Erik Mueggler – författare

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

In a society that has seen epochal change over a few generations, what remains to hold people together and offer them a sense of continuity and meaning? In Songs for Dead Parents, Erik Mueggler shows how in contemporary China death and the practices surrounding it have become central to maintaining a connection with the world of ancestors, ghosts, and spirits that socialism explicitly disavowed. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, Songs for Dead Parents shows how people view the dead as both material and immaterial, as effigies replace corpses, tombstones replace effigies, and texts eventually replace tombstones in a long process of disentangling the dead from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through these processes that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the world and assess the social relations that make up their community. Thus, state interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential, and Mueggler traces the transformations they have wrought and their lasting effects.

An ethnographic history of one of the dozens of indigenous domains that occupied China’s border regions during the Qing dynasty and before.Erik Mueggler’s The Book of Cunning and Treachery is an ethnographic history of a chiefly household that ruled one of the many indigenous domains scattered through upland southwest China during the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The imperial colonization of this region proceeded by way of defeating indigenous polities and absorbing them into a system of indirect governance. In this system, indigenous chieftains inherited power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Mueggler tracks the history of two crucial yet unexamined archives pertaining to this household—a trove of Chinese-language legal, military, and administrative documents, and hundreds of ritual manuals, histories, and morality books written in the indigenous Né script—to show how the chiefly house reproduced itself through these languages, each with its own forms of ritual, recitation, and inscription.As Mueggler demonstrates, through different forms of access to writing in Chinese and Né, male and female chieftains, domestic slaves, enslaved bondsmen, bonded tenants, chiefly concubines, and more existed in a complex ecology of relations. House and domain were governed through a dynamic process in which residents continuously worked out the status hierarchies that animated their relations with one another as well as the relations between the chiefly house and the local administrative system. This groundbreaking book provides a compelling account of the intertwined problems of writing, slavery, and sovereignty, as well as a vivid portrait of the unique form that indigenous jurisdiction took in this era.

An ethnographic history of one of the dozens of indigenous domains that occupied China’s border regions during the Qing dynasty and before.Erik Mueggler’s The Book of Cunning and Treachery is an ethnographic history of a chiefly household that ruled one of the many indigenous domains scattered through upland southwest China during the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The imperial colonization of this region proceeded by way of defeating indigenous polities and absorbing them into a system of indirect governance. In this system, indigenous chieftains inherited power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Mueggler tracks the history of two crucial yet unexamined archives pertaining to this household—a trove of Chinese-language legal, military, and administrative documents, and hundreds of ritual manuals, histories, and morality books written in the indigenous Né script—to show how the chiefly house reproduced itself through these languages, each with its own forms of ritual, recitation, and inscription.As Mueggler demonstrates, through different forms of access to writing in Chinese and Né, male and female chieftains, domestic slaves, enslaved bondsmen, bonded tenants, chiefly concubines, and more existed in a complex ecology of relations. House and domain were governed through a dynamic process in which residents continuously worked out the status hierarchies that animated their relations with one another as well as the relations between the chiefly house and the local administrative system. This groundbreaking book provides a compelling account of the intertwined problems of writing, slavery, and sovereignty, as well as a vivid portrait of the unique form that indigenous jurisdiction took in this era.

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community--a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

In Erik Mueggler’s powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the “age of wild ghosts.” Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise “wild ghosts,” he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.