ABSTRACT
The Yi nationality, an ethnopolitical category constructed during the 1950s nationality recognition campaign, is typically portrayed by the Chinese state and its citizens as a coherent ethnic group with shared cultural characteristics. This clichéd depiction reflects the state’s top-down cultural security imperative to present each nationality as a building block of the Chinese nation. However, the official Chinese narrative of ethnic coherence starts to unravel when viewed from a bottom-up perspective built on the everyday practices of the Yi and non-Yi elites as well as of other stakeholders within the Yi nationality. Drawing on longitudinal and multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this chapter offers three ethnographic vignettes from Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces that reveal how ritual practitioners and ordinary people from different Yi ethnic sub-branches and localities seek to master the hegemonic voice within a wider “Yi-osphere.”
