Père Vial and the Gni-p’a
Orientalist Scholarship and the Christian Project
Civilizing projects of various ruling centers have formed a complex pattern of interactions with distinct linguistic/ethnic groups settled in Southwest China’s peripheries. During the late nineteenth century, European and American missionaries introduced variations of the Christian civilizing project into the region (see Harrell, Introduction; and Cheung, this volume). Some of these missionaries were practitioners of Orientalist scholarship, which shaped their responses to indigenous groups they targeted for conversion. Missionary Orientalism can be understood as a type of Christian civilizing project that provoked ethnogenic reactions among its “flocks.” It is possible that such missionizing brought about consciousness of membership in an ethnic group opposed and perhaps superior to the Han Chinese.1
This type of civilizing project came to my attention as I searched for historical information on the Sani Yi, previously labeled Gni-p’a Lolo, a small ethnic group in Yunnan that has persisted despite its homeland’s proximity to Kunming, the provincial capital.2 Research led me to the writings of missionary Père Paul Vial. Attempting to isolate ethnography, history, and opinion, I began an exhilarating, French-mangling affaire du texte. Toward an ultimate aim of understanding the effects of Vial’s Orientalist missionizing on Sani ethnicity, I gathered his published writings and photographs (dating from 1888 to 1917), as well as contemporary writings of other missionaries, engineers, and travelers. By today’s standards, what they have to say sounds romantic and humane at best, ethnocentric and racist at worst. Vial was part of a French and British network of individuals who followed their countries’ colonial expansions from India and Indochina into Yunnan. A number of these colonists indulged in an ethnological hobby of romancing the indigenous, of collecting and classifying while they explored, exploited, and converted in Southwest China. Their writings form an ironic Orientalist commentary by external imperialists on the internal colonizing by China of indigenous peoples.
A typology of Orientalist approaches—based on individuals’ occupational motivations, research agendas, and their results in terms of scholarly contributions and impacts on the “host” society—is proposed here.3 Vial was a missionary type of Orientalist scholar who had sustained contact with the objects of his study. He emerges from his writings and from comments of contemporaries as a flamboyant character with a mission to convert and a fascination with “archaic” societies. Vial’s mission was to convert Sani to Christianity and European modernity while maintaining their distinction from Han society. His fascination with Lolo writing and literature fits into this mission as a key to continued Sani Yi ethnic identity as a separate group with a history. Reading his materials as colonial discourse raises a number of questions about their meaning. What was the context in which he wrote? What were Vial’s self-image and motivation? What was his understanding of Chinese society, Sani life, and the future of his civilizing project for the Sani?
These questions are addressed by exploring factors that shaped Vial’s discourse on the Sani. His classification of the Sani as a dialect group, and his understanding of their relationship to the Han are analyzed in the context of European imperialism and Orientalism, Vial’s personal experience with the Sani, and the objectives of his missionary organization, the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. From his perspective as a Roman Catholic Orientalist missionary, Vial saw his conversion efforts and scholarly study of Sani culture as a civilizing project constructing a new Sani identity. Evaluating Vial’s efforts in terms of Sani thoughts about the effects of Vial’s mission on their ethnic identity is a goal of my current research among the descendants of Vial’s congregations.
By “ethnic identity” I mean the sociocultural construction of a unique group identity, based on shared descent expressed in cultural traits or markers, and perceived in opposition to other such groups (Spicer 1971; Keyes 1981; Bentley 1987; Harrell, Introduction, this volume). When the Sani were missionized, a new factor or “other” was added into their equation of Sani/not-Sani ethnicity. Vial offered Sani people a new identity of conversion, linked with powerful European colonial imperialists who contested the Chinese state’s authority. Sani response to this missionary civilizing project has functioned within the history of colonialism and revolution in China, while contributing to a transforming sentiment of ethnic difference or ethnogenesis.4
ORIENTALISM AND EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM IN SOUTHWEST CHINA
The political and intellectual milieu in which Vial wrote is well defined by one word—Orientalism. Edward Said’s seminal work (1979) on the subject is so widely cited that a brief introduction should suffice here. Orientalism is a Western European (male) representation of the East or Orient, an us-them dichotomy on a global scale and a justification for colonial domination. It became an academic tradition based on a style of thought, as well as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient. Orientalism can be examined as a discourse for understanding “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produced—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively. . . . From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism” (ibid.:3–4). Orientalism can thus be seen as a “dynamic exchange between individual authors” (ibid.:15) produced in the framework of colonial political concerns of overlapping empires.
Although Said focuses on their shared pursuit, a typology of Orientalists can be constructed by grouping occupational motivations which then correlate with distinct research agendas and results.5 The Orientalists discussed here have a common interest in indigenous peoples, but there is variation in insights and arguments in their writings that often can be explained by motivation. There is some gradation of commitment to the colonial enterprise—from colonial agent to missionary to traveler to academic—although individuals ranged widely over these hypothetical boundaries.
Colonial agents, whether diplomats or engineers, were motivated by a political mandate (in this case European expansion into Southwest China for economic gain). Their research agendas may have included in-depth study of the “high” culture (Han) Chinese, with incidental study of minority ethnic groups they came across illustrating racial/cultural theories of the day. Research results were usually in the form of information reports to government or scholarly institutions in the agents’ own countries supporting colonial activity in the host country.
Missionaries, motivated by a conversion goal, sought to change radically the religious beliefs and self-identity of the mission community. Their research agendas were determined by their gender, religious affiliation (Protestant or Catholic) and theology, and by their sustained contact with specific groups. Research results were in the form of letters for fund raising, language-study materials prepared for local instruction, and scholarly reports. Said notes missionaries as agents of colonialism but does not specifically examine their role in the Orientalist project. T. O. Beidelman in Colonial Evangelism calls for study of the missionary role in colonialism by investigating missionaries’ perceptions of themselves and their stereotypes about those they sought to dominate and change (1982:27). Such an approach would enable us to gain insight into what made missionaries act within imperialistic colonialism, and the impact of their missionizing on host indigenous societies.
Orientalist travelers and explorers were motivated by adventure in parts of the world made marginally safe by colonialism. Their research agendas were carried out in brief encounters with distinct cultures, the more remote and exotic the better. Research results (including photographs) were published for popular consumption on postcards and in magazines and travel books, which impacted Westerners’ images of host cultures.
Academic Orientalists were theoretically motivated by scholastic curiosity, either within or beyond the armchair. Their research agenda was to compile and analyze materials on specific ethnological or linguistic topics collected in the field by other types of Orientalists, by colleagues, or by themselves. Their research results were presented at academic conferences and published in journals and books. The impact of their study in the host culture continues as new generations of scholars reassess their work. As we shall see in this study of Père Vial, characteristics of these four basic types were combined in many individual Orientalists, and all shared an interest as Westerners in the other, the Orient. This typology shows that within the Orientalist pursuit there was variation in focus and results, as well as in degree of engagement in the colonialist enterprise.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French from Indochina and British from India and Burma competed to build a transportation network connecting their colonial possessions to Chinese materials and markets. British and French arms had supplied both sides of an Islamic rebellion (1855–1873) in Yunnan, which the Chinese state suppressed, while unable to curb Anglo-French incursions. China’s defeat in the Sino-French war of 1884–1885, and the British annexation of upper Burma in 1886 set the stage for further European exploitation.
In a pattern found in other parts of the colonialized world (Beidelman 1982:12), British Protestant and French Catholic missionaries in China claimed their exclusive turfs in the contest for souls. Some missions targeted the Han majority, while others aimed at distinct peripheral groups. Although there were a number of Christian missions in China, two organizations specifically devoted to work in Southwest China dominated missionizing in Yunnan for a number of years. The first Protestant missionary activity was established in Yunnan in 1877 by the interdenominational, British-run, China Inland Mission, which grew from 52 missionaries in 1876 to an all-China total of 1,063 in 1915 (Latourette 1929:389, 584). French Catholic missionaries of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris had a significant presence in Sichuan since 1756, and were well established in Indochina before they became active in Yunnan. In 1870 there were approximately 80,000 Catholic converts in Sichuan, and 8,000 in Yunnan (ibid.:327). After the Islamic revolt, the Society fully incorporated Yunnan into its field of influence, with the regional French bishop housed in Kunming. In 1872 the society had 78 European missionaries in China and 71 native priests, and by 1918 there were 319 European and 207 native priests (ibid.:323, 326).
Père Paul Vial became a member of this organization just as it flourished in Southwest China. In 1894 the Australian traveler G. E. Morrison (1895:171) reported that there were 22 French priests, 8 ordained Chinese priests, and 15,000 converts under the guidance of Mgr. Fenouil in Yunnan, while at the same time the China Inland Mission had 23 missionaries in the field, with a possible convert total of 11 (ibid.:178). Observing this apparent difference in conversion success, a contemporary British engineer, Major H. R. Davies, concluded that French Catholic defense of their flock against official actions had been a more effective means of proselytizing than British Protestant nonintervention with the local system (1909:217–20). This interpretation is echoed by Morrison (1895), who found the British and American Protestants naive, dogmatic, and inept, and the French Catholic missionaries realistic and relatively successful, though disenchanted with the sincerity of most Chinese converts. In the early 1900s, however, some Protestant missionaries in Guizhou and northeastern Yunnan did take an interventionist stance while ministering to large groups of non-Han converts (see Cheung, this volume).
British and French colonial agents often found themselves dependent on the hospitality of each other’s missionaries stationed in remote areas. Major Davies, who was an explorer for the British India–Yangtze Railroad route in 1894, wrote in reference to a French priest that “it is only necessary to meet in a country like China, to realize how very much alike are the ways of thought of all Europeans,” and notes the help and companionship of a number of missionaries (1909:218). Despite nationalistic and religious sniping and hasty claims of “we discovered it first” in their writings, these British and French scholars found reinforcement and comfort in each other as co-Orientalists. Said notes that what these colonialists shared “was not only land, or profit or rule; it was a kind of intellectual power. . . . [A] family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective. These ideas explain the behavior of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important they allowed Europeans to deal with and even see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics” (1979:41–42).
In Southwest China when Orientalists ran into a number of aboriginal groups decidedly not Han, their classification systems went into overdrive, providing explanations with Orientalist logic. In their desire to classify and explain the origin of the language and physical appearance of diverse peoples, this Anglo-French network of colonial agents, missionaries, travelers, and academics constructed explanatory histories (albeit often confused about who was who) tracing peoples’ supposed migrations. Their conclusions, especially about the physically distinct, indigenously literate Yi, were often that these non-Han peoples were more Occidental than Oriental—more like us (though of course inferior) than like the Han.
Harrell (this volume) sees two modes in the Western construction of Yi ethnic history, depending on the writer’s religious or scientific orientation. He argues that missionaries, with their intimate knowledge of particular groups and motivation to accurately describe language, myths, and cultural traits for their own purposes, devised a history from native legends. Natural and social scientists, on the other hand, developed their history from a racialist paradigm. The scientific impulse to generalize and systematize produces a racial ethnic-group history based on unexamined assumptions about the correlation of “pure” cultural traits with physical characteristics that persist over generations, but become blurred when “pure” races are mixed. Although there are extremes, both modes of analysis are present and inform each other in many Orientalist texts on peripheral peoples.
Orientalist intellectuals were also heavily influenced by the unilineal evolutionary theory of Social Darwinism, which ranks cultures by developmental stages.6 Missionaries, whose motivation was to change the societies they studied, often viewed these societies as developmentally inferior to those in the industrialized West. Orientalists with different motivations formed an audience for each other, networking to produce reams of texts. Among the materials related to the Sani (and to the Yi linguistic group in which they are usually classified by outsiders) there is a similarity in interpretation and cross-referencing. As authors wrote about each other as well as their professional work and ethnological hobby in Yunnan, they provided a window in on the process of Orientalist discourse.
E. Colbourne Baber, a career diplomat, was the self-proclaimed first Orientalist to write about Yi people, then glossed by the Chinese derogatory term Lolo. Baber’s paper describing his 1877–1878 exploration of Sichuan and Yunnan was read at an 1881 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London and subsequently was published. A member of the audience lauded Baber’s “discovery of what appears to be a new language, and of a new people never before visited by any European, not even Marco Polo. [It] was a feat that could be reserved for very few in the present age of the world” (1882:142–44). M. Terrien de LaCouperie (a scholar, according to Morrison “who had a happy faculty of drawing upon his imagination for his facts” [1895:257]), noted that Baber “has the right to the recognition of the Orientalists” and proffered his own opinion from examination of Lolo writings that it is a phonetic language with remarkable affinities to Sumatran.
Baber wrote on meeting Lolo in the isolated Da Liangshan interior:
They are a far taller race than the Chinese. . . . Many of them are robust, but without anything approaching the pork-fed obesity of an affluent sedentary Chinese. . . . Of their women I have unhappily seen few but the younger folk; joyous, timid, natural, open-aired, neatly dressed, barefooted, honest girls, devoid of all the prurient mock-modesty of the club-footed Chinese women; damsels with whom one would like to be on brotherly terms. . . . tall, graceful creatures with faces much whiter than their brothers’. (1882:60–61)
. . . an oval faced, Aryan-like race. (ibid.:72)
Baber included a description of the Da Liangshan Lolo caste system of Black Bone elite and White Bone subjugated and slave peoples, written about by many later observers and a key in the Chinese Marxist classification of Nuosu Yi at the slave stage of development.7 He commented that “what the Lolos are, whence they have come, and what is their character, are questions to which I can only make a very incomplete reply. . . . No description of them exists in any extant work, with the exception of a passage to be quoted [Mgr. Fenouil’s description of his own capture by Lolo published in the French mission journal Annales de la propagation de la foi in 1862]” (ibid.:66, 118–24). Baber wrote that this language group is often mislabeled with various names “devoid of ethnological significance,” and that the term Lolo is an insult of Han origin. He also notes that these people have localized native names in their own language marking dialect differences (ibid.:66–67).
Refering to Lolo astronomical practices, Baber commented that “there is no prima-facie reason for denying that this isolated people may possess the rudiments or, perhaps, the relics of certain sciences in the rough, since there is no doubt they have books” (ibid.). A French missionary had told Baber of an indigenous writing system, and remarked of seeing bushels of texts that he was not allowed to examine. After collecting a few examples of writing in “Lolodom,” Baber, however, was fortunate to secure “through the kind offices of the French Missionaries” an original Lolo manuscript of eight pages, which he copied for scholars to study in the West (ibid.:128). It is intriguing that although Baber’s exploits were claimed by the British to be the first information on the Lolo, he repeatedly noted help from various French missionaries in his quest, and even quoted Mgr. Fenouil’s letter on his experiences with the Lolo published some twenty years before.
PÈRE PAUL VIAL
The earliest reference I have found to Père Vial’s presence in Yunnan is in British engineer Archibald Colquhoun’s 1883 account of explorations for a Burma—China route during 1882. This survey was conducted for the British government from their colony in India and the Royal Geographic Society in order to open up Indochinese commerce. Here again the British explorer was aided by French as well as China Inland Mission missionaries. Colquhoun had bad luck with interpreters, funds, and weather, and was basically stuck on the road to Burma until Vial offered to act as his guide. Vial had been in Yunnan for more than a year, was fluent in Chinese, and welcomed the opportunity to travel from his mission station for Han at Chu-tung, southwest of Dali. He seemed to be a combination missionary-explorer/guide-scholar. Colquhoun described Vial’s skill in negotiating troublesome matters with Chinese servants and officials, his amiable sharing of his last bottle of wine with his European fellow travelers, his fascination with the indigenous Lolo living near his mission, and his willingness to take the more interesting dangerous route. Indeed, Colquhoun reported that “Père Vial was strongly in favour of risking the Ta-ping route [site of Kachin tribal warfare], but at such time I thought the truest courage was . . . ‘to be prudent and discreet in everything’ ” (ibid.:14–15).
On the safer route Vial demonstrated his cultural sensibility by stopping an Englishman from drinking out of a sacred container, which would have disturbed Kachin Nat spirits and perhaps started a fight. Colquhoun and Vial shared numerous adventures, then parted company in Mandalay, where Vial stayed to confer with the regional bishop. Vial’s expenses to and from Burma were paid by Colquhoun. When the British explorer subsequently published a monograph in French describing indigenous peoples in Yunnan, the French missionary praised it as the most sincere and exact of European accounts to date (Vial 1893:160). Morrison is not so congratulatory about their exploits. He remarks that the “famous missionary traveller, Père Vial, . . . led Colquhoun out of his difficulty in that journey ‘Across Chryse’ which Colquhoun describes as a ‘Journey of Exploration’ (though it was through country that had been explored and accurately mapped a century and a half before by Jesuit missionaries) and conducted him safely to Bhamo in Burma. . . .” (1895:151).
The next chronological record of Vial is in his own words, the first in a series of letters published in Les Missions Catholiques. This tabloid was started by L’Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi to promote funding for Catholic missions worldwide. From 1888 on Vial wrote “back home” about his living experience with the Sani. As a missionary of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, Vial attended seminary in France (Avignon), then pledged a commitment to missionary work. Although many missionaries went out with the expectation of dying isolated in the field, this society made an effort to keep its missionaries in touch with world events and allowed some furloughs back to France (Latourette 1929:343). Vial, as we have seen, traveled about. Once he made the Sani his primary focus, his mission spanned years of turmoil in China, marked by the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and the Republican Revolution in 1911, while Europe metamorphosed into modern industrial states fighting the First World War. The last of Vial’s extant records are his final letters to Les Missions Catholiques in 1917.
Vial published letters and photographs for his popular audience in the mission journal, and scholarly works on Lolo language and culture for his fellow ethnologists, and perhaps the Sani themselves. In all of his writing there are constant reminders of his mission to convert the Sani and consistent ethnographic themes: that Sani are part of the Lolo (a larger linguistic/racial/cultural group with a distinct literary heritage), that Sani are in opposition to the Han in both political subordination and cultural (simpler but not inferior?) difference, and that Sani by their very character are open to conversion to Christianity. On this last point, he commented: “. . . these sweet, honest, naive, and likeable faces have conquered me . . .” (1894:161).
Vial interpreted ethnic relations between the Sani and other local groups as being shaped by their sociocultural “character” differences, as well as by the dynamics of political inequalities, and their physical proximity to each other. The relationship between Sani and Han was his primary emphasis. He rarely noted Sani relations with neighboring minority groups such as the Nuosu Lolo, Axi Lolo, or Miao.8 Muslims allied with various indigenous groups including the Sani during their grueling twenty-year revolt, but, according to Vial, they often became enemies. He cites Muslim treachery as the reason there was so much post-revolt enmity between them, despite their common Han oppressor (1898:4).
Cross-references and specific comments indicate that the editors of Les Missions Catholiques read all of Vial’s writings as one unified discourse on the people he was evangelizing. His writings do inform each other, sometimes raising questions about what he really meant, but often filling in apparent gaps or background information. However, the voice Vial used in his writings differed from audience to audience. His popular works were written as informal narrative, describing his environment and the people he worked with, offering opinions and often paraphrasing conversation. His scholarly works which are cited by his fellow Orientalists and other researchers are formally concerned with ethnographic description and linguistic analysis. Vial’s greatest weaknesses for a reader today include his unorganized writing, which leaps from topic to topic, and his lack of maps, which make it difficult to locate his actions in small outlying villages. Another problem, especially in his scholarly work, is his transcription of Sani dialect into his own French-based phonetic system, rather than the International Phonetic Alphabet, which some French linguists used as early as 1886.
Vial can be portrayed as an Orientalist by quoting his views on Chinese society and his mission, and by examining his missionizing project among a “simpler people.” He lauded the positive qualities of indigenous life—the love of freedom, noncoercive law, gender equality, and language complexity of “la race Lolotte”—and railed against the folly of colonial imperialism and the slander of peripheral peoples by the Han. He was very clear in his distaste for much of Chinese civilization. Often in the same letter or chapter however, Vial spoke of “mes enfants,” the Sani folk he worked to convert, their pagan superstitions and simple childlike ways, and their need for enlightenment into the true faith through his colonial mission. There was thus an ironic tension between Vial’s celebration and defense of peripheral people and his efforts to make them more European than Chinese. His writings imply that he believed he was empowering the Sani to deal with the modern world in the face of inevitable change, without the loss of their language and culture. Vial’s theology and politics shaped his belief in continued cultural diversity within the commonality of humankind.
It is not really correct to say that this missionary-explorer-scholar was a Social Darwinist or unilineal evolutionist like many of his contemporary Orientalists. Rather, he reflected the Neo-Scholastic movement among Catholic intellectuals, which combined theology with an interest in “pagan” peoples (Arbuckle 1985). A counter-evolution theory popular at the time among Catholic scholars was the “degradation theory,” which held that in many cultures (especially tribal folk) universal monotheism had been corrupted by human weakness into idol worship. Vial expressed his own theory in a paraphrased conversation with the British consul to Hainan aboard a ship running from Hong Kong to Haiphong (1902:89). He quickly determined that the Englishman was an agnostic and asked if this meant he was a disciple of Spencer. When the consul answered affirmatively, saying that agnosticism was the highest form of truth, Vial attacked with gusto:
Oh! The highest form! Do you know monism? Do you know Haeckel? . . . I would say that you are ignorant of the latest pack of truths that science (!) has given us. [“] I believe, he responded, that everything changes and that there will come a time when the earth belongs to five or six powers. [”] I find you very generous . . . for an Englishman. Is that because I am French? Well, I believe just the opposite; I believe that humankind will end by forming only one people, but a people divided into small nationalities. I have studied your “evolution” with the firm intention to admit it, if it became evident to me that it was rationally demonstrated. But, the entire system is based on pure hypotheses or on false appearances. . . . Modern science is based on the immutability of natural laws. . . . Evolution is nothing other than a late-model rifle which, one hopes, will vanquish the army of the Church. But this is a gun that does not shoot and it will end by exploding in your hands. Me, the more I study, the more I understand man, and the more I am Catholic. (Ibid.)
Vial’s Popular Writing
Vial’s extant letters were published in Les Missions Catholiques in the articles and series “Yun-nan (Chine), un tournoi chez les sauvages Lolos” (1888), “Les Gni ou Gni-p’a: Tribu Lolotte du Yun-nan” (part 1, 1893; part 2, 1894), “Deux mois chez les Miaotse” (1900), “Les Joies du retour” (1902), and “A travers la Chine inconnue: Chez les Lolos” (1917). From Vial’s letters emerges the story of why and how he found the Sani. He had moved from his mission in the Dali area and spent several years administering a small, calm district which (in his own words) was not sufficient for his zeal and character—he ran out of converts (1893:160). His perception of Chinese persecution of French missionaries after the Sino-French war also spurred his search for a new, more isolated area to evangelize. He quite literally walked into Gni (Sani) country and decided to relocate there as soon as he could make the appropriate administrative arrangements. He settled for the first time in the midst of a small-scale, peripheral community, a group of Lolo with their own literary tradition and writing system.
It was through this restless, evangelizing (by means of a harmonium and magic lantern show), swashbuckling missionary with a huge desire to help the unknowing to a better future that the Sani had their first sustained experience with a European, and ultimately global, society. Vial staked out his territory, evoked Saint Benoît for the men and Saint Geneviève for the women as Sani patrons, and went about setting up a complex mission incorporating a number of villages. He constructed schools, various residences, and churches. According to another French missionary stationed later in the area, Vial was helped with his building projects by a generous French benefactress, who is described as Vial’s guardian angel: “Mademoiselle the viscountess, . . . what a shame that not all missionaries have as devoted a protectress!” (Lietard 1904:105).
Vial’s first letter from Sani territory is a mixture of colonial editorializing and dramatic description, and focuses mainly on local geography and Sani wrestling events (1888:445). He misidentifies limestone as granite, but his description evokes the rugged, unique characteristics of the karstic topography, and his description of wrestling matches still applies to Sani society. Vial enjoyed watching the matches and felt that wrestling was good conditioning for the rigors of agricultural labor. Bracketing these observations, he addressed his perception of the Lolo’s position in China, and his own role:
This people, dominated but not defeated, subjugated but not subdued, as are all the rest of the indigenous peoples with whom the Chinese are in contact, wait for the time when the celestial empire will disintegrate before the strength of the wind that blows from Europe. . . . Later, if it is the will of God, I will be the historian of this humble nation. . . . Who knows? Perhaps when China dies, this humble nation of Lolo will still live on. (Ibid.:445, 446, 448)
This theme is restated in 1893 when Vial starts a series of letters with the following observation:
The Lolo people, if they succeed in inoculating themselves with true civilization, which is that of Christianity, may be called upon to play an important role in the future of the Chinese race, which vanquished them, but [which] has not the power to assimilate them, and against which they [the Lolo people] hold a grudge as deep as it is tenacious. (Ibid.:60)
Vial’s 1893 letters comprise a nine-chapter study, written mainly in an active personal voice, expressing his feelings and opinions as an engaged observer. These chapters are titled as follows: (1) How I arrived among the Lolo; (2) How I introduced myself into the [Sani] Gni tribe; (3) My installation at Loumeiyi; (4) An apostolic trip around Gni country (different climates, rice culture, description of Gni country, an excursion, souvenirs, a festival, the “braves” of Voetsoe, hunting in Gni country, oil mines, the history of a Lolo overlord, a patrician tribe, arrival at Sia poutse [to visit colleague] Père Birbes, and return to Loumeiyi); (5) A group portrait; (6) Of the family; (7) A word on the Axi [“Ashi” in Vial’s writing]; (8) Methods of conversion; (9) The persecution.
Each chapter is rich with detail that is sometimes difficult to distinguish as fact or opinion. Examples of Vial’s ongoing themes are found in his comparison of Sani and Han family life (1893:258), where the Han are portrayed as opium addicts incapable of productive life, while the Sani are seen as hard-working saints. This view was echoed by a fellow missionary who maintained that Sani and Axi in the area were buying up land from Han forced to sell for cash to support their opium habits (Lietard 1904:94). Vial in another chapter wrote an interesting variation on the Orientalist “they seem Aryan” argument about indigenous folk:
Thus, the Lolo is convinced that we belong to the same race as him; and this conviction draws him all the closer to us, as he hates the Chinese race. “Since we are of the same race, it is natural,” he says, “that we be of the same religion.” And so he hopes to live in the safety of the protective shadow of our influence. (1893:293)
From Vial’s perspective, the Lolo (i.e., Sani) saw themselves as very distinct from the Han and kindred with Europeans. Thus “his” Lolo at least sought mission protection and readily converted to Catholicism.
In his ongoing comparison of Han and Sani character, he summarized Han intelligence as strong, crafty, and mercantile. The Han were farmers only by necessity—their instinct was commercial. The hierarchical structure of Chinese society mandated that all social interaction be calculated as responses in dominant-subordinate relationships, which Vial maintained was contrary to “the European character, and especially the Catholic character” (1893:245). In comparison, in his view the Sani loved their land. They had a sense of liberty, but that was not the same as an independent character. More than the Han, Sani allowed themselves to be swayed by example, following their leaders. The Sani had their faults, but they were not haughty, jealous, or opinionated like the Han (ibid.). Vial discussed the problems resulting from exchange of identities between the Sani and the Han:
They take on their reciprocal faults and abandon their [own] strengths. The Chinese-Lolo loses the politeness that distinguishes the yellow race in order to fall into the libertine way; the Lolo-Chinese abandons his good nature and his simplicity in order to become hypocritical and haughty. (1893:209)
He also related some aspects of Sani-Han political economy in his letters. He believed that most Han settled in Sani territory were descended from waves of migrants coming west out of the Nanjing region,9 who took indigenous people’s land by force or trickery (ibid.:179). The Han then started charging rent and administered the area as a prefecture under their jurisdiction. Vial described Sani territory as two parallel plains divided by a mountain chain running north-south (1902:160; 1917:537). In the western Loulan (Lunan) plain, the land is well irrigated and villages are tied to regional market systems and to the main road running from Kunming to Guangxi. The population is about half Han and half Sani, living in segregated villages. The eastern plain is much more rugged karstic topography, remote, and dry, and the population is mainly Sani. Vial reports that every year Sani women, men, and children migrate from the east, where their crops are still green, to the Lunan region, where they can work as temporary laborers harvesting rice on Han lands. Han prefer to hire Sani laborers “who talk less and work better,” rather than other Han (1893:201). Vial felt that in Lunan, on the outer limits of Sani territory, “where [they are] in contact with a race whose minds are less one-track, more advanced,” the Sani were more open to conversion than were the Sani in more remote areas. Hence his long-term mission strategy was to first concentrate on these people, then slowly work eastward to communities in the core of Sani territory. He wrote about this plan in 1902 and in his 1917 letters gave details of recent conversions in the remote communities. (See map 2, p. 64.)
In Vial’s last letters he talked about the most remote village yet to convert, and remarked how strange it was that “the more the village seems savage to me, the more the children who live in it seem sweet. All around me I perceive such big, calm, innocent eyes, shadowed by a chestnut blond head of hair; could it be the true ancestral type?” (1917:545). There is a strong romantic sentiment in Vial’s description of the Sani which usually avoided the words “primitive” or “savage” to describe his people of “the noble simplicity, . . . this good people which civilization has not yet reached” (1893:179). This perception shaped his conversion efforts among the Sani. Vial saw them as little babes, incapable of reason at first, and needing to be carefully guided to take their first steps toward spiritual maturity (ibid.:224). Firm paternal authority was the avowed style of his mission, with entertaining enticement in songs, “European curiosities,” and outright bribes of pearls for the women. He found it remarkable that during his evangelizing, the Sani never slandered the religion he taught, even though they may not have understood it (ibid.:245).
Over the years, Vial commented on Sani character as the inspiration and challenge of his mission. His first impressions of Sani portrayed a lively, well-built, warlike people, a little rowdy, frank, of good faith, and even the women were “not frightened” (1888:446). His later observations used words such as fearful (craintif) and timid (timide) in reference to the Sani response to outsiders, which varied with both the relative isolation of Sani and the nature of the “other.”10 In 1893 he wrote that Sani shun (fuient) strangers, although he was making some progress, and had been “allowed to lift the veil that had enveloped them until now” (ibid.:160). A little later he observed that “the Gni is unfortunately fearful: his first movement is to avoid you” (ibid.:245). This could be resolved if one opened up one’s heart to them, but here Vial was talking about the Sani response only to strangers like himself. In the next sentence, he wrote: “Happening suddenly upon a Chinese, he will come to you and beg you to defend him.” He later expanded on this theme:
The Gni is born timid but not fearful; he shuns strangers as if they were bringing the plague. . . . He is not afraid, but he is not daring. In front of a Chinese, he is as a dog before a tiger; it is not the man but his treachery that he dreads. . . . The most serious fault of the Gni is clearly to be a large child who follows you, but who never precedes you. He is missing the mind that makes nations and leaders, but between headless and heartless, I need not deliberate[;] I choose headless. (1898:26)
Vial’s understanding of Sani and Han character reflected the Sani point of view about the Han and served as a rationale for his mission to convert this “simpler people” and thus arm them with ways to protect themselves from the Han.
Vial’s chapter on Chinese persecution of his mission set the stage for a remarkable story retold in the “current news” section of Les Missions Catholiques (1894:307–308). In a verbatim report of a lecture Vial gave at a seminary in France in 1894, his continuing fight with the local mandarins unfolds like an adventure novel. His struggle with Han authorities became personally dangerous when the word went out among the Han that this priest had set himself up as king of the Gni and needed to be removed. After discovering the “mandarin’s assassins” in his church late at night, Vial fought with them, receiving fourteen wounds, including damage to his right arm and a stab wound next to his heart. His followers dragged him back to his quarters, where he said to them: “You see, I will die; it is because of you and in order to defend you that I voluntarily offer my life for you; always stay faithful to the religion that I have taught you.” He doused his wounds with an antiseptic, a local Sani medicine man applied herbs, and Vial recovered enough to go to Hong Kong for surgery. Because he needed more medical care, he proceeded to France.
While in Europe, Vial continued work on his scholarly text, Les Lolos, excerpts of which he published as “Les Gni ou Gni-pa: Tribu Lolotte du Yun-nan” (part 2) in Les Missions Catholiques in 1894. He then returned to Yunnan, continuing his mission building and working on his Sani dictionary, which he completed in 1908. His mission grew to incorporate several other French missionaries and Chinese nuns and ultimately Sani priests serving some thirty villages throughout Sani territory.11 When he wrote to Les Missions Catholiques in 1917 he spoke of his mission’s progress in schools for boys and girls, and of focusing on the present moment in his work. Vial died that year in Lunan, surrounded by the Sani Catholic and French missionary community he had so carefully crafted (Zhang Wenchang 1987:31).
Vial’s Scholarly Writing
Of three scholarly works by Vial, only his brief initial study, De la langue et de l’écriture indigènes au Yû-nân (1890), was published in Europe.12 His 1898 book based on Sani data, Les Lolos: Histoire, religion, moeurs, langue, écriture, was published in Shanghai by La Mission Catholique. His largest work, the 1909 Dictionnaire Français-Lolo, dialecte Gni, contains a grammar and six Sani texts and was published in Hong Kong by La Société des Missions Étrangères. A detailed examination of Vial’s scholarly writing and of contemporary ethnographic and linguistic critiques of these efforts shows us how the Orientalist’s perspective on minority and Han cultures combined with scholarly interests. Vial’s missionary goal of conversion intertwined with this Orientalist agenda to shape his Christian civilizing project among the Sani.
Several methodological issues are central to Vial’s scholarship. The importance of language study permeates his writing and infused his missionary efforts. Vial perceived Christianizing the Sani as a process that must use their own language (1902:175–76). He hoped to accomplish conversion by preaching to them in Sani and, most of all, by publishing a catechism written in their own language: “Their own ways must be added there to obtain this goal [of conversion] and the methods must be in keeping with the genius of this people” (ibid.).
Vial prefered to use primary research materials. He remarked that his own translation of many Chinese texts about the Lolo proved to be useless “childishness” (enfantillages), and he cautioned all students of human diversity in China to firmly avoid Chinese texts on the subject. Rather than give an example of these prejudiced Chinese texts, Vial quotes Marco Polo as an early outside source on the Lolo. In response to colleagues’ questions about why he did not use Chinese sources, Vial wrote: “All sinologists are legion . . . to travel through the labyrinth of Chinese literature; I would prefer to travel on foot, and gather the information myself. . . . The Chinese observe foreigners, Miao, Lolo, or Europeans only through the magnifying glass of their immense conceit, and all objects have the appearance of a grotesque caricature which seems reality to them” (1900:474).
Initial Study: De la langue et de l’écriture indigènes au Yû-nân. In his 1893 letters Vial makes a brief reference to his 1890 study: “Two years ago, I was the first, I believe, to become acquainted with the language and writing of the Gni-p’a” (p. 160). In a preface to the 1890 work, the Benedictine Dom Chamard writes that while it assuredly was not a complete study following the scientific methods of comparative philology required in Europe, “it seemed to me that, written by the first missionary to take on such a work, . . . [it] was worthy of the attention of those who are interested in the history of primitive peoples and faraway regions.” This same theme—that Vial’s work is incomplete but noteworthy especially because it is the first study of a Lolo dialect based on sustained fieldwork—is echoed in G. Devéria’s 1891 review. Devéria draws on reports by various agents and travelers in southwest China and includes information from Edward Colbourne Baber’s 1882 study to favorably assess Vial’s contribution. The missionary’s character also seems to be a factor, as he is portrayed in rather heroic terms:
[T]his valiant missionary began to study their language and their writing. He is the first who made this attempt, dictated by an intelligent zeal, which places him among his scholarly predecessors of the last century, [an] attempt crowned by success which will broaden the fieldwork of Catholic missions in South China and [which] suffices from this day onward to rectify some appraisals previously too hastily published on the writing and language of the Lolo. (Devéria 1891:360)
Père Alfred Lietard, who worked in the neighboring Axi Lolo mission inaugurated and administered by Vial, provided another commentary on the 1890 study, noting that Vial is the authoritative voice on Lolo ethnography (1904:94). However, he differs with Vial on various points—including the names of the two major Lolo dialect groups constructed by Vial (the a and the ou, which Lietard calls the o)—and calls Vial’s group Sagni, not Gni. Vial remarks of Lietard that here is a young man, much as he himself was in his earlier days, full of idealism and protectively watching over his Axi “children” (1902:149). What might have been a fruitful working relationship between the two missionaries is not reflected in their later publications.13
This first study of Vial’s, which established him as an expert on Sani, if not all Lolo language, is seventeen pages long. It consists of an introduction, a section on spoken language, a section on writing, and the Sani text and a literal translation of the Sani story of the flood (which would be rewritten and retranslated in the 1898 study). Vial carefully cites various Europeans who had published opinions on Lolo writing, including his old friend Colquhoun and the often-quoted Terrien de Lacouperie. Much of what Vial has to say in the language sections is elaborated on in his later work. Of particular interest here is the introduction, in which he writes about ethnic relations between the Lolo and the Han and the forces of imperialism. Vial saw in European history parallels to the situation in Yunnan—the Han were like the Romans, while the Lolo were like his own people, the Gauls (1890:8):
In their administration, their morals, their character, and their religion, the Lolo vividly recall our [fore]fathers. . . . Their tribes are as numerous as the Gallic tribes, and if their language is basically the same, the difficulty of communications has multiplied the dialects. That which has caused them to be delivered to the Chinese is the same as that which delivered us to the Romans: lack of unity. Finally, the last trait of resemblance, those same Franks who drove out the Romans and conquered our fatherland, are now at the door of Yunnan.” (1890:8)
Les Lolos—Histoire, religion, moeurs, langue, écriture. Vial’s 1898 study is a seventy-one page jumble of information. The subjects are generically Lolo or specifically Sani, with reference to several other indigenous groups. About one third of the content concerns language. The following brief review of the study’s nine chapters and an appendix illustrates the variety of topics Vial pursued. In the preface, he writes that a desire to counter misunderstanding about the Lolo motivated his study:
I love him [the Lolo] because he is good, I love him because he is scorned. I would like to have him known [for] pushing aside the plethora of prejudices that fill books and that are unabashedly accepted as proven facts. It seems to me that a missionary who has first of all given eight years of his apostolic life for the salvation of the Chinese, and who now has evangelized to the Lolo for as many years, has the right to carry an opinion exempt from ignorance, if not errors of partiality.
In chapter 1, “History,” Vial attempts to “set the record straight” with a partial history of Lolo people, citing Sani stories and French missionaries working in Southwest China since the 1600s.14 There is a symmetry between Vial’s experience with Lolo culture and Sani origin myths. Vial first came into contact with Lolo groups in the Dali area, and the Sani origin myths say that their ancestors traveled east from Dali to settle in their current territory. This chapter was critiqued by R. F. Johnston, a British colonial official stationed in Northeast China who wrote with a focus on ethnology about his own travels in the Southwest. Johnston noted Vial’s conclusion that the Lolo are one and the same as the Manzi (a Chinese term for independent “barbarians” living in the Southwest) based on the linguistic research of a colleague, Père Martin. He comments that “probably no one has a better acquaintance with the Lolos than the Catholic missionary M. Paul Vial. . . . [But] his historical sketch is unfortunately too brief to be of much value. . . .” (1908:274–75).
Chapter 2, “Religious Traditions,” relates Sani myths Vial collected from texts written in Lolo script, or from dictations by the writers and keepers of these texts, religious specialists called pimo.15 Myths translated by Vial include “The Creation,” “The Disobedience,” “The Drought,” “The Flood,” “The Darkness,” and “Redemption.” Recitation of the flood myth occurs at every marriage. According to Vial, its story of the second beginning of the earth is a metaphor for the beginning of each family. The myth relates the first act of venerating ancestors (both mother’s and father’s parents) by decorating a small household memorial with a specific species of orchid. Vial observed this form of ancestor worship commemorating two generations (grandparents and great grandparents) within Sani homes.
In his analysis of the creation myths, Vial sees trinities of good and evil forces. From the redemption myths, he notes indigenous application of Jesamo or Iesou, a redeeming culture hero, to signify Jesus. Despite many potential parallels with Christian myths and symbolism, Vial does not argue for a “primitive monotheism” or actual links, as did many of his anti-evolutionist co-frères. Rather, he writes: “. . . since they became Christians, they have insisted to us that Isou and Iesou (Jesus) are the same. Myself, I still believe that this is only a fortuitous resemblance” (ibid.:11).
The next chapter, “Lolo Language,” mentions a few points of grammar, then discusses three questions: Is there one Lolo language? Is it widespread? To what languages is it related? In response to the first, Vial states: “. . . the Lolo language is indeed the same everywhere in its structure and its mechanism; but it is divided into a large number of dialects by the changing of consonants or vowels—or consonants and vowels” (ibid.:14–15). Vial answers the second question by using Chinese maps and compiling word lists showing relationships over a broad geographic range, to map the distribution of Lolo. To answer his third question, he posits: “. . . the Lolo seem to me to be the brothers of the Burmese and the cousins of the Baiyi (or Tai); but they have no relationship with the Chinese, neither in language, nor in custom, nor above all in character” (1898:15).
This last answer was critiqued by Johnston (1908:277). He felt that Vial had “gone a little astray” by offering a linguistics-based argument, “which should always be accepted with very great caution. . . .” Vial’s conclusion that the Lolo, Burmese, and Tai had common origins in the area between the upper Mekong and the Brahmaputra, also “does not account for the subsequent divergence of languages, customs, and traditions.” Johnston’s reasoned tone disappears (ibid.:279) when he turns to his own ideas on possible language links between the Lolo and “Mo-so” (”they call themselves Lashi or Nashi”) living in northwestern Yunnan (ibid.:279). Any such links were denied by the Mo-so he asked, but “such denials . . . do not go for much, especially in the case of a people who are totally lacking in any historical sense.”16
Chapter 4, “Literature and Poetry,” expands on Vial’s view that the Sani are part of a larger linguistic tradition and repeats materials he published four years earlier in Les Missions Catholiques. By literature, Vial meant both oral and written traditions. He distinguished poetry from prose forms by the invariant rhythm of three or five syllables per line. Long formal chants, such as the flood epic or the nuptial chant describing the development of a girl from infancy to marriage, are part of the Sani pimo’s written tradition. Songs are an informal poetic form of improvised recitations following a set melody. They are more often melancholy than cheerful and are most often sung by young women while working. Vial notes that “like the song in France, the indigenous tragic ballad has its fashion, and some are even passed on to posterity” (1898:21). Sani and Lolo in general also sing geographic verses called mifèké, which describe where they live as well as territory occupied in the past “which the Chinese took from them” (1894:302).
Poetic laments and geographic songs published by Vial (1898:20–23) were used with acknowledgment by the writer Paul Boell in a paper on Lolo language presented at the International Congress of Orientalists in 1899.17 Boell began with a list of previous works on Lolo language, including those of Baber and Vial. Vial had impressed Boell with his industry and knowledge when they met in Yunnan:
. . . the man currently best placed to furnish us with information on the language of the Lolo must be mentioned: Fr. Vial. . . . We await from him an extensive dictionary of the Gni-p’a dialect, which he knows well. . . . We are happy that Fr. Vial can find, in the midst of his demanding ministry, the necessary time to complete this great work. . . . [Vial] was on many an occasion my authorized guide during my stay in Lolo country. (Boell 1899:2)
Returning to Vial’s 1898 study, chapter 5, “Lolo Morals and Customs,” discusses themes found throughout his work: that the Sani are linguistically Lolo; that they are culturally and politically in opposition to the Han, and that the Sani are open to conversion to Christianity. He defends his use of the Chinese derogatory gloss Lolo as an expediency because there is no pan-linguistic-group indigenous term,18 and then in the appendix elaborates on the possible origins of the term. Addressing the question of how to distinguish between the numerous Lolo peoples, Vial’s observations prefigure issues of ethnic identity that anthropologists would focus on more than fifty years later. Noting that members of the same tribe can dress in a variety of costumes and that the same dialect can be spoken by several tribes, Vial continues:
There is, in fact, only one way to recognize the clan to which these inhabitants with such varied costumes and dialects belong: it is to know whether they marry each other. No doubt, there are exceptions to this rule, it could not be otherwise; but the principle remains true and it alone suffices to explain many things. In short, a tribe is nothing other than a nation writ small and a family writ large. (Ibid.:25)
His argument that marriage rules reflect a group’s boundaries much more accurately than language use or material culture was based on years of travel, work, and observation in Southeast Asia. Edmund Leach, in his 1954 study Political Systems of Highland Burma (based on his research among the Kachin), brought this type of observation to mainstream anthropology. As G. Carter Bentley has observed, ethnicity emerged as a key problem in the discipline when Leach challenged
the conventional assumption that societies and cultures covary sufficiently that the two terms can be used interchangeably. Leach’s argument . . . was that members of a social group need share no set of distinctive cultural traits. Instead . . . social units are produced by subjective processes of categorical ascription that have no necessary relationship to observers’ perceptions of cultural discontinuities. (1987:24)
Once Leach’s premise was fairly well accepted among anthropologists, “the issue shifted to whether subjective claims to ethnic identity derive from the effective potency of primordial attachments, . . . [and/]or the instrumental manipulation of culture in service of collective political and economic interests” (ibid.:25). While I would not argue that Vial was thinking along these lines, I do think that his theoretical openness about the criteria used by the people themselves to determine an ethnic group or “tribe” was ahead of its time.19 Unlike many of his fellow Orientalists, Vial in this passage was not equating a linguistic group with a sociocultural or racial entity.
In chapter 6 of Les Lolos, “Birth, Marriage, and Death,” one might expect to find the definitive Sani characteristics spelled out in marriage, residence, and inheritance rules, but neither in this study nor in his letters does Vial address kinship issues and authority structure coherently. Rather than describe household composition, he discusses families, which he says averaged six members (1898:27) and had an average of six children (1893:268).20 Marriage is treated as a fact of Sani life that had been somewhat corrupted by adapting the Han practice of paternal betrothal of young children (1898:28). Sani marriage customs are shown to vary considerably from those of the Han in the following ways: either child could later refuse to enter into the marriage; the marriage was not performed until both partners were considered of marriageable age; and after marriage a young woman could visit her parents—the Sani did not practice matrilocal residence prior to birth of the first child, as did some Lolo groups (1893:268–70; 1898:28–30).21 This last Lolo custom, Vial commented, was “an abuse, but it will not go any further; and the prejudices against this people must be deeply ingrained in order to dare conclude them a monstrosity” (1898:30). The highly negative Han opinion of the position of women in many peripheral societies based in relative gender equality was an issue that Vial raised when comparing Sani ways more favorably to European than to Han mores (1893:189). Sani gender equality was also expressed in property rights,22 rituals welcoming the birth of all children, similar funeral and ancestor rites for males and females, and the lack of patronyms.
Although Vial did not discuss marriage rules defining potential spouses, he offers a few clues in the writings discussed here. He remarks that in the Sani extended kinship system
almost all are cousins, as is the fashion in Brittany; it suffices, for example, that [when] one old man greets another old man for all the descent relations to be acknowledged, not only direct descent [relations] but even collateral and quasicollateral [relations] if there are any. (Ibid.:270)
If practically all are cousins, and if the Sani marry only Sani (Lietard 1913:39), then marriage partners are probably cousins. In his dictionary Vial does not define marriage partners, but he gives the terms for different kinds of cousins, aunts, and uncles. Two main types are distinguished. Ego’s father’s brother (FB) and mother’s sister (MZ) are called in everyday usage eebá and emmà respectively, the same terms for “father” and “mother.” The children of FB and MZ, parallel cousins, are called by ego the same terms as sister (moùneù)23 and brother (vìghài). The other type, cross cousins—the children of father’s sister (FZ, àghhè) and mother’s brother (MB, ágni)—are distinguished by specific terms. Ego calls MB’s and FZ’s son ágnizá, while MB’s, FZ’s, and ego’s own daughters are call ámái. A similar form of this Iroquoian system of cousin terminology has been recently documented by Stevan Harrell (1989) among Nuosu Yi, who practice preferred cross-cousin marriage. In Vial’s day, even though marriage forms were being sinified, the choice of partners, which Vial considered critical for group identity, may have been based on the Sani kinship system, which was very distinct from that of the Han.
Chapter 7, “The Dong jiazi [people] and the Miao jiazi,” is a rendition of correspondence between Vial and his colleague Père Roux, a missionary working with peripheral peoples in neighboring Guizhou province.24 The two groups in the title are the focus of Vial’s questions and Roux’s answers. Vial was particularly interested in comparing Miao (Hmong) society and culture, which he saw as considerably less complex, to those of the Sani. Later, in 1900, he tried to set up a mission among a Hmong group in southern Yunnan.
“Complementary Notes,” chapter 8, deals with the Lolo calendrical zodiac cycle (a system similar to that of the Han); Lolo naming practices; and “the future of these people.” This last section contains Vial’s urgent message about and to the Sani: they can and should persist. He relates that some fifteen years earlier an old missionary had commented to him that there was little reason to evangelize this race when in twenty or thirty years all their efforts would die with the Lolo. Obviously Vial thought otherwise, but he understood that this Han-derived perspective about indigenous peoples was difficult to overcome: “. . . it is evident that this people has been called upon to disappear, or rather to disintegrate. There is not a shadow of a doubt, and to think otherwise would require gall indeed” (1898:38). He acknowledged that the Han had driven back Lolo people from the plains into the mountains, that some Lolo had sinified by choice, and that even whole tribes for diverse reasons imitate the Han. But at the same time, the Han, who “have the spirit of assimilation even less than the English,” scorned the Lolo and the Lolo hated the Han. Vial argued: “If the Lolo have relations with a kind, sweet, and just nation, I believe they will willingly ally themselves with it” (ibid.). He did not see the Han changing, however, and literally put his faith in Christianity as the hope for the Lolo’s future: “Christianity . . . will make him understand what is beautiful, good, and true, and the Lolo will no longer think to search elsewhere for that which he will find henceforth in himself” (ibid.).
The last chapter, “Lolo Writing: Ideologic, then Phonetic,” briefly describes the main characteristics of the language and what Vial theorized to be its development history. He argues that each tribe has conserved the usage of some signs and has forgotten others (ibid.: 41). The writing was used mainly by the pimo religious specialists to record Sani teachings. Vial lists four difficulties in translating Lolo books: (1) It is difficult to know where a phrase starts and ends because there is a “five-character rule,” which adjusts the meaning of each measure. (2) Many of the locutions are of an old form, are regionalisms, or are extinct. The books are transcribed without intentional change, which is helpful to a translator trying to decipher a particular text. (3) When comparing texts, it is best to work with the oldest for the most accurate (least copied) text, but dating the manuscripts is just conjecture. (4) The actual ideographic and phonetic aspects of each character are obscure (ibid.:66–67). Despite these and other problems, Vial worked long at translating Sani writings, apprenticing himself to learned pimo when possible. In this chapter he offers side-by-side Sani script, pronunciation, and French gloss for three Sani myths: “The Creation,” “The Universal Drought,” and “The Universal Flood,” and provides a textual translation.
Vial had hopes of someday discovering a book of Lolo writing that would reveal the history of this people. However, he saw no conscious need for such a book among the people with whom he worked:
Basically, the Lolo know only the life of the family—of the village at most—and all the books with which I am familiar are written for this life: birth, marriage, illness, religious acts, death—such are the circumstances around which the literary works of these tiny republics effuse. (Ibid.:67)
The issue of “historical sense” was important in Orientalist paternalism and in the Social Darwinist argument about the position of “simpler” folk on the evolutionary scale. As Vial noted early in his work with the Sani, he hoped to become their historian. What was wrong with the Sani’s own religious leaders who wrote and interpreted the sacred Yi scripts, telling their written stories and oral histories as well? In part it was the need of the Europeans to rewrite these histories so that they fit into Western schemas of how things are and should be, thus justifying imperialistic actions. Vial in fact saw himself salvaging Sani language from certain deterioration and loss in the face of cultural change that from another point of view was aggravated by his colonial mission:
The literate Lolo no longer write, they only transcribe; it happens, however, that they add what they believe to be explanations, and the text of which I speak is one of these. I was not put off by this, out of a sense of impartiality; perhaps others will not think like me. (Ibid.:67)
The final entry in Les Lolos is an appendix, “Origin Problem of the Word ‘Lolo,’ “with comments by Vial’s trusted friend Père Martin. Martin argued that a euphonic doubling of the first syllable of Noeso, the indigenous name of the “patrician” tribe they first encountered, led the Han to call them Nono, often pronounced Lolo in Chinese.25 Vial comments:
Particular to a tribe, this word had become the appellation of an entire people. . . . It is a scornful term only when passing from a Chinese mouth, from which, one realizes, the word European is also an insult. Later, the Chinese developed a less confused opinion of the Lolo, and they strove to designate each tribe by a particular name. (Ibid.:70)
As Vial notes with the example of “European,” just because distinct cultures are known does not keep others from grouping people by perceived characteristics. Vial had already stated in chapter 5 why he used this term despite its pejorative meaning in Chinese, for lack of any other group name. His need seems to be primarily to label a linguistic group, although he lapsed into racial rambling, as his remarks on a “true ancestral type” quoted above from his letters illustrate (1917:545). In his dictionary, Vial elaborates once more on usage of the term Lolo:
The Lolo do not have a single term that can be applied to an entire nation or a race of men, no more for others than for themselves. . . . With the Lolo, each tribe knows only the tribes around it; beyond this horizon, it knows nothing. In their books, the author uses the name of his tribe, sometimes in a limited sense, if it is a particular history; sometimes in a broad sense, if the history applies to the entire race. (1909:81)
Vial explains that he therefore translated the tribal name Gni in a Sani legend as Lolo because the story of the ancestors before the flood applies to the whole “nation or race” (ibid.).
A number of other Orientalists also wrote on the problem of using the term Lolo (see Harrell, this volume). R. F. Johnston saw it as a question of lost history that could no longer explain current conditions:
I venture to express a doubt whether we should gain much by classing under one such designation a number of peoples who, whatever their origin, have been so long separated from one another that they refuse to acknowledge any mutual connection, and to some extent have different customs and speak different languages. (1908:274)
Other European scholars suggested substitute terms, and the Protestant missionary Samuel Pollard took Vial soundly to task for promoting the use of this epithet:
The Roman Catholics have had a flourishing mission work among the Gni, a branch of the Nosu race, and Père Vial, who has for many years been the head of this mission, gave the world some account of this people and their language. There is . . . one serious criticism to make of Père Vial’s writings. He persists in calling these people Lolo. . . . One ought always to be a bit suspicious of adopting any [Chinese] name for an aboriginal tribe. . . . The ideograph which Chinese use for the word Lolo is usually written with a “dog radical at the side,” thus in a concise way expressing to all who can read the supreme contempt in which the Nosu are held. . . . The name which the people prefer should rather be adopted. Nosu . . . is not an insult to a brave race, who have kept up their end of the wicket for so many centuries. (1920:264–65)26
Chinese imperialists, European Orientalists, and Chinese Marxists have all utilized a linguistic classification of Lolo or Yi.27 The Chinese imperial system defined and grouped ethnic populations over the centuries as a form of political manipulation and creative historiography to control potentially dissident peoples. The Orientalists were motivated to map out linguistic and/or racial classifications as an intellectual exercise and as a way of understanding the intriguing and inferior other. The use of Marxist-Stalinist criteria of nationalities classification in the People’s Republic has upheld the government’s ultimate goal of incorporating all nationalities into greater China. Ethnic differences can be tolerated if the long-term goal is kept in mind.
It was during this reclassification effort that the Gni-p’a Lolo became known as the Sani Yi. The syllable sa had been added to gni (Sagni) by Lietard (1904, 1913) to name this group, while Vial persisted in combining gni with the suffix p’a to indicate male gender (1909:24). By the 1940s Chinese scholars had standardized the romanization of Sani (Ma Xueliang 1951). Linguistically, the Sani were classified by Chinese scholars in the 1950s as speaking a vernacular of the Southeastern dialect of the Yi language in the Yi branch of Tibeto-Burman (Bradley 1987:82), and socioculturally as part of the large Yi nationality.28 The nonprejudiced term Yi was constructed to replace Lolo as a minzu name.29
Vial’s French-Lolo Dictionary. Vial’s language study, the primary focus of his scholarship, culminated in his Dictionnaire Français-Lolo, dialecte Gni.30 The work is organized into two parts: an introductory text discussing various features and examples of the language, and the French-Gni lexicon itself. The introduction is addressed to outside scholars, with a preface on the distinction between Western and East Asian thinking;31 “preliminary notes” on pronunciation, money, measurements, calculation of time; and a list of some 430 Lolo characters used in the work. The grammar section covers characteristics of articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, propositions, conjunctions, interjections, sentence word order, and particular words with multiple usage. Following this are notes on numerals and six actual texts: “A Genealogy of Lolo Ancestors,” “A Dream,” “Why the Earth is Wrinkled,” “An Elegy,” “The Sacrament of the Eucharist,” and “The Act of Contrition.” These texts were included at the request of Vial’s colleagues, who argued that these additional examples of writing would have “the advantage of making [one] grasp more precisely not only all the rules that coordinate words, but also the special genius of this language that instructs discourse” (1909:77). The genealogy and the geology story are from Sani books, the dream and the elegy are from oral tradition, and the texts on Catholic rituals were written in both Sani script and Latin by a Sani about to be ordained as a priest.
Information from Vial’s dictionary has been compared in a paper by A. G. Haudricourt (1958) on uvular consonants in Tibeto-Burman to material from a more recent linguistic study of Sani language by the Chinese linguist Ma Xueliang (1951). In Haudricourt’s analysis, both studies have their strengths and weaknesses as partial descriptions of the language’s phonetic system. In Vial’s lexicon, all of the words are accompanied by their written form from a syllabary, while Ma’s study gives words in the international phonetic alphabet, but the lexicon is separate from the syllabary. The Chinese government has developed educational materials in the various Yi dialects and vernaculars (Bradley 1987:82), but the government-published 1984 Sani-Chinese dictionary (Yi-Han Dictionary 1984) using traditional Yi orthography and phonetic transcription is not used in Sani schools.32 The wealth of ethnographic information in Vial’s lexicon can also be mined for a historic perspective on the Sani (e.g., the previously mentioned kinship-system clues uncovered in the entries for cousin, aunt, and uncle). Under hemp, thirteen operations involved in preparing and weaving the fiber are named and described. Information on the indigenous authority structure is given under the word chief.33 Many of the “holes” in Les Lolos are at least partially filled in this dictionary.
While the grammar section was definitely written for outside scholars, the lexicon may well have been intended for both linguists and Sani students in Vial’s numerous schools who were studying French, Latin, Chinese, and Sani languages. Some entries are curious for a European scholar, such as “cupide—Voy Désirer” (1909:108). Vial also proselytized in his entries. For example, the word comme (as), is illustrated with the following sentence in both Sani script and French: “Le corps de Jesus-Christ nourrit notre âme comme la nourriture nourrit notre corps” (The body of Jesus Christ nourishes our soul as food nourishes our body) (1909:87). Contemporary Sani response to the Oriental other in Vial’s dictionary would be extremely interesting to pursue, as a chronicle of conversion.
We have seen in this survey of Vial’s scholarly work interlocking themes of difference and superiority in an Orientalist’s discourse, reinforced by critiques of fellow ethnographers and linguists, and shaped by a missionary’s drive to convert the other. Orientalism justified Western imperialism while fostering an ironic commentary on competing (Christian vs. Chinese) civilizing projects. It was in this intellectual milieu that Vial formed his Christian civilizing project of conversion and modernity for the Sani.
MISSIONARIES, MISSIONIZING, AND IDENTITY CHANGE
Vial belonged to the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, which was a product of the Catholic church’s involvement with expanding French colonial interests in East Asia. The Holy See’s agency to coordinate missionary activity, known as the Propaganda, recruited its first apostolic vicars from Paris in 1658 for Tonkin and China. Their mission was to develop a native clergy, supervised by foreign bishops.
Instructions issued in 1659 to missionaries from the Propaganda stressed respect for local customs, as long as they did not conflict with the teaching of Catholicism.
Do not regard it as your task, and do not bring any pressures to bear on the peoples, to change their manners, customs and uses, unless they are evidently contrary to religion and sound morals. What could be more absurd than to transport France, Spain or Italy, or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them, but only the faith, which does not despise or destroy the manners and customs of any people, always supposing they are not evil, but rather wishes to see them preserved unharmed. (Quoted in Burridge 1985:153)
In 1700 a French seminary for new missions in East Asia was officially recognized as the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris. Its goals included “the building of native churches and the training of a native secular clergy which in time would be capable of self-maintenance” (Latourette 1929:114–15). The society’s missionizing project, however, was not to create a syncretic, nativistic church. During the long Catholic Rites Controversy (1640–1742) the dispute over incorporating Chinese language and ritual into Chinese Christianity was both a clash between two cultures (Imperial China and the Roman Catholic Church) and a clash between missionary societies. Ultimately, the Jesuits and others whose scholarly approach supported some Chinese cultural elements lost to a papal bull upholding the church’s authority to not compromise its customs or adapt to what it deemed “superstitious” Chinese beliefs. Beginning in 1742, all Catholic missionaries in China were sworn to uphold this decree (ibid.:150–52).
Père Paul Vial was thus trained to build a native church with close ties to global Catholicism. The common bonds of set European ritual and Latin liturgy (translated into the local dialect for native comprehension) were supposed to be reinforced by changing any elements of native culture construed by the missionary to be of unsound morals or evil intent. As seen in the Rites Controversy, there was little consensus among missionaries in diverse societies, or between missionaries and peoples being evangelized, regarding what particular acts or institutions should be described as evil. This task was further complicated, for “if the evils of civilized society, whether in Europe or Asia, had much in common, first experiences with the non-literate or subsistence communities . . . provided missionaries with an entirely different set of problems” (Burridge 1985:154–55). In response to Social Darwinism, missionary doctrine from the mid-nineteenth century on saw all “inferior” (to advanced Euro-American industrial society) people as teachable, capable of reaching equivalent heights. However, goodness was represented in “progress, trade, and industrialization, . . . [while] the rural scene overseas tended to be ‘wretched’ or ‘miserable,’ at best ‘simple’; the ‘primitive’ was bad and superstition, magic, taboo, nakedness, and other savage customs—impediments to [good] progress,—were generally described as ‘evil’ “ (ibid.:156).
Conversion
Most missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, took on the task of determining what was evil among “their” people and then devised methods to remove it. Central to their methods have been questions of holism and social change theory: can one change a single element of a sociocultural system without affecting the whole; and should one first focus change in social circumstances, or in ideology (Beidelman 1982:16)? The missionary dealt with evil through the practice of conversion. Gerald A. Arbuckle defines conversion in the following way:
Conversion to Christianity entails, precisely, a new consciousness. But since the old consciousness was contained and maintained and renewed by the traditional institutions, the latter had to go or be considerably modified if the new consciousness was to have a viable ambience of action. And behind a people’s reluctance to modify or abandon their traditions and institutions one can see not only Jung’s “struggle” against the light of new consciousness, but the determination not to give up an identity bequeathed by the ancestors, an identity which contradicts the new consciousness. (1985:160)
However, the conversion process may sometimes complement a people’s identity, given the political environment of interethnic power plays. It may be instrumentally advantageous for them to adapt some aspects of this new consciousness into their cultural identity, as Daniel Hughes shows in his analysis of what might be called polysemic Christianity as a response to missionizing in several societies (1985:168–71). Hughes applies Ward Goodenough’s (1963) insight that change in both individual and community identity is experienced in religious conversion. The change comes from within individuals as a psychological process that can transform from individual beliefs and practices to a generalized attribute that “any member of a community attributes to all other members of the community” (Hughes 1985:169). This is a process, in other words, with individual variation and group adaptation, not a wholesale substitution. The conversion strategy of a missionary, or the “theology of evangelization” (Arbuckle 1985:181), determines whether the primary concern is community evangelization or individual salvation supported by the missionary-implanted church hierarchy. Those focused on individuals see “little need to understand culture or its implications for human behavior or corporate salvation” (ibid.). The primary goal of converting individual souls for incorporation into the Church was questioned in the late nineteenth century by Catholic Neo-Scholastics. Returning to Aristotelian philosophy through Aquinas, theologians thought that insights about God were obtainable through the study of humanity, not just through the scriptures. “There emerged an openness to discover what is valuable within the so-called heathen religions” (ibid.) and community-based evangelizing. While some Catholic missionaries, such as Vial, exemplified this stance (including a rejection of evolutionism), ethnocentrism (entrenched for instance in the use of Latin) slowed down even the strongest intentions to build a culturally identified converted community.
As agents of change, missionaries had a range of messages they preached to their flocks, telling them that they were either “set in evil ways, in ways that could be better, or in ways inadequate to a future pressing hard on them” (ibid.:160) As we have seen, Vial’s view of Sani culture was remarkably positive, and he was sensitive to their subjugation and the encroachment of Han society. What he saw as evil in Sani life was limited to practices he felt were rooted in superstition, which he dealt with by replacing pagan practitioners, rituals, and sacred objects with similar Christian ones. Vial was a firm, patriarchal figure, literally addressed as Father. He distinguished in his tallies between those merely studying Christianity and those who had converted, and commented that once he was convinced students had become believers, he put them to the test by having them destroy all of their own “superstitious objects” (1893:293–94). Vial felt that conversion was often partial for the individual, and, as is shown in the running record of converts in his letters, concentrated much of his effort on family units or whole villages. In Sani religion, Vial saw many parallels with seventh-century European paganism uprooted by the Church, such as sacred groves, forests, stones, and trees that were worshiped in group ceremonies (1890:7; 1893:294). He felt that to uproot superstition, he must have long patience and prudent reserve. His goal was to transform (his own word) rather than to destroy Sani religiosity. He did this in many ways, such as by placing crosses on sacred rocks, meeting in the same place at the same time of day for celebrations, and replacing Sani charms on babies’ hats with Catholic medals.34 His solution to Chinese corruption and domination was to arm the Sani with the sophisticated knowledge of European modernity and global Christianity. He saw reflected in the Sani’s relatively egalitarian ways and intriguing literary heritage a good, simple basis for development into a modern society. Ultimately he hoped that they would be Sani Christians. As the evils perceived by this missionary were outweighed by many perceived goods in the native society, the transformation process may not have been so disruptive to the community as if it had been more radically Europeanizing. From the indigenous point of view, conversion can be a layering of distinct ideologies (Hughes 1983:168–69). Especially in the Sani case, these people who were already subjugated to Chinese rule had little to lose by adding to their worldview new ideological constructs that offered a belief and practical proof of transcendence.
Missionary as Ethnographer
The issue of whether a missionary—someone with a conversion agenda—can actually be an ethnographer producing material of any value is obviously relevant to the work of Paul Vial on the Sani. I take a stance fairly close to James Clifford’s (1982) conclusions about the renowned French Protestant missionary Maurice Leenhardt. Clifford, in Paul Rabinow’s analysis, saw “no unspanable gulf between Leenhardt the Ethnologist and Leenhardt the Missionary; only a field of tensions in which Leenhardt forged his life” (1983:203). Despite major differences in religion, methods, and theoretical interests (Leenhardt definitely moved beyond Orientalism in his analysis of person and myth in Melanesia), there are a number of commonalities between these two missionary-ethnographers.
To paraphrase Rabinow, both missionaries opposed exploitation but worked within a colonial system (ibid.:199–205). They believed that progress was inevitable, and that conversion to Christianity would safeguard native culture through bilingual and bicultural education. As participants they defended their flocks and basic human rights; as observers they “saw that ethnographic understanding was a linch pin both for their own mission[s] and for the survival of native culture in a healthy form. The task of the missionary-ethnographer was to gain an understanding of local custom that would enable him to change it without ‘violating’ its life sustaining form” (ibid.:201). They made observations for the sake of promoting change, basing their work on decades in the field, sound language ability, and “believed in the sacred as did those [they] studied” (ibid.). There were several dialectics at work between their own spirituality and indigenous tradition, and between their desire to convert and doubts about the depth of these conversions. Evolutionary sentiments about these “simpler” people contrasted with the missionaries’ commitment to transform indigenous culture through conversion to transcend the inevitable destruction of their way of life. As Rabinow notes, there is no consideration in this perspective of conversion’s implications for the other’s political and existential realities (ibid.:202–203). While Rabinow argues that Leenhardt’s ethnography was fused with conversion by using “informed transcription” by trained indigenous converts writing their own texts, Vial was somewhat different. Vial worked side by side with the literate specialists who transcribed texts, and he recorded oral traditions himself in the “usual” field method. He therefore did not foster “intertextuality” of native voices as did Leenhardt. Both Vial and Leenhardt as missionary-ethnographers can be shown to have been active agents in changing the cultures they studied. Through their efforts to convert, they hoped to foster a type of ethnogenesis—to transform the identity of their converts into a new identity that was both Christian and culturally contiguous with the converts’ past.
The Other’s View of Missionizing
Sani response to Vial’s missionary project is a focus of my current research. Background information on Han-Sani ethnic relations and the role of the state is useful in developing an understanding of the mission between Vial’s death in 1917 and the end of the mission era in 1949–1951. A series of Nanjing newspaper articles written while the mission was still functioning is one source of research questions (Fang 1939). Two examples of the competing civilizing project that followed—an early PRC scholarly work on Sani language (Ma Xueliang 1951) and a locally authored “county information” book on Lunan Yi Autonomous County (Lunan Yizu 1986)—illustrate the reaction in the People’s Republic to Vial’s Christian-Orientalist civilizing project.
Ma Xueliang’s work (cited above in comparison to Vial’s linguistic studies) provides a commentary on Christian competition with the PRC civilizing project involving the Sani. Ma does not overtly use Vial’s work on Sani language, but he has a great deal to say about missionaries among Yi people. In an essay entitled “How Imperialism Destroys Our Brother Nationality’s Culture”35 Ma wrote about his field experiences in 1942, when he first came into contact with missionary activity (1951:381–85). Everywhere he went in Yi country there were churches, schools, and hospitals organized by British, French, and American missionaries. Ma tells of being watched by the missionaries, who were particularly suspicious of his interest in Sani religious texts. The missionaries insisted that the local youths study Yi using their romanized alphabet, not traditional Yi characters. Ma studied with a group who learned both systems to placate the missionaries. Even though Ma and his Yi friends demonstrated their ability to read the missionary’s transliterated Bible, the missionaries drove them out of the area with rumors of bandits. Ma went to Kunming to recover from harassment, then found a new Yi informant, who took him to his home by the Jinsha River. After studying for a while Ma was introduced to a shaman (wushi) who was supposed to have many holy books. The old man was evasive about the books, and Ma learned that people thought the old man had hidden the books away. Ma approached him as a student and asked if he might study the old stories orally with him. The “shaman” asked Ma why he, a Han, wanted to study Yi writing. Ma replied that in order to preserve Yi culture, Yi writing must not be given up. Later, the “shaman” told Ma his story. The missionaries had asked to buy the holy books. At first he thought it would be all right to sell them because his family needed money. Then he thought about how writing was given to Yi people by God, so he refused to sell them. Later he heard that the foreigners had burned Yi books secretly. The “shaman” hid his books away in the mountains. Now the youngsters no longer learned from the Yi holy stories taught by the ancestors. Everyone, even his own son, went to church to learn the foreign language and read the Bible. When the “shaman” first talked to Ma he thought he was just like the foreigners, trying to wipe out what was left of Yi culture. Even though he later trusted Ma, he would not show him his books.
At this point in the story, Ma tells about his own efforts to preserve what was left of the Yi books in the area. Trying to act before the missionaries were able to buy up the books, he requested funding from the government and was able to buy one thousand texts, which he shipped off to Beijing (via Chongqing) for safekeeping. Thus, in his own way, Ma was responsible for taking away what was left of Yi writing, but he reasoned that at least the texts would be safe for future study (if not for religious use by the Yi). In his final paragraphs, Ma argues that the missionaries destroyed local culture by creating foreign language alphabets so the natives would learn quickly and be converted to Christianity. Missionary myths from the Bible also took away their history. Some people even say they are not Chinese now, because of the story of Adam and Eve taught to them by the missionaries. Ma saw this story, which told people that they are all descendants of one family or all the same people, as typical of the kind of poison missionaries spread.
It is instructive to compare Ma and Vial on the subject of sacred writings. They were agents of distinct, competing civilizing projects that conflicted with Sani sacred teachings. Both saw Sani books as valuable links with the past, as cultural heritage, but not necessarily keys to the future. At the same time both professed concern about the maintenance of Sani identity in the face of modernization. Ma’s remarks about the Christian imperialists taking culture away could be addressed to subsequent years of Communist rule, especially during the Cultural Revolution, which drove both traditional Sani and Sani Catholic religious practitioners underground.
The tension between Western missionary activity and Chinese state policy among ethnic minorities is also reflected in a muted Sani political text. In the Lunan Yi Autonomous County information book (Lunan Yizu Zizhixian gaikuang) there are several references to Vial and his mission. It relates that in 1889 a French Catholic missionary named Paul came to missionize in Lunan (Lunan Yizu 1986:29). He built churches in six places, including Qingshankou, which became an estate with more than twenty households of Yi peasants as tenants of the church. The mission was there for forty years, but after Liberation there was religious freedom (ibid.:46).
Although it has been decades since this mission closed, the retelling of events from Vial’s era continues as a part of the new Chinese civilizing project. The story of Vial’s being attacked in his church has been retold by Yunnan social scientists, but in this version the robbers are Sani jealous of Vial’s wealth, certainly not henchmen of the Chinese state. This restatement of conditions between competing civilizing projects can also be seen in Vial’s legacy among the Sani. In Loumeiyi, the site of Vial’s first Sani church, there is a stalemate in the early 1990s between local Sani Catholics and the state. The church building was desecrated during the Cultural Revolution, and has not been used as a church since. State officials want the community to accept the rebuilding of this embarrassing structure now covered with “Long live Chairman Mao” slogans. The community has refused on grounds that this is an important monument to their martyrdom, and they want a new church built for them elsewhere, which the state refuses to fund. Another concern of the state is adoption in Loumeiyi of the official Catholic church as a replacement for the underground Roman Catholic church. The official church is controlled by the state, while the Roman Catholic church is considered by the state to be an intrusion of a foreign power—the Vatican.
The spiritual mentor of these Sani Catholics is a French-speaking Sani priest, Laurent Zhang, who was ordained in Kunming in 1947 and later imprisoned in Yunnan for twenty-six years. When not ministering to the local Catholic community, this priest carries on Vial’s intellectual legacy. Zhang’s first writing project when released from prison was translation of the French into Chinese and republication of Vial’s Sani dictionary. Like the Yi-Han Dictionary (1984), this work was published by the state, but is not available to the Sani public. Zhang (1987) has also written a biography of Vial, and numerous articles with Christian or Yi folklore themes. He hopes young people will carry on his work, but is not too optimistic.
Small pockets of several hundred Sani Catholics have persisted, but their future is unsure. At the moment, there seems to be a triangle of tension between traditional Sani practicing the old ways, Christian Sani, and the majority of Sani being propelled by government action toward becoming modern Chinese with a few interesting folkloric features useful in tourism. It could well be that Vial’s hope for the Sani—to become modern citizens of the world while being distinctly Sani—may be reached but as a reaction to the PRC civilizing project.
CONCLUSIONS
The subtext in Vial’s missionary letters and scholarly writing about the Sani was Orientalism, mediated by his commitment to conversion and expressed in his dialectical role as missionary-ethnographer. Orientalism can be conflated with evolutionism and racism (Clifford 1988:271), but Vial’s Catholic theology prevented a direct equation of race with limits to cultural development. What he saw in the Sani was a “simple” group that was more Occidental than Oriental, and for whom it would therefore be easy, he thought, to become more “like us.” This was a dynamic Orientalism, committed to change through conversion or the transformation of culture. Clifford, in his essay on Orientalism, made the following observation:
. . . collectively constituted difference is not necessarily static or positionally dichotomous in the manner of Orientalism as Said describes it. There is no need to discard theoretically all conceptions of “cultural” difference, especially once this is seen as not simply received from tradition, language, or environment but also made in new political-cultural conditions of global relationality. (Ibid.:274)
Vial believed in both cultural difference and cultural transformation, which are also basic to a dynamic understanding of ethnicity. The factors that shaped his discourse on the Sani included a concept of linguistic classification that did not dictate associated political economy (Lolo language group, with great cultural variation into diverse tribes) and an understanding of intergroup dynamics over boundaries (the opposition between Han and Sani). These factors—of language group versus political entity, and the feedback of majority culture–minority culture over boundaries—are important to the construction of Sani ethnic identity. Besides teaching his catechists Latin, Vial taught French in his schools for indigenous boys and girls. The fact that some Sani in the late twentieth century know a little French reinforces their uniqueness in Chinese society. Sani do think of themselves as Sani—it is possible, despite Vial’s efforts to contextualize the Sani as Yi in his linguistic studies, for Sani of mixed heritage to think of themselves as “half Sani, half Yi” in the 1990s.
Missionary Orientalism in Southwest China was a factor in ethnogenesis among peripheral groups. Affiliation of ethnic groups with specific national/religious organizations and particular missionaries within spatial and temporal boundaries affected the groups’ interactions with each other and ultimately with the state. Assessing the impact of missionary Orientalism calls for comparative study of contemporary indigenous societies with a history of missionizing. In the Sani case, reactions to Vial’s scholarly study, conversion efforts, mission policies concerning gender roles (Swain forthcoming), education, and the teaching that indigenous people have “God given” rights to a distinct culture are being investigated as possible ingredients in Sani ethnic identity. It is under the subsequent Chinese civilizing project that Sani language is not taught in schools, Sani culture is commoditized for tourism (Swain 1991), and the push is toward assimilation into the mainstream modern culture. Without the Orientalist twist of “we” non-Chinese Christians against “them” of Vial’s civilizing project, the Sani may again be moving into a phase of ethnogenesis as they respond to the state’s project for Sani society and culture.
1. The potential effects of missionizing among peripheral peoples are addressed by Siguret (1937:2), who quotes the head of the Yunnan Bureau of Popular Education as saying that the Chinese government has not seen to the needs of the peripheral peoples, while Western religious orders have “won the hearts of the inhabitants,” who, in the case of conflict, will support the French and the British along the borders, not the Chinese. Moseley also notes that “Christianity was very attractive to the animistic hill peoples, . . . for it made possible feelings of equality and self-respect which had been denied them by the arrogant [Han] plainsmen. These sentiments were reinforced by the loss of prestige, in the eyes of the the hill peoples, of Chinese . . . by comparison with the modern civilization of the West. . . . Christian influence among the uplanders of Yunnan and Kwangsi persisted into the Communist period” (1973:29–30). If Moseley’s generalization is accurate, then colonial missionizing efforts to incorporate peoples into a world religious network could be seen as a vehicle for ethnic resistance to state assimilation.
2. My work with the Sani began in 1987 with a brief field study of Sani women’s commoditization of ethnicity (Swain 1989; 1990). I wish to thank Stevan Harrell for his encouragement and editorial nurturing of this chapter. I use the current indigenous term Sani, rather than Vial’s Gnip’a, to refer to these people. However, I follow Vial’s use of the term Lolo rather than the current Chinese minzu classification of Yi when discussing Orientalist writings about this linguistic group.
3. I am indebted to G. W. Skinner, who, in discussing a draft of this chapter, raised possible distinctions between an “old school” understanding of Orientalists (as students of the Orient who fell in love with a particular language and became fluent in it) and Said’s (1979) politically charged understanding, and suggested developing a typology of Orientalists.
4. I have argued (Swain 1989, 1990) that with the growth of ethnic tourism, the Sani developed a position of some power in relation to the state. This feeds back into sentiments of uniqueness and global perception in the Sani’s process of ethnic identification. This chapter begins to explore the effects of conversion to Christianity and development of a Euro/global consciousness in this process as well. The issue of individual actor vs. group ethnic identity is beyond the scope of this chapter.
5. These characteristics are typical of scholarship by members of colonizing nations about colonized peoples. What makes this specifically Orientalist is the subject’s geographic/cultural dimension (e.g., this could also be Africanist or Latin Americanist).
6. The five stages of development used in orthodox Marxism to classify sociocultural groups and used in the Chinese government’s minzu classification process is a classic case of unilineal evolutionary thinking. Orientalists and Chinese Communists ironically share an ideology.
7. This distinguishes them from other Yi groups and the majority of minzu, who are classified at the feudal stage.
8. Vial uses the terms Ashi (for Axi) and Noeso (for Nuosu). His discussion of the Axi, among whom he also inaugurated a mission, does mention one mixed Sani/Axi village along the border of their territories (1893:283). The villagers spoke each other’s Lolo dialects as well as Chinese.
9. Harrell (personal communication, 1989) notes that many “minority” peoples of central Yunnan trace their descent to Nanjing. On a Lipuo case, see Harrell (1990:531).
10. Vial used similar terms to indicate Sani belief in “superstitions” for explanations.
11. Whether Vial chose to stav with his mission or was limited to it because of his confrontational stance toward the Han and Catholic Church hierarchy is an interesting question. In 1894 the peripatetic Australian traveler George E. Morrison noted that Vial “has often been in Yunnan City and is a possible successor to the Bishopric” (1895:150), but Vial remained a field missionary administrator. In 1900 he took a vacation among a Miao (Hmong) community and looked into possibly starting a new mission with a Yao group. As he later noted, he was forty-five years old then with may be a dozen working years left, and his work with the Sani was virtually complete (1902:106). He reasoned that it would be the best use of his talents to evangelize a new group, but Mgr. Fenouil ordered him to return to his Sani “children,” and there Vial stayed.
12. This study was printed less than two years after Vial moved to Sani territory, where, as he notes in his early letters, he was taking time to learn the Sani language and to build up trust among the people. As Colquhoun (1883) noted, in the early 1880s Vial was interested in Lolo writing, so he probably had accumulated information useful in his study of Sani that became the basis of his 1890 publication. While Lietard states that Vial arrived in July 1888 to start his Sani mission (1904:105), Devéria also says that by 1890 he had been there for several years (1891:360). In Vial’s 1890 work, Dom Chamard writes that his young friend has been with the Sani for three years. Vial himself dates the work July 31, 1889.
13. Vial makes no mention of Lietard in his dictionary, although Lietard published on Axi linguistics. Lietard gives one scant reference to Vial in his own well-organized, detailed 1913 study of the Lolopo, a Lolo group located in northwestern Yunnan with whom he subsequently worked.
14. For recent Lolo history, Vial (1898:4) refers to fellow Orientalist G. Devéria’s “La Frontière Sino-Annamite” as the authoritative source on the peripheral peoples’ political situation in Yunnan under the Chinese, perhaps returning the favor of Devéria’s favorable review of his 1890 study.
15. Vial translated pimo as sorcier (sorcerer), a male religious functionary, but noted that there arc other named categories of specialists (male and female) whose activities include positive and negative sorcery and divination. About the pima, who interprets sacred texts and presides over rites of passage, Vial wrote: “It would be more accurate to translate it as prêtre [priest], if I were not afraid to profane this word” (1898:12). Much of what Vial wrote about myths and religious specialists he applied to all Lolo, although he notes specific “tribal” differences and acknowledges the Sani source of much of his material.
16. Upon questioning, some Mo-so “admitted” to Johnston that they had many words in common with the Lolo. Furthermore, he used a remark by Vial to fuel his own ideas, which well illustrate the perils of linguistic based arguments. Vial’s 1898 book mentions that the Axi Lolo tribe lives in southeastern Yunnan. Johnston (1908:280) then tried to demonstrate that the Axi are somehow one and the same as the Naxi in northwestern Yunnan, who today, with many linguists, would still deny any close link.
17. Boell, who had left the secretariat of the French legation in Beijing to become the special correspondent for Le Temps, traveled in Southwest China in 1892 (Morrison 1895:150). One of Boell’s objectives on this trip was to research the Lolo language. An opportunity to “unlock” Vial’s French-based orthography of Sani was lost when Boell, instead of using the International Phonetic Alphabet for the same texts, chose to use his own system based on a mixture of European languages. He even transcribed into his own system Sani words that are used in the grammar notes attributed to Vial.
18. See Harrell (this volume).
19. Harrell (this volume) notes that while Leach was studying the Kachin, his contemporaries Feng and Shryock in China ironically were interpreting Chinese accounts of various minority groups to mean that “an ethnic group is a racial and/or cultural, but not political, group.”
20. This might imply neolocal residence, although virilocal is implied by “The Complaint of the Young Bride,” a song recorded by Vial in which a girl laments her separation from her mother, and living with people who make her feel like a thief or someone with the plague, and who, despite her hard work, still speak to her unkindly (1898:20–21). I have found only one reference to family authority in Vial’s writings: “. . . this intimate life of a patriarchal people” (ibid.:67). Under the term parente in his dictionary, Vial notes that consanguines (ts’òkò) are thought of as a trunk, while uterine kin (kòkeé) are a branch off a different trunk (1909:246). He did not discuss indigenous political authority, except in a dictionary entry on chief described later in this chapter.
21. This was discussed by Lietard in his comparison of Sani to the neighboring Axi, who did follow distinct Lolo customs (1904:94–96). Axi youths stopped sleeping at home at about age fifteen and stayed in single-sex groups at night. Informal intervillage youth gatherings, where marriage partnerships often first evolved, were held monthly. Parental sanctions were requested for marriage around the age of twenty. Lietard does not make it clear where the young couple lived after marriage. The Sani epic poem “Ashima,” popularized in China during the 1950s as folk literature, tells of a Sani maiden who, following a custom similar to that of the Axi, socializes with a group of young people prior to the time of choosing a mate. In Vial’s versions of this wedding chant, prenuptial coeducational camping is not mentioned.
22. This is another underdiscussed issue in Vial’s writings. In his letters, Vial mentions that “sons, daughters, sons-in-law, all are on the same footing; in addition a son-in-law has the right to a double inheritance, first his own and afterward his wife’s” (1893:268). That the son-in-law has rights to his wife’s property infers that males may have more male ultimate control in the system than do females. However, Vial offers more tantalizing clues in his next paragraph: “If the daughter leaves her house to enter another, her mother makes a gift of some fields which belong to [the daughter]; the young wife can always return to her parental dwelling and live there like other members of the family.” So a bride is given property by her mother, and she has the option of coming back home if the marriage fails. Vial then states that the Lolo’s high incidence of divorce is most likely due to women’s freedom. In the same chapter he writes that partition of property occurs late in the family cycle, with siblings often staying together for a while after both parents are dead (ibid.:270). Perhaps bride-wealth and inheritance was a gender-based parallel system, with mothers giving to daughters and fathers to sons. In his comparison of Axi and Sani marriage, Lietard wrote a little on inheritance. While both groups celebrated the birth of either sex, among the Axi “parents seem to have a weakness for boys who will continue the family. A daughter, in effect, has no share in her paternal inheritance unless she has not been married” (1904:94).
23. While he gives this term and explanation for this relationship, Vial also notes under soeur that there is no direct Lolo gloss, and relationships are age-graded in a variety of terms (1909:305). Address terms are simplified and terms of reference are often age-graded for kin relationships as well as marked by generation.
24. Roux wrote from “Tchen-lin, Koei-tcheou [Guizhou]” in 1889. While saying that he had little time to research the Miao in particular, he wrote that the numerous tribes he was aware of called themselves in their own language various types of Hmong and said they came “from the East.”
25. This word was very much in use as a pejorative by Han in the Kunming area in 1987.
26. A sticky wicket at that. Pollard’s suggested use of (Nuosu) a group name used in Liangshan and western Guizhou, as a generic name for this “race” would of course infer a commonality that the people themselves did not acknowledge.
27. See Harrell (this volume) for a detailed discussion of this point. The term Lolo is still used in non-Chinese linguistic circles for the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman languages (Bradley 1987).
28. Much of Sani territory was incorporated into Lunan Yi Autonomous County in 1956, although some Sani communities remained part of Luliang County.
29. This Yi 
is distinct from another form of yi 
applied through centuries of Chinese history to non-Han “barbarians.” Vial wrote that Lolo as a group are composed of the independent man and the subjugated yi (1890:7).
30. Vial’s dictionary is one of many sources James Matisoff is using for correlative material in his huge Tibeto-Burman dictionary project at the University of California, Berkeley.
31. For example: “We love the new; they, the ancient; we, progress, they, tradition.” (Vial 1909:4). Vial thought such distinctions arose from the difference between flexible European languages and inflexible, monosyllabic Asian languages.
32. The entries in the Yi-Han Dictionary (1984) are in Sani script, then phonetics, with definitions in Chinese. There is also a Chinese-Sani index. Sani have demonstrated to me their ability to use this dictionary, but it is virtually unavailable to them, and it is not widely used in other research. A Chinese-Sani dictionary by Fr. Laurent Zhang, which translates Vial’s French into Chinese, is discussed below.
33. For the internal direction of the village, there were two types of chief: the boùdzé, who forms the village council and who deliberates over current affairs, and the sèmo, who executes the orders of the council. One says equally “headman” and “middleman,” because in reality “Village chiefs are nothing but mediators among different opinions” (Vial 1909:79).
34. This is reminiscent of tactics used by priests who followed the Spanish conquest in the New World, with the difference that Vial represented a secondary colonial force in opposition to the Sani’s colonial oppressors.
35. The following paraphrase from the Chinese only hints at the emotion behind the words. I wish to thank Yu Sheunn-der for his help in translating this document. In an introduction to this study, Ma briefly describes working with Sani informants who were Catholic converts. They told him stories from the Bible rather than from actual Sani life. Ma also mentions Vial’s scholarship. According to Ma’s colleagues, it was this brief reference that caused his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution.