The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory Violence and Place in Southwest China

About this book

In Erik Muegglers powerful and imaginative ethnography a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here people describe the present age beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of communitya bad dream embodied in the life death and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region Mueggler explores memories of this institution including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts " he shows is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.