Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dreams of 'native' ethnologists among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group of Southwest China, who re-envision their animistic cosmology in light of priestly, ethno-historical, and archaeological evidence. It shows how dreams launch imaginative rewritings of cosmographic history.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnographic dream is typically envisaged as the product of Euro-American voyages to remote corners of the globe, where fieldwork findings are gathered and later transformed into the fame-building projects of Anglophone anthropology. What happens when this vision of ethnographic dreaming is inverted, to reveal the dreams of 'native' ethnologists and anthropologists elsewhere in the world, whose own scholarship launches innovative visions of their cosmology, history, and political positioning? Since the 1980s, ethnic minority scholarship in China has expanded dramatically, and especially among the Nuosu (known in Chinese as the Liangshan Yizu), who have produced their own field of study called 'bimo culture', which draws upon the millennia-old textual and ritual repertoires of their animistic priests.

In this paper, I offer an ethnographic case study of the 'eureka' moment that arose among several Nuosu ethno-historians during my 2015 fieldwork in Yunnan province. These scholars introduced a radically revisionist view of the Nuosu 'heavens' or 'ancestral afterlife' world, citing their ethno-historical creativity, Nuosu etymological reconstructions, and archaeological findings from the 4,000 year old Bronze Age Sanxingdui Culture in neighbouring Sichuan province. Tellingly, their new cosmographic vision did not go unchallenged, but opened up a debate within their institution about the noumenal qualities of the Nuosu heavens and whether anyone can fully know them. This debate invites us to reflect on how any ethnographic dream might unfold, ontologically-speaking, as an imaginative work-in-progress that (due to its scholarly underpinnings) always tests the boundaries of its unique cosmographic purview.