among the Shan, namely, the so-called Chinese Shan, the Dai (the Shan call themselves Tai Long, of which Dai is the Chinese Pinyin spelling; “Shan” is only a Burmese name for them), and this too informs his analysis to advantage. Now one looks forward to additional work on the ethnography of both Jinghpo and Zaiwa, this time focusing upon ritual matters, by Dr. Wang’s Taiwanese colleague, Dr. Ts’ul P’ing Ho, whose recent dissertation on this one hopes will also see publication soon. The reader will notice that 1 have not used the terms of the opposition made so femous by Leach, between so-called gumsa and gumlao. This is no accident. Dr. Wang goes a great way beyond where Dr. Maran La Raw and I left our critique of these categories and their mutual relationships, and we can now see clearly not only that Leach got these facts a bit wrong but also, surely more to the point, how the alternative forms of Kachin political order really work and are related to one another. This is, I maintain, of quite general anthropological significance, if only because the so-called gumsa-gumlao oscillation or structural opposition (terminology and aH) has come to constitute a standard social anthropological “model” in a theory of interethnic relations, and especially relations between “tribal” peoples and peoples with

xvii

traditional states. It is surely a capital mistake to take as a general model an analysis that fails in its primary domain of application! The reader does not need any further words from me here. The book is in your hands. Read it and profit from it as a significant contribution both to the ethnography of Southeast Asia and the adjacent part of China and to the general theory of social, political and cultural systems. It is a fine example of the way wellarticulated and explicit theory and careful and rigorous ethno­ graphy should go together. F. K Lehman (F. K. L. U Chit Hlaing) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

References Leach, E. R 1993

Political Systems ofHighland Burma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1.

Lehman, F. K “Kachin.” In The Encyclopedia of World 1993 Cultures: East and Southeast Asia, ed. P. Hockings. Boston: G. K Hall, for HRAF, voL 5: 114-19. 1997

“The Relevance of the Foxmders’ Cult for Understanding the Political Systems of the Peoples of Northern South East Asia and its Chinese Borderlands.” To appear [in Chinese] in The Proceedings of the Advanced Seminar of Sociocultural Anthropology of China, 2d Sesaon, Yunnan University, East Asia Institute of Visual Anthropology, Kunming, PRC.

xviii

Maran, La Raw 1967 “Towards a Basis for Understanding the Minorities of Burma: The Kachin Example.” In Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, ed. P. Kunstadter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, voL 1, chap. 3.

Preface For more than a decade I have been engaged in anthropological studies of China’s ethnic minorities, and concerned with problems of China’s national policy on minorities and the involvement of minority peasants in the processes of sociocultural change, modernization, and adaptation. This book is an outgrowth of that concern, tempered by years of trying to combine what I have learned in the United States with what I studied in my motherland, China. Writing this book was arduous not only because of language difficulties but also because of the differences between my previous and present experiences in learning and thinking about anthropology. Much rethinkiug and adjustment have been necessary. Without the continuous help and advice of my colleagues and friends, this work could never been written. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Paula Brown Glick of SUNY/Stony Brook for her enthusiastic encouragement and help, hi fret, my initial attempt to pursue advanced studies in anthropology in the United States began at her suggestion, During those seven years of study and work, I became aware of her deep concern and understanding for her Chinese colleagues in the field. 1 am gratefill to Professor F. K. Lehman of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for his thoughtful criticism and comments on both the earlier and the latest drafts of this work, for his detailed discussion and editing of the manuscript, and for sharing with me his valuable knowledge and information about the Jingpo. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professors David Gilmore, Pedro Carrasco, David Hicks, and Margaret A. Gwynne

xix

XX

of the Anthropology Department at SUNY/Stony Brook for their suggestions and advice on both the content and form of this work. I am indebted to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their generous funding. It was a Wenner-Gren Developing Countries Fellowship that enabled me to pursue my studies in the United States. My dissertation served as the basis of this book. My life and study in the United States would have suffered greatty without the deep love and devotion of my wife, Hui Yang, and the support of my many fiiends, from whom I received constant encouragement and the strength to continue my academic journey. Finally, I owe a great debt of thanks to the Jingpo people of Dehong, the subjects ofthis work, with whom I spent some of the best years of my life. If I have successfiiUy conveyed something of their historical experience and aq)irations, I will have passed on only a small part of the significance and substance of Aeir lives. Zhusheng Wang University of Yunnan, Kunming

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