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The Naxi Name: Naxi, Na-khi, Nakhi, Mosuo Population: 308,000 Localization:
Yunnan Province, Lijiang Prefecture. |
The Naxi is one of the best known Chinese nationalities. Their pictographic Dongba script, the paradisiacal environment where they live, and the splendor of Lijiang, their main city, have lead thousands of travelers, from China and abroad to Naxi lands. Some of their most famous places have suffered important changes, not always benefiting the local people. On the other side, an international interest for Naxi culture, make it a valuable treasury on the eyes of the Naxi themselves.
Basic Facts about Naxi Culture
Introductory
Articles in Ethnic China
Naxi pictographic
script: the only living pictographic script in
the world is the called Dongba script.It is called the Dongba script because
is primarily utilized by Dongba priests and shamans when they carry out
their different ceremonies, rituals and exorcisms.
Echoes of the Naxi culture: Yang Fuguan proposes that the peoples living in the Zang-Yi corridor of western Sichuan must be considered to belong to the same family that the Naxi (in fact he considers the Naxi nationality to be composed by five ethnic groups whose cultures and languages are related, to whom he calls collectively Naq)
History of the Naxi: At the end of the Song Dynasty, the head of de Naxi in Lijiang, Zhang Maizong united several small tribes of the proximities, and got freedom from Dali Kingdom. In the year 1253, the son of Maizong, Aliangzeng, provided assistance to the Mongol conqueror.
The
descend of Man, the main myth of the Naxi: Congrenlien
knows of the coming flood and the way to avoid it, becoming the only human
being that survives it. He wanders alone looking for a woman to marry.
Shu nature spirits and Naxi ecological thought: As every time the ceremony is performed, their main myths and taboos related with nature are chanted, it serves as a collective compromise to protect the ecological balance.
Love
and Marriage among the Naxi: The young Naxi traditionally
enjoyed freedom to meet and love people from the other sex. But
unmarried people have forbidden keeping sexual relations. Pregnant girls
are forced to abort; and their descendants, excluded from the family and
society.
The Naxi and Ezra Pound concept of Paradise: "It seems that the Nakhi world had been dwelling in Pound's mind during the years he wrote the last cantos. The Nakhi community appears in Canto CX "it reappears in the fragment "From CXII" which depicts the Nakhi paradisiacal landscape."
Baisha
Frescos of the Naxi: One of the most remarkable
icons of the artistic heritage of the Naxi people are the Baisha Frescos,
a set of Ming Dynasty religious paintings that decorate the walls of the
main temples of Baisha Village, a small village situated 10 kilometers
off Lijiang
Academic Materials about the Naxi
The Naxi language
Harald Bockman.- The Typology of Naxi Tomba Script.
Some materials and some views on a script which in terms of evolution of the script belongs to a very early stage.
Hanny Feurer and Yang Fuquan.- Greetings among Naxi and Kham Tibetans on Yunnan' High Plateau.
The sociolinguistic research reported here consists of greeting patterns of Naxi and Kham Tibetans, collected in urban, rural and enclave settings of northwestern Yunnan between 1991 and 1996.
Seaver Johnson Milnor.- A Comparison Between the Development of the Chinese Writing System and Dongba Pictographs.
Dongba pictographs developed in a context of contact with other writing systems, among them Chinese and Tibetan.
This paper offers new data and a guide to an older resource: the correspondences between our transcriptions and the script invented by the ‘botanist-explorer’ Joseph F. Rock.
Na (also known as Naxi and Moso), a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in China, has a wealth of reduplicated constructions.
Takata Tokio.- A Note on the Lijiang Tibetan Inscription.
In 1992, a stone monument was discovered at Gezi, in Shigu zhen, Lijiang district, Yunnan province.
Naxi Mythology and religion
Bai Gengsheng.- Nakhi Tiger Myth in its Context:
The author will try to sort out the background of Nakhi tiger myth and provide a general perspective for the Tibetan-Burmese, or even China’s, tiger cultures.
Emily
Chao.- Suicide,
ritual, and gender transformation among the Naxi
.Ritual elaboration was aimed at the incorporation of Chinese values, while suicides were acts of resistance against them. Naxi suicides may be understood in terms of the clash between preexisting Naxi gender values and Chinese conceptions of female chastity and paternity.
Anthony Jackson.- Naxi Studies: Past, Present & Future.
In truth there is nothing very remarkable about the Naxi... they have been written about in the West than any other minority nationality in China.
Li Guowen.- The Naxi Traditional Medicine-The Dongba Sutra of Naxi Ethnic Group
Analyzing
these characters from the point of view of medicine, we know that the
forefathers of the Naxi Ethnic Group had a discovery of human body, its
parts and the positions, viscera, diseases and medicine in very early
times, and formed their own cognition of the medicine rudiment.
Irene Masdeu Torruella.- Del silencio de los hombres sabios a la popularidad del arte dongba contemporáneo: Una aproximación antropológica a la recuperación de las tradiciones naxi a través de los objetos artísticos.
This paper shows the active role that the Naxi art objects performed in the recuperation of Naxi traditional culture and its power to influence the formulation of new meanings of the word "Dongba".
Charles F, McKhann.- Fleshing out the Bones: The Cosmic and Social Dimensions of Space in Naxi Architecture:
The anthropogenic myth of the Naxi people of Southwest China is the story of the descent from Heaven of Coqseelilee, the earth born man, and his celestial wife.
Charles F, McKhann.- Naxi, Rerkua, Moso, Meng: Kinship, Politics and Ritual on the Yunnan-Sichuan Frontier
For nearly a hundred years now, there has been a debate on the cultural and historical relations between the Naxi of what I will call the Lijiang area and the Moso of Ninglang, Yanyuan, Yanbien and Muli counties.
A Dongba does not pass on his knowledge to women, but only to men." But, ironically enough, there is a female saint honored in each and every Dongba script. The name of this goddess is Pancisamei. Among the many saints in the Naxi belief system, she is the master of divination rituals.
Mette Halskow Hansen: Learning to be Chinese: Minority education and Ethnic Identity among three ethnic groups of China.
Charles F. McKhann.- The Naxi and the Nationalities Question
The difference between the residence patterns, descent systems, and hierarchical structures of Naxi and Mosou have obvious economic implications.
Charles F, McKhann.-Tourisme de masse et identite sur les marches sino-tibetaines.
The number of tourist/days per year has passed from 100.000 in 1991 to 3,1 millions in 1999.
Marsha Smith.- Constructing Identities: Tensions in Defining Naxi/Mosuo and Bai/Yi Ethnicities:
Some groups do receive a great deal of provincial and national subsidization to re-establish cultural educational centers and religious activities.
Seth Sicroff, Empar Alos and Roshan Shrestha.- Independent Backpacker Tourism: Key to Development in Remote Mountain Destinations. 2003
The
objective was to promote independent baclpacker tourism as a means of
expanding economic opportunity while fostering cultural and natural conservation.
Thesis
and dissertations
This research project examines and evaluates sustainability in its complexity within an institutional, socio-econonic, and technological context through a case study of environmental and natural resource management in Lijiang, a traditional community in southwest China.
Jung-Yao Lu.- The recipient construction in Naxi
Li Pingping.- Typological transformation of courtyard house in Lijiang area : women and nuclear space of Naxi dwelling. 2005
Although many traditional Han courtyards were destroyed during the upheavals in the first half of the twentieth century, an important and diverse group of courtyard types can still survive in the Lijiang area in northwest Yunnan Province. The diversity of the surviving forms reflects a period of dynamic change, apparently closely related to changes in the mode of production and in the status of women in this district. Most previous studies of Naxi dwellings focus on describing and classifying courtyard dwellings in Lijiang Old City, or on exploring the cultural influence of the Han courtyard.
Pierre-Alexis MICHAUD.- Prosodie de langues a tons (naxi et vietnamien), prosodie de l'anglais : eclairages croises
Yu Haibo.- Identity and schooling among the Naxi : becoming Chinese with Naxi characteristics. 2008.
Books
and references
Free books about the Naxi
Peter Goullart.- The forgotten Kingdom.
The classical book about the life of the Naxi nationality in the Lijiang of the 1940s
J. F. Rock- Studies in Na-khi literature. Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient. 1937
Not until recently has it become known that the Mo-so or Na-khi posses a voluminous literature all in manuscript form. The majority of these books are written in primitive pictographic characters.
J. F. Rock- The Romance of K'a-ma-gyu-mi-gkyi . Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient. 1939
The Harlalu ceremony is performed almost daily in some Na-khi home of the Lichiang district. This Romance explains the wave of suicides among the young Na-Khi.
Free excerpts of books dealing with the Naxi
The Naxi of Yunnan in 1917, as seen by Roy Chapman Andrews in Camps and Trails in China
The Naxi in The Forgotten Kingdom of Peter Goullart,
The
Chapter VII of this wonderful book about the Naxi and Likiang in the 1940s
depicts Naxi life and culture.
- Bibliographic materials
English books about the Naxi: We try to build a complete list of the books published about the Naxi, including some difficult to find books published in China.
- A History and Anthropological Study of the Ancient Kingdoms of the Sino-Tibetan Borderland. This book provides one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the Naxi history, religion, pictographic writing, wedding and family life.
The Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China. Joseph F. Rock. The quality of the first-hand information Joseph Rock provides, has made this book the starting point of many new researches, even half a century after the publication of the book.
- A Road Close to the Gods - Dongba Painting "The Road to Heaven". A wonderful book about one of the most important rituals of Dongba religion, a treasury now accessible to the global public. It is a reproduction of the longest and best preserved of the old Dongba scrolls.
- Comprehensive Introduction to Tourism and Famous Products of Lijiang: In the natural environment of Lijiang is stressed Yulong Mountain, Tiger Leaping Gorge and the First Bend of the Yangtze River in Shigu.
- Proverbs of the Naxi Nationality: The pictographic component of the Dongba script is so manifest that even readers without any knowledge of it, can find some connections between the pictographs and the English translation.
Naxi Culture Through American Eyes: Pinson's book is an account of seven years of her family life in a small Naxi village. She arranged the information in nine chapters dealing with the most important events of the Naxi yearly cycle, from the winter season, the time of killing pigs, to be married and to raise a new house.
Chinese Bibliography of the Naxi: Some of the most important books about Naxi life, culture and history.
Research on Naxi Dongba culture: One of the basic works about the Naxi in Chinese language. This book is a compilation of articles with a broad thematic that includes all the aspects of the Dongba culture.
He Yunfeng.- Naxi zu yinyue shi (History of the music of the Naxi nationality)
This thesis is the product of the author's many years of fieldwork, specialized research and collection of material. It incorporates a wide range of the latest research and methodologies within the fields of music, history, ethnology, folk customs, archeology, linguistics, etc.
Researches on Naxi History and Society
Almost half of the 218 pages of this first volume are a "Collection of Historic Materials about the Naxi Nationality", a work of Xu Hongbao and Wang Hengjie, where they put together hundreds of references in Chinese historical documents and local gazetteers related to the Naxi nationality
Researches on the Dongba Mythology- Bai Gengsheng
According to the writer the main characteristics of Naxi mythology are its relationship to a religious tradition, to the literary works of the Dongba priests, its poetic style and its artistic value.
Along this chapter the variations of the Naxi culture are fully considered, and many of the paragraphs deal with the characteristics of the Naxi people around Lijiang, of the Moso around Yongning, the Ruarke (1) in Baidi Township, or the Masha in Weixi County.
The Naxi in the Art, art of the Naxi
Photo Exhibitions
Ethnic
China photo exhibitions
Old Pictures about the Naxi Nationality: We suggest to have a look at this Websites, where a nice selection of old pictures, most of them from the fist half of the twentieth century, are exhibited.
More
Photo exhibitions
Music
Naxi
music: A
guide to download their music
Films and Video
Some
videos about the Naxi: The best videos available
online to understand Naxi nationality life and culture.
Documentary
Films about the Naxi: Some films depicting Naxi
life and culture.
Image of the
Naxi Nationality in the Chinese Films: Some information
about six films where the life and culture of the Naxi is somehow depicted.
Arts
The
Naxi art: The most interesting aspect of Naxi art
is their Dongba religious art that includes not only the pictographic
script, some times nicely coloured, but also ceremonial paintings, dances,
etc.
Art Exhibitions
Travel
Travel
to Naxi lands: Lijiang is the traditional capital
of the Naxi. It was the center of Naxi economy, culture and politics during
the last centuries. An important stop in the tea caravans.
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