Yi identity and Confucian empire: Indigenous local elites, cultural brokerage, and the colonization of the Lu-ho tribal polity of Yunnan, 1174--1745

This dissertation examines the history of the indigenous Lu-ho tribe in China's southwestern borderland, a Nasu Yi tribal polity formed during the twelfth century that maintained significant cultural and political autonomy until the late Ming period. The author argues that the Lu-ho elite were cultural brokers between imperial civilizers and indigenous peoples, adapting elements of the Confucian civilizing project to their own uses while preserving a ritual and social system that distinguished them from the Chinese.;The Lu-ho lords and Yi tribal rulers like them actively sought economic opportunities in the increasingly commercialized Ming world, developing mines and manufacturing enterprises, as well as intensifying their agricultural practices. They adapted Chinese ideas about morality and social control to indigenous society, attempting to educate and indoctrinate obedient vassals who would be moral, productive, and frugal while performing the role of Confucian civilizers in a 'barbaric' frontier region. The Lu-ho lords actively manipulated imperial political discourses and worked pragmatically to influence those agents of the Ming state who might aid them against both radical civilizers in the Ming bureaucracy and enemies within the Lu-ho polity.;However, the Lu-ho lords and their peers took care not to compromise a set of core structures that made them Ne (Yi) and kept the Ne tribal rulers in a position of collective power in the southwestern borderlands, even when the rituals that embodied those structures were suspect in the eyes of Confucian civilizers. The result of this syncretic mixing of Chinese and Yi elements was cultural change---"sinicization." "Sinicization," though, did not amount to assimilation. Instead, it brought consciousness of common ancestry, language, and customs that transcended tribal boundaries. The Lu-ho and other Yi tribal elites began to see themselves as an ethnic constituency within the Ming empire, and that thinking continued even as their polities were gradually broken apart and subjected to direct imperial rule in the late Ming and early Qing periods.