Against the Flattening of Ridges and Ravines: (Dis)locating Cultural Security through Writing with the Yi of Southwest China

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.”