| This is an account of how people in a mountainous corner of Southwestern China received attempts of state officials to transform their identities as social persons. These were efforts to create both subjects of and agents for the socialist state. They aimed to make most people into willing material for campaigns to create new kinds of society, and to make many into agents who would actively carry out such campaigns. I show how these efforts were inextricable from moral transformations. They could not be separated from people's convictions of deep obligations to others, which bound the life and death of persons to the life and death of collectivities. The historical focus of this study is a ritual and political arrangement called a ts'ici, in the local Tibeto-burman language and a huotou (XXX) in Mandarin. In the ts'ici, the burden of dealing with representatives of Imperial and Republican states rotated yearly among the wealthiest households in the community. With this burden also rotated the duty of sponsoring a cycle of rituals intended to nourish the community's health and unity. Though this arrangement deteriorated rapidly after the area was liberated in 1950, to be finally destroyed early in 1965, it haunted the entire subsequent history of this community, as a group of powerful, malignant, and extremely stubborn ghosts. This investigation combines recollections of the ts'isi, its slow destruction, and the ghosts released in its demise with an exploration of the spatial foundations of social personhood. My aim is to show how memories, inextricable from the spaces people inhabited, became resources with which people deflected state efforts to manage how they lived and died, as persons, as households, and as a community. |
