MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Mark Bender’s review of Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture, by Magnus Fiskesjö. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/bender/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Stories from an Ancient Land:
Perspectives on Wa History and Culture
By Magnus Fiskesjö
Reviewed by Mark Bender
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)
Magnus Fiskesjö, Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Xiv + 414. ISBN: 9781789208870 (Hardcover).
Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture is a much-needed examination of the history and culture of the Wa (Va) people of the borderlands of Yunnan province in southwest China and the Wa State located in eastern Myanmar (Burma). Stories from an Ancient Land was published in 2021 by Berghahn Books, New York, in a hard cover edition of 414 pages, along with black and white photos and maps. Within studies of ethnicity in Southwest China and Southeast Asia, the Wa (Va) are a well-known but relatively understudied ethnic group in comparison to the Yi, Dai, Lahu, Bai, Miao/Hmong, Yao, and other ethnicities that have received ample treatment in Anglophone scholarship in recent decades, from researchers in various fields (especially anthropology), including Stevan Harrell, Shao-hua Liu, Erik Mueggler, Sara Davis, Shanshan Du, Beth Notar, Louisa Schein, Nicholas Tapp, Ralph Litzinger, Anthony Walker, Helen Rees, Katherine Swancutt, Yanshuo Zhang, Duncan Poupard, and others. Based on his extensive fieldwork in Ximeng county, Yunnan, and supported by archival data from various sources, some dating into antiquity, Fiskesjö tells the stories of a misunderstood ethnic group that has figured in the upland economies, regional and international politics, and popular imaginings of the border regions they have for millennia called home.
The “stories” Fiskesjö tells concern questions of, “Who are the Wa? How have outsiders regarded them?” and “How do they regard themselves?” The answers to these questions are unraveled through a cascade of ten chapters. Fiskesjö’s Introduction reviews sources on the Wa, ranging from ancient Chinese accounts, Burmese and Shan sources, British Colonial and other European accounts, writings of Christian missionaries, the substantial research carried out at various times since 1949 in the People’s Republic of China, contemporary Wa ethnographic accounts of themselves, and an overview of very recent fieldwork carried out by researchers in various disciplines, as well as a brief review of museum exhibits and films.
In chapter 1, the author positions himself within the fieldwork process in Ximeng County (a relatively culturally conservative area). He proceeds to treat the themes of naming and position in the world, the emergence of the Wa from an underground crevice in the Si gang lih epic, in which the Wa, emerging first are followed by other local ethnic groups, including the contemporary Dai, Lahu, and Han in China—though some versions mention other groups, including the Wa of Myanmar (30). This is a pattern reflected in many creation myth-epics from the border areas of the Southeast Asian Massif, and further examination of the Si gang lih epic would be useful in thinking about the place of the Wa within reconstructions of an encompassing mythological landscape of the region. This primacy given to the landscape in the epic narrative comes with obligations to nurture and appease local spirits on behalf of everyone—insiders and outsiders alike—a task carried on by some Wa even in subsequent and present eras of domination by more powerful regional states.
The initial chapter also looks at Wa social organization through the lens of rice beer consumption (which for the fieldworker involves “participant intoxication,” [39]), the impact of television and media on daily life, etc. Ensuing chapters expand on other themes raised in chapter 1, including: the role of mining and interaction with powerful state and colonial powers; slavery; the infamous, stigmatized, and much misunderstood practice of head hunting; traditional practices of warfare (discussed fully in chapter 6); images of the Wa within visions of civilizing projects; social effects of and reckoning with disease and death; an examination of border prophets; so-called “foreign saviors”; millennial cults; the power of exotification in contemporary tourism in China; and resistance movements in Myanmar. Fiskesjö ties the chapters together with an acute ethnographic eye and gives insight into the positions of the Wa within the borderlands, which in turn enriches our understandings of both historical and contemporary events and situations that concern the Wa and other ethnic groups of the region. An epilogue, “Dark Clouds Gathering,” extends beyond an exclusive focus on the condition of the Wa and takes a pessimistic perspective on the future of ethnic diversity in the PRC, based on recent reports about the fate of Uyghurs in Northwest China.
Some of Fiskesjö’s most insightful remarks on contemporary Wa culture appear in chapter 10, devoted to how Wa culture has been framed as “primitive-exotic” and its people “dangerous barbarians,” both within China and Myanmar, especially in museums devoted to ethnic minority culture and sites of ethnic tourism, which includes both festivals and villages utilized in promoting tourism (249). It is in these latter sites that Fiskesjö sees how Wa futures are negotiated among the various stakeholders and participants, including local Wa Chinese Communist Party cadres, economic boosters, and locals in search of socioeconomic advancement. Fiskesjö looks at a Wa theme park in Ximeng, Yunnan, near the Burmese border, and an ethnic theme park far to the east in the international city of Shenzhen to explore the interwoven dynamics of these groups and their interests. This includes a brief but insightful overview of the trajectory of the creation and evolution of an “official socialist-era image” with its mix of initial repression of markers of backwardness, such as the giant log drums used in rituals, to the revival of select and “improved” customs, such as the hair-shaking dances of young women and isolated aspects of rituals. These latter dovetailed with a move toward selective authentic representation in the 1980s and 1990s, including the assemblage of water buffalo skulls (once markers of merit feasts) and hints of headhunting, for example, in addition to adaptations and creations made in search of tourist money and even nostalgia, rather than cultural improvement.
Fiskesjö notes the ambiguous stance of many young Wa toward these newly sanctioned “primitive” depictions, seeing them as “primitive, yes, but also as a vigorous, energetic, and thus perhaps proud and powerful” in contrast to a grimmer daily reality of life in the borderlands (254). As he often does throughout the text, Fiskesjö reflects on his own reactions to these scenes. Here he observes that younger Wa, lacking the context of the past, “unproblematically” engage with the cultural spectacles of the present, while “a scholar like myself is also frustrated with these types of blatant appropriations and multiple ways in which such installations distort the Wa past” (256). Fiskesjö gives several examples of these distortions, including the spectacle of giant mass-produced wooden drums, as well as the “imitation Greek architecture” that gives an aura of “civilization chic” to Ximeng in contrast to the “primitive” themes of the park (256). Although the theme park caters mostly to locals because of its remote location, Fiskesjö notes its simultaneous existence as an exotic offering to the occasional tourist from more distant areas, as well as a “celebratory space of the Wa as a vigorous people” which, within limits, is particularly inspiring to some local youth (257). In the “Splendid China” theme park exhibits in Shenzhen, a somewhat different story plays out among the young Wa performers who are far from home, and who until very recently were employed as actors representing not only their “exotic otherness” to largely urban Chinese audiences, but also “dark-skinned” peoples from around the world (259). Fiskesjö’s discussion of the generational attitudes of the Wa populace culminates in an observation apropos to the position of many ethnic groups in Southwest China today, who “in the course of their own exotification . . . are regaining and refashioning certain instruments of their traditions and manipulating it for their own purposes” (264).
In sum, Magnus Fiskesjö sheds light on many intertwining aspects of Wa culture and society over the last hundred or so years, offering insights into the situation of a less-documented ethnic group straddling a border between two dynamic regional powers. Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture has relevance to readers interested in the experience of other upland minority cultures in the borderlands of the Southeast Asian Massif and comparable places elsewhere.
Mark Bender
The Ohio State University