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ABSTRACT
This article is about the ways the Drung (Dulong), a minority inhabiting a remote mountainous valley of Northwest Yunnan province (China), view the ‘natural world’ as part of a cosmological order in which human society is integrated. The article explores the principles of differentiation that preside over the modes of relation between the diverse components of this world, by paying close attention to subsistence activities. Until recently, the Drung people practised swidden agriculture, and hunting and collecting remained important secondary sources of food. These activities imply specific relationships with natural forces, deities and spirits, which constitute a socio-cultural means of accessing natural resources and obtaining prosperity, or ‘good fortune’. Four mutually non-exclusive modalities of transaction with these entities are identified, which capture the variability of peoples’ attitudes toward natural resources and ideas of social reproduction. Recent socio-economic reforms that have brought traditional cultivation to an end, threatening Drung people’s livelihood and culture, seem to influence the dominance of a certain modality of economic transaction.
Acknowledgements
Various earlier drafts have benefited from critical comments by Joëlle Smadja, Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Andreas Wilkes. In its most recent iteration, this article has greatly benefited from comments by two anonymous reviewers, as well as Giovanni da Col, which were extremely helpful for clarifying the arguments. I am also thankful to Bernadette Sellers for her help in revising the language. Fieldwork on which this article is based was mainly conducted at different periods between 1998 and 2003 for a total of nearly 18 months, with an additional 3-month field trip in autumn 2010. This article cannot do justice to the magnitude of the transformations that are taking place in the Dulong valley, which I have partly addressed in a companion article (Gros Citation2014).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Drung are officially recognized as 1 of the 55 ‘minority nationalities’ (Ch. shaoshu minzu) of the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese name of Dulong. They speak a Tibeto-Burman language, and amount to roughly 7000 members (4000 living in the Dulong valley itself).
2. Also recalled by McKhann (Citation2017), another well-known case is that of the sacred mountain Khawa Karpo (Tib. Kha-ba dkar-po, Ch. Meili Xueshan), situated at the border between Yunnan and the Tibet Autonomous Region, in Dechen county (Ch. Deqin xian).
3. There has been growing literature on the subject; see among many others, Hillman (Citation2003), Kolås (Citation2008), Litzinger (Citation2004), McKhann (Citation2001) and Oakes (Citation2007).
4. As one of the world’s largest funds for ecosystem services SLCP is now well documented at both macro- and micro-level through case studies. I do not review all this literature here, which is referenced and discussed in another article; see Gros (Citation2014).
5. In other parts of the world, many studies have discussed how diverse approaches to environmental protection are problematically blind to taking into account other conceptions of reality; see, for instance, Turner (Citation2000), Blaser (Citation2009).
6. For a recent contribution to the anthropology of fortune-like concepts among Tibetans in Northwest Yunnan, see da Col (Citation2012a, Citation2012b).
7. For a discussion of Drung myths (as authoritative narrations that legitimize order), see Gros (Citation2012a, 85–87, 233–235); and for an approach to diverse forms of historicity, see Gros (Citation2009).
8. Flood stories are a very common mythical motif throughout southwest China and Southeast Asia more generally, and the prohibition of incest is one of their key components; see for instance Đăng Nghiêm (Citation1993).
9. In fact, some spirits have a human origin: this dates back to pre-flood times, and several stories relate how a human being became attached to a particular realm (mountain, sky) and therefore separated from other humans, and turned into a spirit.
10. I owe the ‘nutritional cosmology’ formulation to Giovanni da Col. This seems at first glance quite similar to the ‘cosmic food web’ described by Arhem (Citation1996), but it is important to note the difference regarding the level of reciprocity; here, predation is not an exchange that accounts for the regeneration of life and renewal at the level of the category (animal or plant). See also Descola’s ([Citation2005] Citation2013, 285ff., 336ff.) discussion of the dilemma of eating non-human ‘persons’ and what he calls the ‘traffic of souls’.
11. Here I have simplified this otherwise rather long story based on versions collected in the field. Different versions of this story have also been published in their Chinese translations; see, for example, Zou, Shifu, and Rongxiang (Citation1994).
12. It would take too long to quote extensively the myth here. Incest took place after the great flood that allowed for the reordering of the world, between a young man and his sister, the sole survivors. All human beings are the descendants of this incestuous couple.
13. Gvmeū is generally viewed as either a single male figure or a male/female pair.
14. There is extensive anthropological evidence that can hardly be summed up in a short list of references; see, for example, Descola ([Citation2005] Citation2013), Dwyer (Citation1996) and Ingold (Citation2000, Citation2011, Chap. 10). See also Lecomte-Tilouine (Citation2010) for the Himalayas.
15. While forms of sociality may well be characterized by egalitarianism at an intracultural level, it does not exclude asymmetrical exchange during intercultural interaction. Fortier (Citation2000) has observed among the Raute, hunter-gatherers living in Nepal, that sharing is a dominant ideology and often deployed as an intracommunity mode of interaction, but several forms of exchange nevertheless coexist.
16. The Drung term for ‘place’ can also include the notion of ‘wilderness’.
17. As I will make clear below, masters of game are nevertheless within the territorial domain of higher mountain deities (lā) that are considered as the master-owners of all the natural resources. Similitudes with Tibetan religious practices extend to ritual vocabulary, with terms such as fumigation (sāng) (Tib. bsang) or ritual flags (lv-dār) (Tib. lha-dar), among many others. For a comparative perspective on the notion of master-ownership, see Fausto (Citation2008).
18. Luck is to be understood here as a form of generative property that enables one to obtain (as opposed to produce) something; it is dependent on a relational process similar to the one described by Hamayon (Citation1990, Citation2012) in her work among Siberian Buryat and Evenk hunters. For comparative insight on luck and fortune, see da Col (Citation2012c).
19. Ritual terminology refers to gyāng (prosperity) as a cognate to kăr-jī (good fortune), which obviously comes from the Tibetan g.yang. The whole ritual, as briefly described here, is very similar to the one performed by Tibetans in Northwest Yunnan. For a stimulating discussion about g.yang and other Tibetan fortune-related concepts, see da Col (Citation2012b).