Résumés > Narration, Ritual Making, and the Ethnography of Development among the Hmub of the Eastern Yun-Gui Plateau

Vendredi 7 novembre 2025 - 9h-9h45

Mei-ling CHIEN, Professor in Anthropology – ethnology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taïwan.

This paper explores how the indigenization of modernity and development was experienced and made through the act of speaking by Hmub local elites. These men, originally rural immigrants, now serve as the local political leaders of an extensive cultural renewal feast ritual (lasting four years) at an upland village in eastern Guizhou. Discarding the Han Chinese discourse of otherness that tends to emphasize a feminine image of the periphery and minorities, this paper shows that throughout this indigenization process, the local elites worked as the main channels in communications, passing down and re-learning the language and knowledge of this feast ritual. By using specific vocabulary and phrases, they created dialectical relationships
among tradition, development and modernity. The indigenization of development and modernity they articulate in speech results from the creative linking of traditional perspectives, the ethnography of development, and modern reality, which they present to the outside world by means of cultural exhibitions and ritual making.